WHERE Little Yabba Creek comes in I swim in the clear water that flows out of the forest. Over by the other bank a school of mullet drift and turn in tight formation.
For a short distance on the western side the river has been fenced off from cattle. The farmer is above, up on the steep side of the hill, spraying thistles and castor oil plants. After we have passed the time of day for a while I ask him about the fencing.
‘It’s nothing but common sense,’ he says. ‘I have arguments with the bloke across the way because come the dry he lets his animals over my side. I says to him, “That fence is there for my cows, not yourn. Build your own.”
He don’t listen.’ The opposite bank is bare of almost any kind of vegetation. There is supposed to be a Bora Ring over there, but I can see no sign of it. The farmer has never heard of such a thing. ‘It’s all been ploughed up over there for years.’ he says. He directs me to the top of the hill to see my way to Kenilworth.
This is it then, Hinka Booman; the Larger Bunya Country! The Mary comes out of the neck in the hills behind me and meanders across extensive flats, with the Obi Obi coming in from the East and Kenilworth Bluff, Brooloo, proud in the North, the town spread out in the centre.
While buying supplies in the main street I am addressed by Les Moreland, a thin wiry man with a sharp jawline and an abrupt manner. He is unshaven, and the grey stubble on his chin gives him a derelict air. He notes my pack.
‘Where are you going then?’ he says.‘Maryborough.’ ‘You’ve got a way to go then, haven’t you? Oh, I know, you’re the chap who’s walking the Mary.’ ‘That’s right,’ I say, and introduce myself. ‘I know your name,’ he says in that curt way he has, ‘You’re one of my wife’s fathers.’
This remark is too difficult for me. I can make no sense of it. I stand confounded in the milk bar, wondering if I have stumbled on some obscure kinship ritual. He does not explain, just continues with the business of buying Champion Ruby Unrubbed. Then the name Moreland sinks in – this is the husband of my daughter’s schoolteacher.
‘Bring that with you,’ he says, indicating my sandwich. ‘I’ll make us a cup of tea.’
Les has a wealth of information on local history. Straight away he clears up a mystery from Simpson’s diary: he had constantly referred to a road in the valley. ‘It was an Aboriginal road, of course. The Blacks had been living here for thousands of years, they had their own routes along the River. They were as good as roads.’ ‘This is the trouble with history,’ he says, ‘I mean with drawing conclusions from what people wrote at the time. People can’t see outside of their own times. The white people who lived here in the 1800s, even those ones sympathetic to the aboriginal cause, couldn’t help but see them as savages. We’re the same, we have our own misunderstandings that we don’t even know about. You’d be a fool to think people in a hundred years will still think the same as us about the world.’ ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘but sometimes you feel you can’t blame them; what about the way the Aboriginals treated women? You get these consistent reports of brutality.’ He nods. He rubs the tobacco on the palm ofhis hand and rolls it into a thin cigarette. ‘The Aboriginals treated their women badly,’ he says. ‘But no worse than the Whites. You know where we get the expression “Rule of Thumb?” Until the early 1900s it was British Crown Law you could beat your wife with a stick no thicker than your thumb. And that was just the beginning of it. So, some Aboriginals hit their women with nulla nullas. Where’s the difference?’
Interestingly, Inga Clendinnen, in her book Dancing With Strangers, both confirms and expands on this opinion. But then one of Australia’s major historians is not here, in Kenilworth, to support Les. He was born here, his family have places named after them. He remains, full of a crusty and cynical bitterness. ‘It’s true,’ he says. ‘I don’t like people very much. They don’t see things, they don’t value what’s important. You could take them out into the forest and all they’d see was a bunch of trees. It’ll be a generation before anyone values the river again. It’s not like it was when I was a child. There were swimming holes then, and I mean swimming holes. We spent our summers jumping out of trees into deep clear water. Now it’s a shallow drain.’
North of Kenilworth the water quality is poor enough to make me suspicious of swimming, even though from high on the banks I can see turtles paddling and mullet surfacing. On the Western side someone has taken a bulldozer to a hill. Giant electricity cables haunt the sky, their pylons marching across the valley, locating me exactly on the map. The smell of dead animals hangs in the air.
I push on through thistles and dead grass, grumbling at the ways in which the land is being misused, and what needs to be done to make it right. As the day lengthens I clamber over a series of horse fences populating a spur of land caught in one of the river’s meanders (what they locally call a ‘pocket’) and with each obstacle my mood becomes ever more sour. It is only after another half and hour of this sort of struggle that it comes to me that my outrage does not serve me. What I mean is that, even though this part of the River appears patently, wilfully damaged, getting angry about it here, now, isn’t actually helping.
The valley is a complex interrelation- ship of billions of parts, from the smallest micro-organism to the men in their bulldozers, from the turtles to the pylons. How it works is way beyond my comprehension. As a walker passing through, it is best to attempt a witholding of judgement. My place, today, is to observe the way things are, to take all of it into my imagination, not just the bits that please me.
This is easier to talk about than to do.
Steven Lang
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