The Guardian - Gabrielle Chan
On the land and in the towns they’re affected to varying degrees; some find it harder to cope. But they all agree something has changed
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| An olive grove on Sommariva station, owned by Karen McLennan and her son Michael McLennan.
Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian |
The Guardian
The new normal?
How climate change is
making droughts worse
In the first part of a new series, we take you through the current conditions, and then put them in context with other severe droughts in Australia’s history.
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If
you don’t fully appreciate the complexity of rural communities, farmer
Peter Schmidt is not the sort of bloke you would be expecting in the
Mulga Lands.
His place is 21,000 hectares – 52,000 acres in the old
money – and his family have been there since his grandfather selected
blocks in the 1890s.
The closest town is Wyandra, a blip on the highway
on the way to Cunnamulla from Charleville – a drive that reveals the
disused fences of smaller blocks long abandoned as unsustainable.
Schmidt though is still at his homestead at Alawoona, its sheds and
outbuildings surrounded by a metre-high levee, standing like a bad joke
in their sixth year of drought.
He put it in after the 2012 flood, which
washed a foot of water through his house. Problem is, that flood
heralded the start of the dry and it pretty much hasn’t rained since.
He
jokes with station hand Joe that he cursed the place and might have to
break the levee to bring on the rain.
But far from being a man of
superstition, Schmidt is a rural scientist, with two masters degrees –
one each in rural education and cattle behaviour. He has a softly spoken
manner and a sense of humour born in the Mulga.
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| Scientist farmer Peter Schmidt with his partner Kathryn James on
Alawoona, near Wyandra , Queensland. Monday 20 August 2018. Photograph:
Mike Bowers for the Guardian
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| Alawoona station with homestead and levee, owned by Peter Schmidt and Kathryn James. Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian
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“We’re mad here, we are in the most unreliable area, the most unreliable climate in the most unreliable continent,” he says.
“Well, it’s unreliably reliable,” says his partner, Kathryn.
‘Dry eight years in a row’
Schmidt first started thinking about climate change after seeing a
program on the astronaut Neil Armstrong who, before he went to space,
thought the earth’s atmosphere was like the peel of an orange. In the
pictures of space, Schmidt could see that the thickness of the
atmosphere was more like an onion skin, and it stayed with him.
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Alawoona, near Wyandra, Queensland.
Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian
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“I kept that in the back of my mind and then you hear things like
there’s a million new cars put on the road every year in Australia
belching out exhaust fumes – and these coal-fired things – something has
to happen in that very confined space of the atmosphere. I think it’s
happening.”
It is the middle of winter when we drop in, and though the fine day
stretches over the place like a shroud, there is a chilly wind that
blows through the mulga. Schmidt welcomes us into a small closed kitchen
as he loads some old gidgee (
Acacia cambagei or stinking wattle) into the wood stove and offers us a coffee.
Schmidt has lived through many droughts but it’s the big ones he
remembers – 1958, 1965, 1983. While southern Australia suffered through
the Millennium drought during the noughties, up in the Mulga Lands,
Schmidt says it was “dry for eight years in a row”.
Every one is different but this time Schmidt has noticed one change from previous droughts has been the higher temperature.
“The essential thing was there were two or three periods there where
the temperature was above 40C for 15 days in a row and it just sapped
all the moisture out of the soil,” Schmidt says. “That’s the difference
between this drought and the others.”
He had 100mm on the backblocks of his place last November, 59mm in March and very little since then.
It doesn’t stop with one rainfall
Drought
has long been a part of the Australian climate and features in
Indigenous stories and history. Indigenous agricultural and land
management practices, documented by historians such as Bruce Pascoe and
Bill Gammage, consider drought as a subjective notion – that is, it’s a
state of mind. This is replicated among today’s landholders, reflected
back in comments like these: “the only thing we know about drought is
that it will end”. That is, it is a period that needs to be managed,
like any other.
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| Donkeys guard sheep against attacks from wild dogs on Andrew and Louise Martin’s station, Macfarlane, near Tambo, Queensland. Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian |
Then there is the scientific definition of drought.
According to the Bureau of Meterology, drought is serious or severe rainfall deficiency – essentially a period of prolonged dryness.
By
this measure, south-west Queensland has experienced almost seven years
of dry times. Yet when Guardian Australia visited the region, locals
were keen to reject some commonly held assumptions. Drought is not
uniform. Parts of
Queensland
have been in drought for seven years but it does not mean those
communities have not had any rain. Drought doesn’t stop with one
rainfall. Even in NSW, which is 100% drought-declared, some areas are
not strictly in drought. Each region responds differently to drought and
has different assets and challenges. All of the community is affected
by drought, not just farmers. Businesses, shops and social events can
close down as people hunker down and stop spending. Not every farmer is
male – businesses are mostly partnerships – and not every farmer is on
her last legs.
Many farmers have taken advantage of rain when it does come, by
making hay and stockpiling other fodder. Many are careful to protect
their pastures and therefore their soil by selling or locking up
livestock and feeding – a practice known as drought lotting – in dry
times. Others over-graze and accelerate land degradation. This explains
why driving through the countryside you can see one side of a fence is
as bare as a board and the other with foot-high pasture. And yet, no
matter how much you prepare, it is hard to manage for seven lean years
with a business, bills to pay and an average farm debt. Land management
is key.
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| Andrew and Louise Martin on Macfarlane station. Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian |
“It’s so much easier to be a good manager in a wet year,” Augathella
farmer Rachelle Cameron says. “There is grass everywhere and no stress.”
Summers ‘so scorchingly hot’
Four hours north of Wyandra, Louise and Andrew (Marto) Martin are
sheep growers on the Mitchell Grass plains near Tambo, 860kms north-west
of Brisbane. Looking out over the high grass, it doesn’t look too bad,
certainly not the desert landscape pictures that metropolitan audiences
are used to in drought. Macfarlane station is on an ancient inland sea –
the Martin’s fossil collection contains ammonites and Huon pine, spat
out of the black soil plains that expand and contract depending on the
water content.
Both Martins work the farm, while Andrew is also mayor of the
Blackall-Tambo region. This year they got a bit of autumn rain and made
200 bales of hay. They reduced their stocking rate to match the season,
as much as is possible with lambing ewes. They’re not in favour of what
Marto calls “agrarian socialism”, believing that subsidies create
dependency.
“The best way of dealing with drought is accepting you are going to have one,” Andrew says.
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| Andrew Martin drives along an exclusion fence on Macfarlane station. Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian |
He takes the longer view on climate, which he describes as always
changing, while Louise echoes Schmidt’s experience that higher
temperatures have been a feature of the latest drought.
“It’s quite unusual to get over 40C here but this last summer and the
last couple of summers have been so scorchingly hot,” she says. “You
can see the water being sucked out of the dams, sucked out of the soil,
sucked out of my life and you can’t plan for that.
“The way to plan for drought is you just have to make a decision and if you haven’t got enough grass, you sell [stock].”
‘Policy adverse to diversification’
Karen and Bill McLennan and their son Michael are in the Mulga Lands
on the highway to Roma, just outside Charleville. Their diversification
plan was an olive plantation – Sommariva Olives – made into oil, soap,
tapenades and other products. They are trying to stay agile, in the
government’s words, to drought-proof. Bill and Karen also work in the
panel-beating business in Charleville through the week; they spread
themselves thin in an effort to survive the climate and the conditions.
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| Karen McLennan and her son Michael McLennan. Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian
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Karen describes the good times, when the grass is above their knees,
but looking out from their back deck off the olive shed, it is all mulga
and red dirt. The olives get enough water to yield a crop every second
year. She describes a life that is filled with work, in the panel shop,
in the olive shed, in the mulga. The olives were to be the retirement
plan, but their oil won awards and it has increased the cashflow in dry
times.
“You
do get a bit sick of it, she says. “You often say, I want to get out. I
have had enough, I just want to get out. But you can’t really sell when
it’s this dry, you have to wait for the rain, and then hopefully, if
you want to get out, you get out then when it looks nice. But probably
everyone else thinks the same way so the market will be flooded.”
They find government policies frustrating, the rhetoric encouraging
farmers to diversify while erecting hurdles, or as Michael says,
“government policy is actually adverse to diversification, it’s crazy”.
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| Sommariva station, a cattle and olive business outside Charleville, Queensland. Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian
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| The entrance to Sommariva station. Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian |
Karen applied for some assistance to restructure their finances and
was knocked back on account of their income from the panel-beating shop.
“Like my husband says, when we are in drought, this whole area is in
drought,” she says. “Our business in town struggles as well, because
people can’t spend money in town. We get hit there as well as out here.”
Pressure has increased on the family after the bank revalued their
properties and stock as a result of the downturn in conditions, which
changes the interest payments.
Like all the farmers we speak to, they appreciate the city’s
donations, though they have not received anything. Hay is tricky, given
once you start feeding cattle, you have to keep going. One or two bales
will not last long.
One of the big movements in farming practice over recent years is
towards grazing practices that respond to climate rather than keeping a
set number of stock no matter what the climate. There are a number of
farmers now who sell down stock and close down for dry periods but this
requires a certain equity level. For the McLennans, it is not an option.
It’s easy to say you need to destock going into a drought – but you can’t
Michael McLennan
“It’s easy to say you need to destock going into a drought, but you
can’t,” Michael says. “The cost of getting into one of these places, you
have to keep producing because if you don’t, how do you meet your
loans? What is your income? In drought, costs go up, but cattle prices
go down because no one else can buy for the next year.”
North west of the McLennans, Doug and Rachelle Cameron live on the
old station of Nive Downs, originally over 738 square miles with its own
post office and general store. It was split up in the 1960s and the
couple have been on 34,000 acres north of Augathella since 2004.
Conditions were pretty good for the first few years, then it flooded
before sliding into drought. They have cut their herd down from 1,300 to
900 and are preparing for the possibility they will not get their usual
summer rain. In a normal year, the Cameron family gets 19 inches of
annual rainfall on Nive Downs, yet near the end of August they have only
had six. Talk turns to what normal is.
“The new norm seems to be drier and hotter over the years we have
been here, with our average summer temperatures,” Rachelle says. “I
wouldn’t say [climate change] is not happening. It seems to be all or
nothing in the country.”
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| Doug and Rachelle Cameron and their children Stirling, 11, Ella, 8, and Grace, 6. Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian
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The Camerons are trying to increase cash flow by diversifying into
production of their Nive Beef jerky. Doug hit on it after a cattle price
crash due to the 2011 temporary live export ban. At a roadhouse on the
way back from the saleyards, he saw a 25g packet of beef jerky for $5
after he just sold cattle for $50 a head.Doug was sick of being a price taker. “It didn’t matter what I did to
the cattle – we could have the best genetics, the best everything – but
outside influences just crushed us. I thought maybe we can make
something out of the jerky and set the price.”
Around Augathella, they grow their haystack in summer and cattle eat
it down in winter. By autumn, they know whether they will have enough
feed to get through the winter, and for the past five years it has never
been enough, so they have sold off cattle.
“This year is worse than every other year. We are missing all that
growth, lately it’s been late rain, with a [short] eight-week window to
grow before it cools out. You are not getting bulk feed through and
that’s what hurt us in the community.”
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| Doug and Rachelle Cameron and their children Stirling, Ella and Grace at
a feeding point on their property, Nive Downs. Photograph: Mike Bowers
for the Guardian
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Farmers are not the only ones to suffer in drought. Dave* lost his
job on a big cotton farm in a small northern NSW town when the drought
started to bite. There was not enough water and the farmer cut back his
cropping program. Like many farm workers, a cottage was part of his
package. So when he lost his job, Dave and wife Margie* also lost their
house.
There was no redundancy package because the employer was not large
enough. Dave was reeling from the job loss but Margie got active. The
couple, in their late 50s, were carrying a bit of debt from the last
drought when they were left unpaid for contracting work. So while
looking for a new home, Margie also contacted their bank to apply for
hardship provisions
which the bank duly provided. But when a good friend gave them some
money to tide them over, the bank dropped the hardship provision.
Margie applied to Centrelink for Newstart, but given the couple have
had various micro businesses, the application process was arduous to
prove they had no hidden assets. She also contacted high profile drought
charities who told her because they were not farmers, they could not
help. Sixteen weeks after losing their job and home, they were still
waiting for Newstart.
The only assistance they have received is from the Country Womens
Association, which pays up to $3000 for household expenses such as fuel,
power, insurance and the like. Another city based charity arrived with
groceries, lining up donated goods like a supermarket at a local hall.
“The government needs to look after people who become unemployed with
the drought,” Margie said. “There is no focus on contractors, the small
businesses, it’s hard to get Centrelink assistance and those people end
up leaving town.”
The dry weather also places pressure on regular social events such as
picnic races, campdrafts and other gatherings, which are important
economically and socially. At a time when people need to keep an eye on
others, the usual events can disappear from a town calendar, having a
material effect on the state of mind of its inhabitants.
‘Women get depressed as much as the next man’
Christine McDougall is the director for mental health, alcohol and
other drugs for the South West Hospital and Health Service under the
Queensland government. Based in Roma, her patch is one of the largest
health services in the state, covering 320,000 square kilometres, but
there are only 29,000 people scattered across that vast “corner
country”. McDougall has been a mental health nurse since 1974 but she
says it makes her cry to drive around Charleville and Cunnamulla and see
the effect on the community, first of the floods of 2012, which wrecked
the soil and land, and now the latest drought.There
are no mental health beds in the south west, and people are transported
by the Royal Flying Doctors Service if necessary. The service aims to
keep people in their own community, using local hospitals and providing
full support as much as possible, via telehealth consultations and
regular visits by clinicians.
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| Service director of mental health at Queensland’s South West Hospital
and Health Service, Christine McDougall, at her clinic in Roma,
Queensland. Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian |
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