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Carrie Tiffany
Editor LandCare Magazine
'When I think back I had an early interest in the bush,' say Carrie. 'I was born in Yorkshire, and came with my parents when I was seven years old, to Perth. Something that was striking for me was in Yorkshire we had those little terraces (that when you) opened the front door you are on the street. When we got to Perth there was a nature strip, a straggly bit of dirt with a gum tree on it. I had a notion when I was a kid that the nature strips led somewhere; they led to some place called the bush.'
For Carrie, the wonders of her new home at seven years old, have continued to capture her imagination throughout her life, and she has followed those nature strips into the bush.
In her early twenties, Carrie was a Park Ranger in Central Australia. She had been working as a waitress at the Yulara Resort at the base of Uluru, the big monolith in the desert, after taking a year out from studying ecology at university. Living in the community and meeting the locals and enjoying the unique red landscape, a job came up working as a Ranger. Carrie says, 'it was being in the right place at the right time'. Her university studies had prepared her for learning and researching on the job, and I see a hint of glee in her face as she talks about her time as a Ranger. She says, 'I was incredibly fortunate, and to be in that landscape and work along side the people, the Anangu, (the traditional owners of Uluru [formerly Ayers rock]) who lived there. Utterly remarkable.'
A part of her job was to maintain the health of the bush through controlled burning practices, which the Aboriginal people have been managing in the Central Australia bush for thousands of years. By clearing undergrowth, controlled burning it makes an area less of a tinder-box for when the inevitable lighting strikes trigger fires seasonally. It is also a method of regeneration of native plants, which have adapted to fire, and in fact need the fire to shed seeds or germinate seeds and re-grow.
On one trip out to the desert for a planned burn-off, Carrie was accompanied by a local Anangu Aboriginal elder. While she tended to her maps and pencils and science, the elder went for a barefoot walk, gave the thumbs up and threw his cigarette over his shoulder.
'It was a moment of pure epiphany. He could tell whether the land needed a fire from the feel of it through the soles of his feet. Here I was with my plans and maps, my Western scientific knowledge, and it all added up to nothing. It was clear to me that I would never be able to understand the land in such a sensual and organic way as he - to understand it through my skin.'
Her work as a Ranger took her throughout Central Australia, the Top End and later to Victoria in the Central Highlands. Increasingly her focus and connections became linked to another group of people who live with and are connect to the landscape: our farmers.
Carrie travelled across Victoria, working with farmers in developing salinity plans. Due to 200 years of farming practices, the saline groundwater rises to the surface and the imbalance poisons the land and waterways. She discovered that a farmer could be re-planting what his grandfather had been paid to remove, or trying to eradicate a 'weed' tree taking over from native species - that a former Government had paid the farmers to plant; the English Boxthorn is a good example. At the time she was writing agricultural articles for the LandCare magazine. 'I would go out to do the salinity work and LandCare work and talk to farmers, and they would be telling me stories that didn't fit with my scientific articles I was writing, so they (those stories) found a place in my fiction.'
Ideas about how we have farmed in the past found their place in Carries 2005 novel, Everyman's Guide to Scientific Living. The novel is based around the Better Farming Train, which toured Victoria in the 1930s prior to the depression - one of the these scientific road shows designed to bring agricultural science to the man-on-the-land. Each carriage contained a dedicated area of farming, the cattle car, the sheep car, the wheat car, the chicken-sexing car and a mother-craft car. Carrie's fiction begins with her romantic lead characters getting off the train and attempting to put farming science into practice. Set in the harshness of the Mallee, where character face drought, sand drift, mice plague and rust in the wheat, the story explores the science that was developed far away 'and was never going to work (here).' Says Carrie.
Through her editing of the LandCare magazine Carrie draws attention to farmers' work which is rarely profiled in the broadsheet newspapers. Farmers like Jane Reid who has a small-scale wetlands on her property along the banks of the Murray River near Howlong, west of Albury. Jane says, 'I'm working towards getting the wetlands back to its natural state. The word natural is key. I see myself as the caretaker of this land, not its owner. I have a responsibility to look after it.'
When I ask Carrie about the future of the LandCare movement, I see a blazing passion from this mild-mannered person. 'I think developing urban and rural links is critical. People (from the city) have to understand our reliance on rural, unless we want to import everything. We need to explain to people why we need a healthy farming industry to grow and produce our own food, and I think that is critical.'
I can't help but think of the inner city trend towards counting the 'food miles' for produce we buy and eat, as well as the push towards buying organic, and consuming free-range animal products. It seems to me that the city folk are crying out for local produce -not oranges from California - and that the relationship between urban and rural is already burgeoning.
Carrie continues: 'Agriculture needs to feel it has the support of all Australians. It is expected they will farm sustainably. Completely and utterly expected. If you have land you have a stewardship role and you are not just managing it now for you, it's forever. The impacts you have will been seen by all of us.'
When I ask Carrie how science is helping us now, she talks about the farmers 'purchasing their own science' to find the most applicable uses of the area they are in, and using trials to do more sound practice. But she qualifies: 'Science has been used for evil. The enormous agricultural companies and the Genetically Modified crops debate - they are not using the technology to feed starving people in Africa; they are doing it to make money.' She feels that farmers are being dictated to by multinational companies and says that this is 'really worrying, distressing'.
However, while environmental news might sometimes look grim, the work of LandCare groups in restoring and building habitats has clear payoffs in the long term. Bald Hills near Avoca, about 70 kilometres from Ballarat, was denuded of vegetation and had huge salinity problems. The local community bought Bald Hills from the landholder and now the name is ironic. No longer bald, the treed hill is a testament to a community coming together to care for and be custodians of their shared landscape.
Carrie's young adult children do not have the connection she does to the land; to them she says the country is 'all a bit sepia toned'. It seems to me that the challenge facing Australians, is for urban and rural people to see the essential colour both groups provide.
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