PETER ANDREWS OAM MAKES MUD PIES

The dry-grown stumps of farmer and veterinary surgeon Bill Harbison, who's watching one of Peter Andrews' brand new mini demo wetlands forming along the top of a ridge on Bill's farm in South Australia's mid-north.


Wild Genius Refits Fractal Chaos

Aussie Bioneer Busts It All Up

Sellout Mob Next Time She Rains
story and photographs by PHILIP WHITE

Peter Andrews OAM is into mud pies.

Having just spent two days with the radical environmentalist in the Mid North of South Australia, this writer feels like he’s been up and given his heart to the Lord at a revival crusade, and is still so buzzy at the epiphanic sight of Andrews playing with mud that attempting to explain it all here is awesome in the truest sense of the word.

Give Andrews water, and he’ll tip it on the ground, get down on his knees and start playing with it.  Give him a bulldozer, and he’ll redesign the whole damn farm.

He's a fair dinkum bioneer.

I’d watched the AustralianStory episodes which attempted to account and explain Andrews’ one-eyed determination to restore buggered Hunter Valley farmland by putting some healthy fractal chaos back into it.  Contentiously, this usually includes an initial explosion of weeds, as part of his program of deliberately disorganising the ground water patterns that farmers have trained and altered, flattened and straightened for 150 years. 

Peter Andrews, left, with George Aldridge and the Harbison brothers, Michael and Bill. Notice Peter's newest wetlands forming just behind his right foot. 

It must have been infernally irritating for the ABC producers to capture the breadth and depth of Andrews’ vision: he talks with barely-measured agitation, leaping from one confounding fact, theory or anecdote to another, covering the most complex realms of hydrology, hydrogeology, plant physiology, geomorphology, climate, carbon and anything else that happens to drift into the machinegun stream of his infectious imagination, understanding and recollection. 

This challenge is so confronting that the brain tends to vague out as one's next question begins to arise before the previous one can possibly form language.  One fatigues.  Like the disappearing puddles, dubs, duckponds, cattle wallers and sheep wets that once covered this place,  Andrews' logic disappears into the fast-drying landscape.  Unless you respect it, acknowledge its force, get your beery arse home and think about it.  Then take a deep breath, and get the dozer out.

George Aldridge, left, with Peter Andrews.

George Aldridge, the revered painter, illustrator and friend, suggested I attend the farm of vet Bill Harbison, who’d brought Andrews, his old Gawler horse-training mate, home to work some magic on the dried-out chip of a farm he’d bought on the stony ridges one or two windfarms west of Burra, near Spalding.  The Yacka Moorundi Land Care Group arranged a morning of lecture and question-and-answer in the local hall, with mountains of local tucker, then a full afternoon of field work on Harbison’s farm before a great thirst drove the throng back to the cool Spalding boozer. 

Andrews had been at work there - farm not boozer - for some days, building a dead-level contour to slow and spread the run-off from the top 40% of the hill, and perforating that at the points that needed the water, not simply the creeklines.  Then he began dozing disruptive walls, islands and meanders in the creek line at the foot of the hill. His major theory is that Australia has survived because its waters were never particularly big on rushing out to sea the way we have recently trained them to, with bare earth, lineal concrete gutters and channels and whatnot. 

Andrews explaining how he's rebuilding chaos into the worn-out creekline at Bill Harbison's place in South Australia's mid-north.

“What’s the point of creating a surface that will ensure rapid run-off, and send all your water down there somewhere, where you dam it, evaporate it, and then pump what’s left back up here for irrigation?  Save your water.  Slow it down.  Let it spread.  Use your water where it falls!

“You’ve got sheep.  Sheep will eat ninety per cent of whatever plants you have by the end of the season, and turn it into neat little pellets.  When it rains, because there’s nothing here to hold it, that all washes down into the fast-draining creek you’ve made.  You lose it.  Ninety per cent of everything you’ve grown!  Then you pay big money trying to replace it with the wrong chemicals.”

When we arrived, he ran a trial run of one of the exercises he would show the farmers next day.  Basically, he had Bill park his fire-fighting unit at the top of a dry ridge-top track, and let a few hundred litres of water run out.  As it trickled down the hard red dust, it made eddies and mini wetlands, and sent little spreading floodplains out to the sides.

This is the same infant microswamp photographed the night before in the shot at the top. The feather's still there.  A vehicle has driven right through the middle of it, the opposite of the plan, yet even that simple accident has put more chaos into the stream.  It'll all begin again, if it's allowed.

Andrews grinned with the satisfaction of a four year old in a taddy puddle.  “See?” he marveled.  “Wetlands!  And look what happens when I put this rock back here, or put some of this dead grass across here!  What if I make a little embankment across here.  Look at that water: look!  It’s going sideways!  It wants to spread!  It’s spreading seeds and nutrient across your country!  Look at that froth! It’s forming its own retaining embankments and pools!”

When he repeated the exercise to the keen, curious and often sceptical mob of farmers who came next day, they stood gazing in silence, absorbing Andrews’ disarming display, remembering what it was like to play in the mud as they watched the delight of the infant lass there who couldn’t believe her luck.  Adults who made mud pies.  Amongst the disarming innocence of it all, the most obvious reality was the most sobering: farming science, politics, bureaucracies and population have forgotten about country.  They’ve lost it.  And this dried out old chip of a joint we call Australia -- from austerous via austral: southern, harsh, severe – will buck us off if we don’t very quickly revolutionise the way we see it.

And how good are our kids gonna be if they don't get their fair share of mud to grow up in? They'll die of allergy in a world of too many clean flat things. And one suspects by the fierce glare in Andrews' bright eyes that he thinks we're about to starve to death watching them.

Like a good geologist, Andrews thinks in 3-D.  He reads landscape quickly, always imagining how he’d rework it, to put it back more like the intricate way it worked before we cut everything up into little squares and killed anything that grew there that we could not sell.

Some of the very old geology in Bill Harbison's hill.  This is from the Burra group, which fills the gap between the Umberatana (650-750 million years back) and the top of the Paleoproterozoic Basement (1.6 billion). It seems that Peter Andrews wants to put some of this ancient chaotic energy back on top.

He’s radical.  He believes grass is a monoculture, and that eucalypts are too. 

“Somebody said to me ‘Look this is a eucalyptus forest: there’s sixty different types in there’, and I say ‘Eucalypts, like grass, is a species.  This forest is a monoculture’.”

 
When challenged by Sally Hawker of North Bungaree Station why he wouldn’t just go out on Bill’s stony hill and plant some lovely natural gum trees, he said “What?  Plant the most water-wasting things you can get?  A plant that guzzles enormous amounts of water from your ground until it’s all gone, when it gets the sulks and covers its leaves with protective wax and goes toxic, so nothing else can compete?”    

When quizzed about weeds, he pulled an unpopular type aside and pointed out the number of grasses and tiny plants that were thriving below its shelter, in the humidity its shade created. 

“Now I’ve pulled this out,” he said, plucking the offending intruder, “you come back after two days of sun and tell me how these little plants are going where they were enjoying that shelter.  And we'll leave this one here [selecting the next weed along] as our test.  See the little grasses underneath there in the shade?  I can promise you, that lot will be all right."

The Sermon on the Mount

It is impossible here to explain the vision of Andrews much beyond that, although I shall attempt to extend this essay once I’ve let my current headful sink in. It may crawl to the horizon before me.

In the meantime, you can dig out the essential Australian Story episodes as a primer, check Andrews’ website, which he gets no time to work on, then read his two books: Back From The Brink and Beyond The Brink.

A really good backgrounder is the extended interview with John Williams, a former Head of Land and Water at the CSIRO, on the Australian Story website.

And the notion of imposing this practical intelligence on the Big Rivers while there’s plenty of water has him glowing with excitement, but that’s another 100,000 words.  Let it rest on his suggestion that there’s no better time to change attitudes than one like this, when politicians, scientists and bureaucracies really do have their sweaty backs to the wall.  

On the phone, comrades!

And yes, I haven’t mentioned wine.  One of the reasons I made my way north was my interest in the crippling salt problems some vignerons are having in the Lower Flinders Ranges winegrape region just over the range from Harbison’s farm.  This is a direct result of their interference with the chaos of their country: vignerons are amongst the most brutally efficient organizers of terrain, of waterways and plant species.  Plant vineyards on thrashed pastoral country, and you’ve got trouble.  Which is exactly what I recall warning growers the day I opened their new appellation, what, a decade ago?

"Beware the dull mono-cultural petro-industrial grapeyard." That threadbare mantra has got me fired from most of the good newspapers in Australia, but it hasn't yet got me fired from my own blog.   So I have a comrade. Andrews’ theories and practical examples are anathema to most modern Australian viticulture. 

It will be a brave industrial winemaking group who first engages this visionary for some initial technology transfer, but the booze brains will surely leave buzzing, struggling to understand how Andrews’ challenging realities and wilder theorisings can assist them improve the vast areas of ground they have sprayed, fertilized, bashed, and neatly organized to produce grape ethanol in the most efficient manner possible.

There were no Southern Flinders grape farmers in attendance at Bill Harbison's place.  None from Clare, either.  Nobody from the Murray Darling Basin Authority.  Or from anywhere much, for that matter.  But as Bill Harbison said with a dry grin, “There’ll be a sell-out mob here next time she rains.”