Drought Scars Australia's Land and Farmers
Date: 05-Feb-07
Country: AUSTRALIA
Author: Michael Perry
The worst drought in 100 years has left farmers the length and breadth of Australia looking to the sky and praying for rain.
On the black soil plains near Walgett in the northwest of New South Wales state, diminutive May McKewon, 68, lives alone on her 6,000-acre (2,400-hectare) cattle property.
After seven years of drought, her son has left the family farm to earn some money, leaving her to run it on her own. Each day she hand-feeds her cattle, determined that her beloved Longview, owned by her family since the 1800s, will survive.
"It's just dead, it's bare ground. It seems like the desert is coming closer and closer," McKewon told Reuters as lightning
crackled on the horizon but failed to deliver rain.
Australia is becoming hotter and drier as it experiences accelerated climate change, scientists say.
"It may be climate change but I just don't know," ponders McKewon, who first saw drought as a little girl playing in the dirt while her father hand-fed cattle in 1942-43.
The McKewons have tried to be good farmers and work with the harsh land they call home, leaving neutral vegetation on paddocks and not over-grazing.
Left alone with her thoughts for the past few years, McKewon wrote poems about her life on Longview's flat plains so that, when she is dead, her family will understand why she stayed.
"The sun burns down on the dusty plain. The hot wind rips and tears. It's years since rain, the paddocks are brown and bare," begins a poem called "Drought". It describes a farm being blown away by stinging winds, talks of cattle losing the will to live.
But another poem, "A Place That I Know", explains why McKewon will never leave, no matter how harshly the land treats her.
It describes a place where the grass waves in the breeze as fat cattle graze, and where a young girl gallops her horse with the wind in her face. "This is the place where as a child I did roam. This place in my heart will always be home," she writes.
LIFE ON THE ROAD
Cattleman Maurice Tully would love to return to his farm. He has been on the road searching for grass for his hungry stock for the past 13 months.
His cattle have just calved and the cows are skinny, their bones push against tough hides, as they struggle to eat enough to feed their young and survive themselves.
For generations Australian cattlemen have moved their stock to the "Long Paddock", stock routes which run alongside country roads, at times of drought.
Overnight dew or light rain on the road rolls to the edge and green shoots sprout. The feed doesn't last long in the searing heat, but is just enough for hungry livestock to survive on.
"We're just existing day by day. I can't raise money to feed these cattle," said Tully as he moved his cattle along William Hovell Drive, outside the national capital, Canberra.
"I will continue until they are gone. The last thing I will do is sell the stock," he said. He knows that once the drought breaks, livestock prices will soar and he won't be able to afford to restock his farm.
But while Tully and McKewon struggle to keep their livestock alive, cattlemen in the outback Northern Territory have begun shooting emaciated cattle they can no longer afford to feed.
Word of the shootings has travelled on the "bush telegraph" across Australia with cattlemen in the south hoping they won't be forced to do the same as their farms blow away in the hot wind.
"Only a few days ago the evening breeze was gusty and blew so much dust off a neighbour's paddocks that you had to turn the car lights on. You couldn't see the front of the car," said farmer John Weatherstone in Yass, southwest of Sydney.
The 2007 drought has left Australia deeply scarred, both physically and mentally.
Dead trees stand like tombstones on barren hills, dry stream gullies look like gaping wounds and dams are cracked and baked.
The further you drive west of Sydney, the worse t