In the years that followed arrival the pastoral narrative trace the development of a pastoral community and the landscape it inhabits. Tents and bough sheds gave way to homesteads and families grew. The landscape is domesticated and native and stock animals are both equally naturalised in the land.
Powell’s[28] description of a 1920s childhood visit to the Bloomfields Loves’ Creek station, east of Alice Springs illustrates the nature of this domesticated landscape. Powell weaves European stock seamlessly into the landscape. They were visiting Atnarpa on Love’s Creek in order to purchase horses. There was ‘lush and plentiful grass. We saw kangaroos everywhere … there were quite a few joeys … we also saw a flock of seven emus and several wedge tail eagles’.[29] The horses at Atnarpa ‘were all such beautiful animals’[30] that it was hard to make a selection. As the unwanted horses were released and galloped off ‘they made a fine sight’.[31]
In this account there is a richness and productivity to Central Australia and a unifying acclamation of native flora and fauna, and of the European world of yards, stock skills, and fine horses. Such childhood memories describe a blooming Central Australia. This is not a barren and difficult landscape, but one in which settlers’ animals and enterprises are thriving, at home in a landscape that is rewarding their efforts.
European stock also materially transforms the land in pastoral memory. From her vantage point on the homestead verandah at Ryan’s Well, Liz Nicker watches the country:
The country around them grew better with every wet. From the homestead vantage point Liz noticed an improvement in grasses and a slow but steady greening and developing density of shrubbery. Because she was a gardener at heart, she believed the cattle were responsible. Their hooves broke up the topsoil and their bodily waste nourished the soil. Where they foraged on low bush branches, the canopy grew taller and shaded more grasses and infant trees. Moving away from their watering places, they distributed grass and herbage which better anchored what already grew. Every hoof indent left a cradle for new seeds to develop, protected from wind on the open plains and held little pockets of water when it rained.[32]
This belief in the ‘gardening’ effect of stock remains widespread among pastoralists today.[33] This observation and belief has material aspects but its true import lies in the manner these observations have entered and informed pastoral culture. It is not only that cattle have changed the landscape; they are seen as at least partially responsible for creating what is seen today, and as having improved it. The pastoral presence is thus written everywhere on the very structure of the land itself, not only through the visibility of homesteads, bores, fences and other pastoral infrastructure. Stories about these environmental changes circulate within the pastoral community and pastoral families.
On one level, these narratives might be dismissed as mere romanticism for a golden rural past. Rural nostalgia, however, is rarely as innocent as its surface form might suggest.[34] In a pastoral culture where deeply embedded presence and insider/outsider identity counts in the cultural politics of land,[35] these histories do more than establish an early presence. They establish a role in the very creation of a Central Australia that pastoralists take as the norm and which takes its form from the pastoral industry. This presence and its geographies are given moral weight in the narratives. For example, the stability and strength of the pastoral settlers is emphasised and contrasted with the mobility and fecklessness of miners. Moreover, pastoral settlement is not associated with the wider colonising processes that made the land available for settlement by non-indigenous people. Settler actions seem to take place within a self-contained world. The infamous children’s home, the ‘Bungalow’, recently described as the ‘government’s most determined act of social engineering by segregation’[36] and which was part of a suite of measures by which settlers intensively regulated the Aboriginal population, is represented in one account as the outcome of the impulses of generous and giving folk. It is described as a creation of the townspeople of Stuart (Alice Springs) as a means of providing for the Aboriginal children left behind by miners. Pastoralists are described as doing their bit by getting into the ‘habit of dropping off beef’.[37]