When the Birriguba people of northern Queensland successfully acquired the 65,682-hectare Urannah Station on April 1, 1998, through a grant from the Indigenous Land Corporation, they rejoiced in the belief that they were at last returning to a place from which they would be able to revive their culture and their language. Urannah is a pristine valley in the old heart of Birriguba country. It was to be a place from which to re-establish their shattered ties to their land. A place in which to reacquire their dignity. The Birriguba elders believed that at Urannah they could begin to come to terms with the social problems confronting their people and that the cattle station would provide them with an economic base from which to move forward into a more secure future and out of the landscape of ruins that had been theirs ever since the arrival of Europeans.

A little over five years later, the elders are divided, their dreams have unravelled, and the intact flora and fauna of the valley is threatened with permanent extinction. Urged by the Bowen Shire Council, supported by a group of Birriguba elders, a proposal is under consideration by the Queensland government to dam the Urannah Valley. Those elders who support the building of the dam do so in the hope that the Birriguba will receive a half share in the sale of the water. Elders opposed to the dam, however, claim it will be run by the state government in alliance with private enterprise and that the interests of the Birriguba will be swept aside and forgotten as they have always been. The water from the dam, it is claimed, is required for the growing city of Bowen and for crop irrigation in the Collinsville area downstream on the Broken River. There is also little doubt that with a state election due before next May, Premier Peter Beattie will be tempted to make the building of the dam an election promise in order to assure a secure water supply to the powerful mining interests in the massive Bowen basin coal fields. Frank Budby, one of the Birriguba elders opposed to the damming of Urannah, and a man exhausted by the long struggle to regain dignity and independence for his people, said to me: "Words can never explain how important this place is to us."

Scarcely anyone outside northern Queensland has heard of the Urannah Valley. But then to be unheard of is in the nature of pristine wilderness. How many Australians had heard of the Franklin before we were called upon to save it? And to our credit we did save it. Australians saved the Franklin because they were certain its loss would impoverish our landscape and our culture. Will the loss of the Urannah Valley entail a similar impoverishment? Will its loss affect the moral and spiritual quality of our lives as inhabitants of this country? Or will it be enough for us that this beautiful valley continues to exist in its pristine state only in a novel and has no other reality? We all know without any doubt that it would be a poorer world if Mount Everest ceased to have a physical reality and was a cultural memory only. But what about our own place?

The valley of Urannah Creek is an aspect of the landscape in my novel Journey to the Stone Country. In reality, as well as in my story, Bo Rennie's sweet water of the Ranna is to be sacrificed to the so-called needs of progress. This is not simply a problem for northern Queensland. For it is the powerhouses of the economies of demand generated by the great cities such as Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne that make developments such as the damming of the Urannah Valley feasible projects. Growth, we are told every day of our lives, is the sacred key to our well-being in this modern economy.

The Birriguba lived in the Urannah Valley since the beginning of time. And the European settlers - Victorians for the most part who overlanded their cattle and their pianos and their libraries of books - trod lightly on that country when they came. Consequently today the flora and fauna of this astonishingly beautiful place are as intact as they were in 1863 when the last of the Birriguba were either murdered or driven out and were replaced with cattle. According to Budby: "The Urannah Valley is the place where the last of our people lived in a fully tribal state."

Bo Rennie, a fictionalised elder of the Birriguba in Journey to the Stone Country, is re-entering the valley with his partner, Annabelle Beck, after an absence of more than 20 years. It is a view of the valley I was privileged to see during my research for the novel:

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It was late afternoon going into evening by the time they came off the spur. Bo pulled the Pajero up in a tall stand of untracked grass and they sat looking at a dark bank of lofty trees along the creek ahead of them. Ancient forest gums and casuarinas, here and there the crimson of a bottlebrush blossom low down among the blue shadows at the base of the trees, the glint of running water between the foliage, a dense traffic of insects and birds back and forth through the failing sunbeams. The charmed coolness of evening in the sweetly perfumed air of the valley.

Bo said, "Smell that sweet water!" He pointed. "The old Bigges' causeway is over there."

Annabelle leaned close to see along his pointing hand.

"To the left of that sheoak," he said. "See up in that high fork? That's where the Bigges anchored their steel ropes when they was setting them stones in. The last time I seen that tree me and Dougald was tailing a mob of bally Herefords out of this valley. I sat here rolling a smoke, my horse snatching at this sugargrass, and I looked back at them trees. I can smell that mob of cattle coming out of the water now, their backs all steaming and them bellowing at each other for comfort."

Behind them the sun was topping the high ranges, the distant stony ridges of Furious and the Hearn's Zigzag. He looked at Annabelle. "The Ranna valley," he said.

"It's beautiful."

"Take a photo."

"No," she said. "It won't come out in a photo. Not in one I'd take anyway. I wonder how old those trees are? I've never seen such big casuarinas."

"Them trees have always been here," Bo said, offhand, as if the ancient trees were not subject to the years as man is and their ages could not therefore be calculated by such a measure. He engaged the gears and they moved off across the flat towards the great trees, easing their way through the tall grass and keeping an eye out for old flood debris. They crossed the river at the Bigges' causeway, the water running clear and deep over the black stones, and they rode on up the bank onto a wide plain of silver grass, isolated crow ash pines casting long shadows in the late sun. Far over to the east the grasslands edged the ironbark forest at the base of the ranges, foothills rising in tiers towards the far-off rockwall of the escarpment, standing tall and cold and hard in the splendour of the evening light. A purple shadow across the deep of the sky.

"She'll be a cold night," Bo said.

Annabelle pointed. "Look!" she said. "There's the homestead!"

"That's her."

A pale cluster of buildings out ahead of them on the plain, catching the evening light like a village set along the dorsal of a low rise back from the treeline of the river. Bo was silent, gazing at the old Ranna Station homestead for the first time since he was a young man. "Yeah," he said. "There she is. I can just about see smoke coming out of that kitchen chimney!"

"It looks inhabited." She turned to him. "Has there really been no one down here for 20 years? You expect to hear dogs barking."

"If the Bigges was here there'd be white-faced cattle all over this pasture. I don't like to see good pasture empty of beasts."

"That's just what my dad would have said."

"It don't seem right. All this feed falling down onto itself and not a track through it."

They drove on slowly towards the station buildings through the strangely trackless grass, silent with each other. Bo drew up at the main house. The old homestead sat solid and unmarked, apparently still intact within its perimeter of fence and wildgrown European shrubs and trees. Some of the less substantial outbuildings were in a state of partial collapse. One structure engulfed entirely, its timbers and ripple-iron ridden flat by a giant bougainvillea, the violet blossoms glowing and intense in the failing light ...............

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As Milan Kundera said in his Jerusalem Address of 1985: "The novel is the imaginary paradise of individuals. It is the territory where no one possesses the truth ... but where everyone has the right to be understood." The novel is always about the intimate lives of individuals. About us. And if it is any good and is doing its job, as well as entertaining us the novel also says something about the moral and spiritual worth of the lives of its characters. In other words, it explores the relationship of its characters not only to each other but also to the values of the culture they inhabit. "Every novel," Kundera tells us, "offers some answer to the question: What is human existence, and wherein does its poetry lie?" There are three principal characters in Journey to the Stone Country: Annabelle Beck, Bo Rennie and the landscape of the Jangga homeland, the Urannah Valley. These are not simply fictions; they are not only imaginative inventions. I didn't make them up. Each has its counterpart in our reality. The real Annabelle and Bo live in Townsville and the real landscape of the Jangga homeland is in northern Queensland.

An assumption driving the great diaspora of European culture for at least the past 500 years has been that the acquisition of land and knowledge is a sacred duty. Colonialism and European culture are not separable but are aspects of the same urgent meditation. We will not be in a post-colonial age until we are in a post-European age. The great German philosopher Edmund Husserl identified the passion to know as the central axiom of the European identity. There were a couple of politicians recently recommending something they called the knowledge nation, as if they had discovered a new challenge for us to meet. But really they were reiterating the age-old colonial mantra of western culture: know it all, own it all, consume it all. That the acquisition of knowledge is really a project of ownership is not a new idea. Adrian Desmond and James Moore in their great 1991 biography of Charles Darwin remind us of it: "Even this project [insect collecting] had its imperial ramifications. Naming is possessing, said the old insect specialist William Kirby. Science was a sort of metaphoric appropriation."

Despite the disclaimer of something we like to call pure research, the problem with the passion to know is that the freedom of scientific inquiry is conflated with the right not only to know everything but also the right to own everything and to put it to use in the service of our own well-being. No knowledge is out of bounds to the European mind. There are no limits on scientific inquiry. For scientific inquiry no aspect of existence is secret or sacred. The whole of created nature is its subject. On a practical day-to-day level, this is often interpreted to mean that the natural features of our landscape can be utilised to supply the growing needs of our cities: in other words, landscape as natural resource.

The vast and ever-growing bodies of our cities represent an exemplary paradigm of the vast and ever-growing body of our knowledge. In this project we ignore our past and drive confidently towards a future in which everything is to be known and everything is to be consumed. We have abandoned our past in favour of a dream of the future. Tomorrow, not yesterday, is where our hopes reside: with the manipulation of the genetic codes of being, with designer offspring, designer parents, the "cure" for ageing - the "cure", indeed, for nature itself. We are engaged on a cultural project in which we define human existence as something that is in need of a cure, and we retain a deeply ambivalent love-hate tension with the land we occupy - both our resource and victim, the ancient dark of our spiritual wellbeing:

That first morning they walked down the rise to the river, Bo in the lead trampling a track through the ribbon grass, Annabelle and Trace staying close behind him for fear of brown snakes. The air filled with a moving tide of living creatures. Grasshoppers, beetles, clouds of small chocolate moths flickering in the sunlight. Arner back some way wearing shorts and thongs and seemingly untroubled by the possibility of venomous serpents in the grass. After 100 metres they came out of the tall grass onto a cropped greensward of soft ankle-high couch grass, black wattles standing like park trees. Closer to the river the shade of the old casuarinas and bluegums, a coolness in the air here, brightly coloured butterflies and birds feeding on the nectar and the insects among drooping foliage and blossoms. The warm air vibrating with the shrilling of millions of insects.

Annabelle and Trace came up and stood beside Bo on the smooth benchrock at the edge of an open stretch of sunlit water. They stood gazing on the scene at their feet, the flow of the river green and clear in its depths, the water golden and rippling with sunlight where it slipped over the shallow bottom sands.

I believe there are profound moral and spiritual consequences for us in pursuing knowledge at all costs. One enormous impoverishment that European culture has suffered because of the unbridled passion to know is a loss of the idea of the sacred. This loss is experienced by growing numbers of people as a deepening divide between themselves and their sense of belonging. It is surely a paradox at the heart of our European culture that each technological advance in the race to possess the future brings with it this sense of failed private experience.

The fate of the Urannah Valley is not a simple matter of European interests versus indigenous interests. The fate of the Urannah is not a 19th- or even 20th-century colonial issue of black versus white possession or ownership. It is a contemporary question involving a complex cultural mix of the interests of innumerable groups and sub-groups in our entire society.

I believe that the preservation of the Urannah Valley is as important to our sense of who we are as Australians and as citizens of the world as the fate of the Franklin or the physical existence of Mount Everest. The complexity of interests competing in the determination of the Urannah's fate, the fact that no simple line can be drawn between indigenous and non-indigenous interests in this conflict, is emblematic of where Australian culture has shifted in its struggle to move beyond a colonial mindset of exploitation and ownership. It is not a question simply of reconciliation, important as that is, but is the far more difficult question of the acknowledgment of difference: difference between cultures, between two dreamings, the European dreaming discarding the past and struggling to possess the future, the indigenous dreaming the struggle of remaining morally true to the ongoing ancestral project, a project that is inseparable from the sacred moral duty to care for the land.

Some critics assure us that our novels are irrelevant in discussions of the important issues facing our society. I don't share that view. As well as entertaining us, our novels have always explored the individual's relationship to the great moral questions of the day. Not answers, but an awareness of the questions we need to face. Something, dare I say it, such as an image of the Urannah Valley out there in our landscape, intact as yet and just as filled with mystery as the deepest and most hidden part of the great Amazonian forest. A fragile and precious reality of ours that we are about to destroy in order to provide water for coal mines and crop irrigation. As a wilderness, Urannah has nothing to do with the knowledge nation or productivity outcomes, but is something that calls to the ineffable and the inexplicable in our souls. If we Australians cannot find a way to preserve the Urannah Valley as a place sacred to both indigenous and European dreaming alike, then we will soon join those civilisations that failed. Two centuries is little more than a moment in time when it is held against the measure of 40,000 years. As Budby says: "The story's not over yet, old mate."

Let's hope Budby is right and we yet learn from the great indigenous cultures of this country that not everything is to be consumed but that some things are to be cherished and preserved. And if we do learn this we may yet come to see that we are also embedded within the story of our own past, the story of our ancestors, the story of our old people, and that there is an ongoing moral obligation for us in this sacred association that will eventually make the land our own. An association that has something to do with our worth as human beings. For it is ourselves, after all, who are the figures in this landscape and it is for us to decide whether it is to be a landscape of ruins or the Paradise of our dreams.

Annabelle observed the two young people gathering firewood together, their graceful forms moving among the drooping foliage of the trees, back and forth between shadows and sunbeams, their voices sudden and brief, a quick uncertain laugh then silence, and she thought how easy it was for them, their existence uncluttered and without ambivalence. Out in the sunlight beyond them, Mathew Hearn's mare trailed her reins and lipped the sweet green couch grass. At the crack of a stick she raised her head and gazed into the shadows at the young man and the girl, her ears working. They came back with armfuls of kindling and firewood and chose for their hearth a natural hollow in the rock. They crouched together to set their fire, he sitting back on his heels when they had arranged the sticks and watching while Trace bent low and touched the flame to the silky grass heads. Together they watched the curl of blue smoke rise through the sticks and ascend into the trees ... A yellow flame leaping up through the laid sticks. "It's going!" Trace exclaimed with delight. "I lit it!" The young man and woman looked at each other and laughed. And in their laughter it seemed to Annabelle it was to be enough for them that they had struck this fire, and for the moment they would ask for no more, but would be content. As if they could believe their actions served some more worthy power than their own desires.

So Trace Gnapun, a modern young woman and a Jangga, and Mathew Hearn, the son of a white settler, build their fire together in their doomed paradise and fall in love with each other as young people will. Such optimism of the young and the will to build our dreams together, not the knowledge nation, is the hope of our civilisation.

Brief Biography

Alex Miller was born in London, England, in 1936 and emigrated to Australia at the age of 17. After working and travelling he graduated from the University of Melbourne in English and History in 1965. He was co-founder of the Anthill Theatre and a founding member of the Melbourne Writers' Theatre. He now lives in Melbourne with his wife and two children. and two children.

Miller's third novel The Ancestor Game <lit/authors/millera/ancestor.html> won the 1993 Miles Franklin Award <lit/prizes/milesfkn.html>, the 1993 Commonwealth Writers Award and the 1993 Barbara Ramsden Award for best novel. He won the award for the second time in 2003 for Journey to the Stone Country. In addition he has been shortlisted twice for the Miles Franklin Award <lit/prizes/milesfkn.html>, in 1996 for The Sitters <lit/authors/millera/sitters.html> and Conditions of Faith <lit/authors/millera/conditions.html> in 2001.

Bibliography

Novels
Watching the Climbers on the Mountain <lit/authors/millera/climbers.html> 1988
The Tivington Nott <lit/authors/millera/tivington.html> 1989
The Ancestor Game <lit/authors/millera/ancestor.html> 1992
The Sitters <lit/authors/millera/sitters.html> 1995
Conditions of Faith <lit/authors/millera/conditions.html> 2000
Journey to the Stone Country 2002

Drama
Kitty Howard 1978
Exiles 1981

Alex Miller

Are writers born with The Gift of writing? On this week's Books & Writing, author Alex Miller might well convince you otherwise. A one-time stockman and twice a winner of the Miles Franklin Award, most recently with his book Journey To The Stone Country, Alex Miller has very down-to-earth views about the act of writing.

However Alex does believe in the power of other people to inspire and guide us, and he talks to Ramona Koval about a life blessed with good teachers and wise voices. Listen to a longer version of Ramona's conversation with Alex Miller <http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/bwriting/audio/alex_miller_14032004_2856.ram>.

Transcript

Ramona Koval: Hello, Ramona Koval here for Books and Writing and this week we ask if writers are born or made. At this year's Words and Ideas Festival in Perth, I spoke to Alex Miller, who won the Miles Franklin Award first in 1993 with his book The Ancestor Game, and then again last year with Journey to the Stone Country. He's a much awarded writer with a Commonwealth Writer's Prize to his credit, too. So what made him a writer?

He was born in London of an Irish mother and a Scottish father. He came alone to Australia at the age of 16 and for some years he worked as an itinerant stockman on cattle stations in central Queensland and the Gulf country. He worked as a cleaner in Myer's as well - all kinds of things. So what does this celebrated author think of the idea that writers know very early on that they have 'the gift'? Before you hear part of our conversation in Perth, just a warning of the strong language that you might expect from an itinerant stockman and a writer with a very good ear for how people express themselves.

Green plan for Birri Gubba land

by Christine Howes
The Birri Gubba Federation has big plans for its pastoral holding 'Urannah Station' north-west of Nebo in Central Queensland says former Executive Officer Norm Johnson.
Mr Johnson said the Indigenous Land Corporation officially purchased the station for the Birri Gubba people in April last year.
He said the Federation was now in the process of forming a company to represent all Birri Gubba peoples.
"We're in the process now of establishing the membership and incorporating an organisation so the ILC can divest the ownership of the property with the Birri Gubba people," he said.
"The property itself is made up of one pastoral holding, that's 254 square miles, which is a pretty big area."
He said the organisation had big plans for the property including a deep water dam and a number of tree planting and youth-focussed initiatives.
"We have more than 14km of river frontage which is Broken River and probably one of the cleanest running rivers in the country," he said.
"The river is crystal clear and it runs cool all the time straight out of Eungella National Park, it's just too deadly.
"We're doing two things, one is we're putting in place an economic development plan for the property, the Birri Gubba Federation and the Birri Gubba people in general.
"And we're looking at ways we can develop the property so we can assist our people to address some of the social and cultural issues within our community that need to be addressed.
"We're talking about things such as youth detention centres, youth in crisis centres, places where youth can come in safety and address some of the social problems they have.
"And at the same time we're going to make it a place of learning."
He said the push for a dam was part of an overall strategy to ensure environmental sustainability to the area as well as economic independence.
"There certainly is a push for a dam," he said.
"We have decided not to pursue any large pastoral industry but instead we're looking to do other things like start planting trees so we can collect carbon credits and all that sort of stuff.
"Doing different things that are probably better for the environment, as far as we're concerned.
"The dam itself won't only be for water, we want to have a hydroelectricity plant within the dam so all the water that's let down will be making power."
He said the idea was to stop having to ask the government for assistance.
"We won't have to go cap in hand for ever more to the government every year for assistance to just help us deal with some of the real social problems that we got in our community," he said.
"We'll be able to address those sorts of problems ourselves through the income we'll make from either the dam or the hydroelectricity."
He said they were now looking at ways of forming a management company.
"We're asking Birri Gubba people to sign up and become a member of the organisation because this dam is a Birri Gubba project and that's the way it will stay," he said.
"We've got a big mob of people and we've had absolutely nothing.
"I think that one of the things that helped the decision for us was that in the country between Townsville and Rockhampton we have nothing so this was our only chance to get something and we've taken advantage of that opportunity."