It might seem strange that the first book I review on this blog isn’t a romance. I love reading romance, so I’m sure it’ll only be a matter of time before a new release excites me so much I want to blog about it. I’m a big fan of Minnie Darke, and I hear she’s beavering away at a new novel. Jo Riccioni, from my very own writer’s group has a romantic fantasy in the works, which I’m sure I’ll promote shamelessly.

Kate Holden, the author of The Winter Road, subtitled; A Story of Legacy Land and a Killing at Croppa Creek, has a romantic story of her own. Since publishing her exquisitely written memoir, In My Skin, about the years she worked as a sex worker to fund her own heroin addiction and her boyfriend’s, without resorting to the proceeds of crime, she’s married environmentalist and scientist Tim Flannery and they’ve had a child together. 

She describes that child in her acknowledgements as their ‘shining son,’ and Tim as ‘a beautiful, exciting part of my own (history).’ Isn’t that lovely? This is why I always read acknowledgements.

 Prior to The Winter Road, she also published a second memoir, The Romantic, about her misadventures with love and sex in Italy. I haven’t read that book, nor her numerous short stories and regular columns for The Age.

 This latest work of hers is a masterpiece, painful as it is to read. It reminds me of the last meticulously researched Australian non-fiction book I read before I went on an Obama nostalgia bender towards the end of the Trump era. That was Anna Krien’s Into the Woods, about the Tasmanian timber industry.

 Holden has turned her penetrating gaze outwards this time, to a single act of violence; just one in a long and bloody history of similar acts over contested land in Australia. 

 In July 2014, elderly crop farmer, illegal land clearer and alleged koala killer Ian Turnbull shot unarmed environment officer Glen Turner repeatedly until he died on a dusty dirt road at Croppa Creek, near Boggabilla, in the Moree region, in front of Turner’s colleague, Robert Strange. Turnbull ignored Strange’s pleas for Turner’s life, and instead of calling an ambulance, drove himself home to sit with his wife and wait for the police to come for him.

 Turnbull, a husband and father of four grown sons, was convicted of murder and died in jail, but not before he and his family threw all the money they could at his defence, hoping, first of all, to get him released on bail, and secondly to have his charge reduced to manslaughter. 

 His decision to plead not guilty to murder as well as delays to his trial meant that Turner’s wife and sister had to turn their lives upside down to attend court in Sydney for a protracted period, and Turner’s traumatised colleague, Robert Strange was forced to give evidence about his own experience of that terrible day.

 Turner was a planter of numerous trees on his small rural acreage, and a loving husband, brother, son and father to two young children. He has been honoured with a posthumous bravery award, as has Robert Strange.

 After Turnbull was jailed, his son Grant continued his father’s legacy by clearing more land, much of it koala habitat. He and Turnbull’s grandson, Cory, were charged, convicted and collectively fined $708,750. Both Grant and his father before him were ordered by the courts to remediate, but as the book went to print this year, there was no evidence either had complied with this order. 

 Grant Turnbull and his family made millions from cropping their land after they’d almost denuded it of trees and native plants and animals.

 Following Turner’s senseless murder, Australia’s current deputy prime minister, then agriculture minister, Barnaby Joyce, expressed the views of many by saying “People who owned a certain asset, this time trees, had it taken off them by the government without payment and it created animosity towards the government.”

 In other words, Turnbull’s action was at least understandable, if not excusable.

 This view is so far from my own, I struggled to understand it.

 Until I read this book. Kate Holden traces the history of environmental philosophy and action, starting with John Locke’s concept of terra nullius, which justified the seizure of apparently uncultivated land as well as the massacre of Aboriginal people defending it. 

 She also pinpoints the sense of entitlement many producers and consumers have that allows every last nutrient to be leached out of the ground. The piss weak state and federal legislation that permits it, and the droughts and bushfires that result, along with the escalating decline of plant, animal and insect species in Australia.

 It’s arguable that Turner’s murder was the catalyst for the introduction of more lax land clearing laws in NSW, along with increased reluctance on the part of authorities to police them.

 Holden concludes with the hope offered by regenerative farming practices. But are they too little, too late?

 My own book, The Fortune Teller’s Daughter, pokes lightly at some of these issues, but The Winter Road, like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring before it, is a serious and scholarly work. It should serve as a call to action for all of us.

Cover image: https://unsplash.com/@wade_lambert