Battle over brumbies in Kosciuszko National Park turns feral
In the NSW high country, the battle over brumbies in the national park goes beyond environmental arguments — it’s a culture war.
The ute pulls up behind me with its engine running. Should I stop or should I run? All around, snow thickly blankets the tussocky hills around Adaminaby in the Snowy Mountains. The headlights gouge twin portals through the fog and the gravel cracks under my feet like ice. Soon the vehicle gets going and the driver gives a friendly wave; I feel ashamed of my fleeting paranoia.
They are warm people, the locals I meet in the NSW high country, but emotions run hot when talk turns to the brumbies, the feral horses that roam the alps. A prominent parks ranger received death threats and his children were targeted when the NSW Government released its 2016 plan to reduce the number of brumbies in Kosciuszko National Park to 600 by culling over 20 years. He wasn’t the only one. Some farmers in favour of horse control will talk to me only if I agree not to use their name, such is the fear of retribution. One has had security cameras installed at his place; he was advised by police to keep his mouth shut and watch his back. With these stories ringing in my ears, I watch the ute drive off into the darkness.
Later, I sit with the locals at the Snow Goose Hotel, trying to understand this long, impassioned tussle over the fate of the brumbies. Knowledge of the land here doesn’t come from city scientists, it’s not taught in schools; it’s passed down through generations. Over the course of the evening I interview the entire pub and receive a unanimous response to the most provocative question in town: what should we do about the brumbies?
What to do about the upwards of 7000 feral horses in the national park — breeding up in good times, starving to death in bad, wreaking documented devastation on fragile waterways and native species — is more than an animal management question. It’s more than an environmental or scientific or animal welfare issue. It cuts to the heart of cultural identity in the Snowy Mountains.
For a group of passionate horse lovers, the horses can’t put a hoof wrong. Their voices are loud, mobilising on social media to vehemently oppose any attack on the brumby and obfuscate any damning scientific evidence. But for others, the brumbies are symbolic of a bitter land dispute, one that was supposed to have been resolved in the late 1960s when the last cattle were removed from the newly minted Kosciuszko National Park. Many grazing families are still not prepared to relinquish this high-country holy land. In a perceived war with greenies and city scientists, the brumbies are the last remaining link to a mythologised past. They’re the symbol of the resistance.
It’s Australian culture told in two tours. Two stories of personal identity, two versions of history. Richard Swain is a Gurindji man who works as a river guide on the Snowy River. His father worked on rehabilitating the main range after cattle were removed, a painstaking project known as “thatching the roof of Australia”. To Swain, the brumby is also a symbol of cultural identity, but it’s an ugly one. “This issue is the story of Australia,” he says as we descend in a four-wheel-drive into one of the most remote areas of Kosciuszko National Park, where Swain’s business Alpine River Adventures runs paddling tours in the Byadbo Wilderness area. “It’s not about horses, it’s about country.”
Park rangers routinely carry out aerial culls of feral deer and pigs here but can’t touch the horses; there’s been a moratorium on equine aerial culling in NSW national parks since 2000. They’re now the most common animal Swain’s clients see. The worst of the horse damage is in an area known as The Pinch: entire reed beds of native grass are gone, every seed head chewed off. “This used to be a corridor of reeds,” says Swain, “and it’s been decimated. This is meant to be a native ecosystem, remember?”
He looks downstream as two wild horses thrash through the river and clamber up a bank, hoofs slipping on the wet rocks. Every few hundred metres there’s another mob, plus numerous horse carcasses rotting in the sun. The air is thick with the stench of horse manure and decaying flesh. Swain says he can’t lie to his clients and tell them they’re in a pristine wilderness area. Death of a river guide’s river. “I feel like the Great Barrier Reef guide whose licensed area is the bleached bit,” he says. “We chose to protect this land, to let it recover. We chose to protect it for what natural values it had. Apparently it’s unAustralian to not want a European animal trashing the land.”
Former Nationals MP Peter Cochran sees the country with a different set of eyes, tells a different story of Australia to the clients of his business, Cochran Horse Treks. It’s here on the flat expanse of the Currango Plains where you’ll find the highest concentration of feral horses. In this northern area of the national park no horses have been removed since August 2017. Some, like the handsome white stallion Paleface frequently spotted near Kiandra, have names and a cult following. Cochran’s clients sit around the campfire and hear stories from the pioneering days of the graziers, farmers and musterers who once had the run of this land, who roped brumbies, built mountain huts and spun yarns for entertainment. Men who eked out an existence in a cold, unforgiving pocket of Australia. “We talk about the original settlers and pioneers who brought horses from South Africa and India; about how the horse was fundamental to almost every facet of life in those early days of settlement,” says Cochran. “The cultural connection between horses and the park is part of Australian history. The Man From Snowy River is a reality.”
Back at the Snow Goose, Cochran leans back, removes his Akubra and places it on the table. His fingers are thick and weathered, crosshatched with grooves. Some people say his great grandfather, Lachlan Cochran, was the inspiration for Banjo Paterson’s The Man From Snowy River. He was buried in the cemetery at old Adaminaby alongside another contender for the title, Charlie McKeahnie, before the entire town was displaced by the hydro-electric scheme in 1957 and relocated to the site where the Snow Goose sits today. The Cochran family has lived just up the road in the Yaouk valley since 1838.
“It’s a bigger picture than the brumbies,” Cochran concedes. “It goes back to the way people were treated when they were kicked off the high country. There’s an ingrained anger there that I don’t think will ever be shifted. Loss of cultural identity is one of the greatest threats in the bush. You don’t have to be black to have a spiritual connection to the land.”
Uphill from Adaminaby is the national park, anddownhill is Cooma, where Mike Patton runs a fishing tackle shop. He’s been active on social media supporting the brumbies’ right to stay and is one of a vocal group in the Snowies who feel dismissed, devalued, scorned and ignored by decision-makers. For people like Patton, the so-called “brumby bill” — a NSW law passed last year that quashes the 2016 culling plan and protects an unspecified number of feral horses in Kosciuszko National Park — is a big win. It sticks it to the elites.
“My grandad lived up the Pinch River, my mum was born in old Jindabyne town,” Patton says. “It’s all about culture and heritage around here, and we’re getting people coming from the city who want to ruin our heritage, who want to wipe the brumby out.” Patton says he doesn’t trust parks, doesn’t trust government; no one round here does. “Mate,” he says. “We’re just peasants to them.”
“The thing is,” says Don Driscoll, professor of terrestrial ecology at Deakin University, “this whole horse issue, it’s not actually about horses.” Driscoll has led the scientific charge against feral horses since he went for a bushwalk in Kosciuszko in 2014 and saw starving horses gnawing at the grass-filled intestines of a dead companion. “This is about as bleak as it’s been,” he sighs. “I’ve got better things to do with my research time than trying to demonstrate that horses are impacting native species, because it’s bleeding obvious. There’s something else going on. There must be.”
He brings up a screenshot of an anonymous comment on an article he wrote about feral horses last year. “This might reveal something,” he says. It reads: You are completely misreading the issue. The brumbies symbolise a group of people and their way of life. Their land, their place, their dreaming if you will. They were pushed off their land in the 1950s, but they haven’t forgotten. You choose to diminish all that, to trivialise it, to pour scorn on them because “science” allows you to. Anyone who disagrees with you is labelled a loony, an idiot, a yokel, a dribbler, a troll. There is still resentment over the very existence of Kosciuszko National Park! By eliminating the brumbies you are reaching into someone’s soul and shitting on it.
“There are people holding these grudges,” says Driscoll, “who think this [brumby bill] is a way to get revenge. It’s vindictiveness. Possibly worse, though, is it could be a strategy to get cattle back in.”
The heritage horse becomes the Trojan horse.
The battle has become heated since local Monaro MP and NSW deputy premier John Barilaro introduced new laws last June that formally recognise the cultural and historical significance of the park’s wild horses. An aghast scientific community interpreted the brumby bill (formal title: the Kosciuszko Wild Horse Heritage Bill) as prioritising a destructive feral animal over native species. If the new horse management plan introduced by the bill comes into conflict with any other plan that protects native species, then according to law the horse plan must prevail.
The problem NSW now grapples with as its high country population of feral horses soars is that the neighbours are peering over the fence, seeing an unkempt yard and are concerned the whole street will suffer. In the bordering national parks of the ACT the feral horse number is much lower. It’s zero. “We have a zero-tolerance policy for horses in our water catchments,” says ACT Parks and Conservation manager Brett McNamara, “and have a very strong policy on lethal control.” This includes shooting horses, although eternal vigilance means these days it’s rarely needed. “NSW legislation that protects a large feral animal within a conservation reserve is a real concern for the ACT. I’m yet to meet a feral horse that recognises a political border.” McNamara says the ACT public has accepted that horses don’t belong in national parks and there has been little opposition to lethal control.
Victoria is also worried, not least because horse supporters, buoyed by the success of their NSW counterparts, are now claiming heritage value for horses in Victoria’s Alpine National Park. In December, a group called the Australian Brumby Alliance applied to the Federal Court for an injunction to stop the planned removal by Parks Victoria of about 100 feral horses on the Bogong High Plains. Victoria wants to rehome or shoot within trap-yards up to 400 horses a year (of an estimated 2500) in the eastern alps — along with all of the much smaller Bogong High Plains population. The plan is considered weak by some ecologists, while feral horse supporters say it goes too far. Middle ground is increasingly becoming no man’s land.
Opponents of the NSW law hope to make it an election issue come March, and the NSW Labor Party has vowed to repeal the legislation. But they face a formidable hurdle: convincing the general population to turn on this lovable icon. It’s known as the “problematic charismatic”, a pest animal we can’t stomach the thought of culling because it’s beautiful, or because it’s ingrained in our psyche, or both. With the brumbies it goes further: they’ve been roaming the Australian alps for almost 200 years; they’re part of the Australian identity, immortalised in poetry, books, movies.
Barilaro acknowledges they are a part of the cultural fabric of the high country, while at the same time conceding there are too many horses in the park. He wants to see the number reduced by roughly half, but he draws the line at shooting. His preferred method is trapping and relocating horses to other areas of the park, with the next best option being rehoming them outside the park. But with numbers increasing by about 20 per cent a year, and trapping failing to control numbers in the past, rehoming as a means of population control has become a pipedream. Fertility control is also impractical, veterinarians say.
Barilaro now concedes any horses trapped under the new legislation might ultimately end up being shipped off to the abattoir. The RSPCA, once opposed to aerial culling, now supports it as a more humane measure than trapping and transporting to abattoirs.
Even with the blessing of the RSPCA, scientists wanting to turn the story around to focus on native animals face an uphill battle. “We’ve failed to communicate what it is we’re trying to protect,” says Parks Victoria chief scientist Mark Norman. “We should love Australian bush and Australian wildlife. It’s found nowhere else in the world and we should be championing it.” But where’s the charisma? “I probably wish alpine spiny crayfish and broad-toothed rats were a bit prettier,” he sighs.
It can’t be about horses. If it was, the horses would be gone tomorrow, says Dr Dick Williams, retired alpine ecologist from Charles Darwin University. “Anyone with half a brain could take a look at the evidence and come to that conclusion, but some people are immune to evidence.”
Feral horses were recently declared a “key threatening process” by the NSW Threatened Species Scientific Committee, a state government body. And in November, the abstracts of 21 peer-reviewed papers detailing the horses’ impact on native species were presented at the Australian Academy of Science’s Kosciuszko Science Conference in Canberra. Some attendees lamented the demise of respect for scientific endeavour in this post-truth age when scientific findings are treated as just another opinion. “Scientists base their careers and reputations on getting things right. The attack on science is insidious,” says Williams.
You can get an understanding of the damage horses do, Williams says, simply by replacing the word “cow” with “horse”. For 135 years cattle grazing was permitted in summer under a lease system, before being phased out over two decades leading up to 1969 — a move driven by the need to have a clean water supply for the Snowy Hydro Scheme’s turbines. Soil erosion was threatening to overwhelm the dams with sediment. With the cattle gone, the alpine area of the newly formed Kosciuszko National Park was slowly rehabilitated as a haven for native ecosystems.
While Williams says it doesn’t take a genius to work out that horses are repeating the damage wrought by grazing, the geniuses gathered in Canberra said it anyway. But did their message resonate? “Science is fairly conservative in how it tells stories,” says Williams. “We use evidence and numbers. We stand on authority: Listen to us, we know. The brumby mob has a great story — myths and legends, men from Snowy River — but their excursions into science and management… it’s denialism.”
La Trobe University academic Deirdre Slattery, author of The Kosciuszko Primitive Area Dispute of 1958-65, has noticed a shift in some attitudes towards feral horses. “Traditionally, graziers found them a despised nuisance,” she says. “They were shot, had their throats cut, were taken to abattoirs or left to rot in the bush. That’s because they were a threat to grazing land. Today brumbies don’t wreck good grazing land, they just wreck national parks — which is not the landowners’ problem, nor is it the problem of the brumby advocates. The brumby has only been a problem when it impacts economically, not environmentally.”
The corroboree frog, the mountain pygmy-possum, the broad-toothed rat and the alpine water skink all got a good hearing at the science conference, but no one mentioned the elephant in the room: the voters of Monaro, and the unanimous results of the Snow Goose poll. Leave the brumbies alone, they said. Get the cattle back in.
Horse trek operator Peter Cochran is their voice. A donor to the National Party, the former Monaro MP still holds sway for any candidate seeking preselection. Last year Cochran famously bragged on social media that he and his solicitor drafted the brumby bill for Barilaro. (The deputy premier insists proper government processes were followed.) Cochran makes no apologies about any conflict of interest. “So what if I gain a financial benefit? That’s what makes the world go round. Why wouldn’t you do it? There are people paying their taxes and employing people and you want to persuade government to go in a certain direction. I really don’t see the issue.”
Cochran sits at the Snow Goose but doesn’t drink. He gave up the booze and the smokes 35 years ago; says he saw the damage they did. But he says that’s nothing compared to the damage heaped upon grazing families in the ’50s and ’60s. “When the Snowy Hydro Scheme came along and the resumption of the land [for the national park] took place it was devastating to people who were losing an entire culture,” he says. As for the science detailing the destruction wrought by the brumbies, Cochran simply rejects it. Fake news. “These scientists are politically motivated. I reject the science because I don’t trust the scientists. Nobody does.”
The brumby bill will see a community advisory panel set up to advise the environment minister on a new feral horse management plan and “identify the heritage value of sustainable wild horse populations within identified parts of the park and set out how that heritage value will be protected…” When the panel is selected many assume Cochran will be on it. He scoffs at the suggestion. “No money in the world would get me on that panel!” He closes his diary and picks up his hat to go. “Unless of course I’m requested to.”
Soon after, Cochran confirmed on social media that he has nominated for the panel.
Around the corner from Cochran’s camp is Currango Homestead, where Ian Dunn, president of Friends of Currango, has been coming since 1968. We walk along Currango Creek, where in the middle of the creek a horse has died while foaling. We count more than 250 horses moving through the plains; a recent aerial survey spotted more than 900. The watercourse is a turgid drain. “This creek used to be clear water, full of native weeds. You’d walk along here in summer and take a big gulp, splash another handful under your hat. You’d fish here all day and nearly always see a platypus. It was just a magical spot. Now, no human would touch this water.”
At the head of the valley where the creek starts is Currango Swamp. Years ago Dunn would sit here and watch waders stalk through the reeds, then throw a fishing line into the deep creek, thick with green, clammy weeds. Today the swamp is a barren paddock, hoof prints pockmarking the grass, pugging the soil, squeezing the moisture from the ground the way you wring water from a sponge. Dunn turns and starts the long, hot walk back to the homestead. “Currango Creek is dead.”
Dr Rob Dyball, a lecturer in human ecology at the Australian National University, brings students to the Snowy Mountains to learn about cultural conflict and battle for resources in this heartland of identity politics. “This is a hotly contested area. All these groups love the high country, it’s in their psyche. Nobody’s trying to trash the place, they think they’re doing the right thing. But it’s unquestionably true that the horses are trashing the place, the same way that the cattle were, so you can’t agree to meet halfway on this.” The grievances are bundled up, Dyball says, in a sense of identity, of past wrongs, people who lost their snow leases, lost access to grandad’s old mountain hut, and now the man from Sydney is coming in to tell them they’re taking the brumbies, too.
“The people who are passionate about the horses are actually quite a small group. But they’re cultivating support from the middle ground, from people who don’t really care much about horses but who are sympathetic to claims of localism and poor treatment, particularly at the hands of city folk.” I thought back to Mike Patton’s words at his fishing shop: We’re just peasants to them.
Tom, a Monaro grazier, sits on a rock beside a creek on his property, looking across to the national park. “We have to make a living here, but we also have to protect that park for our grandchildren. The people who got this brumby bill up found a moment in time. Everything lined up for them. They found a deputy premier whose values aren’t environmental, and saw a moment to strike, when the environment minister wasn’t looking and didn’t care. And I have to congratulate them. Politics has gone a bit funny in this country. Very small groups are able to apply pressure at the right time and bingo, you’ve got yourself a feral horse protection bill.”
It takes three days paddling through the Byadbo Wilderness to get to the last site Richard Swain wants me to see. We pull our canoes out of the water and walk for a few minutes up a side creek to an ancient meeting place. He lights gum leaves, wafts the smoke over our bodies and claps two sticks together — once, twice, announcing to ancestors our arrival on this sacred site. He scours the dirt and picks up stones, then replaces them where he found them, where they’ve sat for thousands of years. Hammer stones, flints, cutting tools.
Since European arrival the once rich topsoil has gone. Cattle came, then rabbits, now horses. The artefacts Swain finds are covered and surrounded by piles of horse manure, some of the piles a metre high. As far as metaphors go it’s hardly subtle. “Sorry about all the heritage poo,” he drolly remarks. The river guide returns to his river, where trees bearing ancient scars from the cutting of bark canoes lead him to his own boat, to finish the journey downstream. “I feel sick. But I’m standing up for my country. I’m standing in my lore. The country talks to me, and it’s crying. It’s asking for help.”
Canoes stored, our car climbs from the deep gorges of the Snowy River, hugging a twisting track. A view opens up to the Pinch River below, where on a small island stands a solitary horse. Ribs ripple across a satin coat. The iconic Australian brumby. A strange apparition in the riverbed, one of half a million feral horses on the continent, it looks lost, like a vanquished spirit; like it doesn’t want to be there. It looks like the last horse on Earth.