Saving Hattah Lakes: Changing Masculinities and the Campaigns for a National Park, 1900–1960

Abstract

Hattah Lakes is a network of lakes in Victoria’s north-west in a region known as the Mallee. This article focuses on three white men who were critical to saving the Lakes: a bushman, a naturalist, and a scientist. All recognised the unique nature of the Lakes and each operated within changing understandings of masculinity as they sought to protect the Lakes from development. These three men viewed the Lakes as a place of natural beauty and abundant wildlife which needed to be cherished and protected, but they were also men who in different ways profited directly or indirectly from the exploitation of the land. Their relationships to the Lakes were shaped by gendered and racial ideologies that privileged different ways of knowing the area: as a bush landscape; as a wonderland of birds and trees; as a sophisticated natural system to be studied.

We thank Lilian Pearce, Melbourne Life Writers, our anonymous reviewers, and the journal editors for their constructive suggestions on earlier iterations of this article, the research of which has been supported by funding from the Australian Research Council [Grant Number SR200200066] and the Murray Darling Basin Authority. Our thanks also to John Burch for his generous response to queries.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See A.S. Kenyon, The Story of the Mallee (Melbourne: A. Kenyon, 1916), 66; John Burch, Returning the Kulkyne (Melbourne: John Burch, 2017), 3.

2 Burch, 20.

3 Ibid., 17.

4 Ibid., 135.

5 For a discussion of the different First Nations groups and their cultural values and uses of the Lakes, see https://www.vewh.vic.gov.au/rivers-and-wetlands/northern-region/hattah-lakes (accessed 10 December 2023).

6 Quoted in Laura Donati, Hattah: An Oral History of the Hattah Lakes (Mildura: Mallee Catchment Management Authority, 2008), 12.

7 For a fuller examination of these threats and the concerted campaigns fought to protect the Lakes, see Burch, chs 8–9.

8 Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (Hobeken: Taylor and Francis, 2012 (1993)), ch. 2. For a discussion regarding differing cultural discourses about the environment, see Michael Thompson and Steve Raynor, ‘Cultural Discourses’, in Human Choice and Climate Change. Volume One, The Societal Framework, ed. Steve Raynor and Elizabeth L. Malone (Columbus: Battle Press, 1998), especially 279–88.

9 Two recent special issues point to this developing field of inquiry. See Katie Holmes and Ruth Morgan, ‘Placing Gender: Gender and Environmental History’, Environment and History 27, no. 2 (1 May 2021): 187–91; and Ruth A. Morgan and Margaret Cook, ‘Gender, Environment and History: New Methods and Approaches in Environmental History’, International Review of Environmental History 7, no. 1 (9 September 2021): 5–19. Each of these editorials contains an extensive list of references to recent work on gender and environmental history. See also recent publications by Traci Brynne Voyles, ‘Toxic Masculinity: California’s Salton Sea and the Environmental Consequences of Manliness’, Environmental History 26, no. 1 (January 2021): 127–41; and Karen Twigg, ‘“Dust, Dryness and Departure”: Constructions of Masculinity and Femininity during the WWII Drought’, History Australia 18, no. 4 (2021): 694–713.

10 Holmes and Morgan, 189.

11 Others have also challenged this unidimensional view. See Tim Bonyhady, The Colonial Earth (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2000).

12 ‘Reminiscences of “Charley” Thompson of Kulkyne Set Down by Steele Blayde’, Sunraysia Daily, 15 February 1933. Reprinted in Burch, 257.

13 Blayde, ‘Reminiscences’, in Burch, 263.

14 Burch, 59–63, 74–78.

15 See for instance Thompson to Lewis, 1 October 1914, Hattah Lakes Sanctuary, 1914–1979, Victorian Public Records Office (hereafter VPRS) 11559. P0001. Unit 331. Description 100/77/1.

16 See, for instance, the depiction of Thompson in this series written by Blayde: Mildura Cultivator, 20, 23, 27 February 1918.

17 Blayde, ‘Reminiscences’, in Burch, 269.

18 Alf Jones to Lewis, 17 September 1914, VPRS 11559. P0001. Unit 331. Description 100/77/1; Liz Downes, ‘Closed Seasons for Wild Ducks and Teal in Victoria, 1862–1916’, (unpublished research paper, La Trobe University, 2019).

19 Edgar Williams, Ouyen League of Progress to Director of Fisheries and Game, 5 August 1914. VPRS 11559. P0001. Unit 331. Description 100/77/1. This iteration of the League only lasted six months due to lack of interest. Ouyen Mail and Central Mallee Advertiser, 12 February 1915.

20 An exception was Alf Jones, a fisherman resident on Hattah Lake (and also the suspected operator of a punt gun). Alf Jones to Lewis, 17 September 1914, VPRS 11559. P0001. Unit 331. Description 100/77/1.

21 Searg A. Carter to Lewis. 2 September 1914, VPRS 11559. P0001. Unit 331. Description 100/77/1. Carter probably had in mind a Hattah resident reputed to operate an illegal punt gun on the Lakes designed to kill many waterfowl at one time. Such shooters were widely reviled.

22 A.H. O’Donoghue, ‘Wanderings on the Murray Flood-Plain’, The Victorian Naturalist 32, nos 1 and 2 (May and June 1915): 28.

23 Burch, 146.

24 Claire Brennan, ‘Imperial Game: A History of Hunting, Society, Exotic Species and the Environment in New Zealand and Victoria 1840–1901’ (PhD thesis, University of Melbourne. 2004).

25 See Acting Chief Insp F/G to FE How, Hon Sec of Bird Observers Club 12 Jan 1916; Age, 14 January 1916.

26 Marilyn Lake, The Limits of Hope: Soldier Settlement in Victoria, 1915–38 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1987), ch. 1.

27 See Joseph Lockwood to Lewis, 17 August 1920; Officer in Charge of Police, Ouyen to Lewis, 1 Mar 1921, VPRS 11559. P0001. Unit 331. Description 100/77/1.

28 See, for example, Chief Inspector F/G to OC Police, Mildura, 10 June 1933, noting he had received a petition from residents of north-west Victoria, opposing the extension of the sanctuary. Opponents also regularly wrote to the Sunraysia Daily and found support amongst some Mildura councillors.

29 See Thompson to Chief Inspector Semmens, inviting him to Kulkyne to do some fishing and shooting (outside the sanctuary). 27 February 1920, VPRS 11559. P0001. Unit 331. Description 100/77/1.

30 Lewis to Under Secretary, memo, 19 December 1914, VPRS 11559. P0001. Unit 331. Description 100/77/1.

31 Steele to Lewis, 29 September 1914, VPRS 11559. P0001. Unit 331. Description 100/77/1.

32 Ibid.

33 Feminist historians have developed a sustained critique of the masculine ethos of the bush legend; see S. Magarey, S. Rowley and S. Sheridan, eds., Debutante Nation: Feminism Contests the 1890s (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993). For a more recent discussion of this literature see K. Murphy, Fears and Fantasies: Modernity, Gender and the Rural–Urban Divide (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 14–18.

34 Martin Crotty, Making the Australian Male: Middle-Class Masculinity 1870–1920 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001), 21.

35 O’Donoghue, 15.

36 Mildura Cultivator, 20 February 1918, 4. The Mildura Cultivator was an earlier title of the Sunraysia Daily.

37 Richard Waterhouse, ‘The Pioneer Legend and Its Legacy: In Memory of John Hirst’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 103, no. 1 (2017): 10–11.

38 See J.B. Hirst, ‘The Pioneer Legend’, Historical Studies 18, no. 71 (1978): 316–37. As Hirst notes, the significant deprivations women endured in ‘settling’ the land enabled them to be understood as pioneers. But they were not seen as actively engaged in the battles against a hostile landscape.

39 Other scholars have drawn attention to the Indigenous knowledge shared with colonists and the varied purposes it served. See: Tiffany Shellam et al., eds., Brokers and Boundaries: Colonial Exploration in Indigenous Territory (Canberra: ANU Press, 2016).

40 Blayde, ‘Reminiscences’, in Burch, 257.

41 Melissa Bellanta, “‘Poor Gordon”: What the Australian Cult of Adam Lindsay Gordon Tells Us About Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Masculine Sentimentality’, Gender & History 28, no. 2 (2016): 401–21.

42 Blayde, ‘Reminiscences’, in Burch, 256.

43 Ibid., 263.

44 Ibid., 137.

45 Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 134.

46 Portland Guardian, 23 December 1943, 2.

47 L.G. Chandler, Bush Charms (Melbourne: Whitcombe & Tombs, 1922), 33.

48 L.G. Chandler, ‘By Chalka Creek: A Naturalists’ Paradise’, Sydney Mail, 14 January 1920.

49 Charles Barrett, ‘Introduction’, in Chandler, Bush Charms, 3. For a discussion of Barrett’s nature writing, see Griffiths, 133.

50 Heather Ellis, Masculinity and Science in Britain, 1831–1918 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), chs 5–6. See also Jim Endersby, ‘Sympathetic Science: Charles Darwin, Joseph Hooker, and the Passions of Victorian Naturalists’, Victorian Studies 51, no. 2 (Winter 2009): 299–320.

51 Ellis, 141.

52 Alex Milligan and A.H. O’Donoghue for example. See also Libby Robin, ‘What Birdo Is That?’: A Field Guide to Bird-People (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2023).

53 Libby Robin, Flight of the Emu: A Hundred Years of Australian Ornithology, 1901–2001 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001), 115–17.

54 Griffiths, 127–28.

55 Robin, Flight of the Emu, 107.

56 Les Chandler, ‘Talk to Rotary Club’, Portland Guardian, 23 December 1943.

57 Ibid.

58 Chandler, ‘By Chalka Creek’, 17.

59 Chandler, Bush Charms, 77.

60 William Cronon, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness; or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature’, in Uncommon Ground: Towards Reinventing Nature (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995), 76–78.

61 Matthew Colloff, Flooded Forest and Desert Creek: Ecology and History of the River Red Gum (Melbourne: CSIRO Publishing, 2014), ch. 9. See also Bonyhady, ch. 6.

62 Ian Burn, National Life and Landscapes. Australian Painting 1900–1940 (Sydney: Bay Books, 1990), 48.

63 See Holmes, ‘The “Mallee-Made Man”: Making Masculinity in the Mallee Lands of South Eastern Australia, 1890-1940', Environment and History, 27, no. 2 (2021): 251–75.

64 W.J. Steele, Inspector of Vermin, Ouyen to Acting Chief Insp F/G, 2 March 1915, VPRS 11559. P0001. Unit 331. Description 100/77/1.

65 The threat that clearing and settlement posed to wild creatures was one Chandler recognised. L.G. Chandler, ‘The Wonders of Nature in the Murray Valley’, Sunraysia Daily, 17 December 1929, 11.

66 L.G. Chandler, ‘In the Land of Pine and Belar’, The Victorian Naturalist 55, no. 7 (1938): 115.

67 Jones to Chandler, 12 February 1941. Box 23 MS 13192, Jack Jones Papers, State Library of Victoria (hereafter SLV).

68 Jack Jones, Roving in a Riley, 1939, 6. Box 21, Jack Jones Papers, SLV.

69 Ibid., 6.

70 Jones to Chandler, 13 October 1938. Box 23; Jones to Chandler, 30 October 1939. Box 23. Jack Jones Papers, SLV. For further exploration of the networks employed within the Australian middle class, see Crotty.

71 Jack Jones, ‘The Kulkyne National Forest’, Emu – Austral Ornithology 42, no. 1 (1 July 1942): 1–12; Crosbie Morrison, ‘Our Newest National Forest: 120,000 Acres of Glory’, Wild Life 3, no. 11 (November, 1941): 440–47; Jack Jones, ‘The Hattah Lakes Camp-out, October 1951’, Emu – Austral Ornithology 52, no. 4 (1 November 1952): 225–54.

72 A request, Jack Jones, Assistant General Secretary, Royal Australasian Ornithologists’ Union to A.E. Lind, Minister of Lands and Forests, 4 December 1939, Box 23, Jack Jones Papers, SLV.

73 Chandler to Jones, 30 November 1940, Box 23, Jack Jones Papers, SLV.

74 Sunraysia Daily, 11 October 1941, 1.

75 Sunraysia Daily, 17 April 1942, Box 20, Jack Jones Papers, SLV.

76 Christopher Dummitt, The Manly Modern: Masculinity in Postwar Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007).

77 Ibid., 7. On the assumed correlation of scientific thought, practice, and objectivity with masculinity, see Evelyn Fox Keller, ‘Gender and Science’, in Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, ed. Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2003). See also Erika Lorraine Milam and Robert A. Nye, ‘An Introduction to Scientific Masculinities’, Osiris 30, no. 1 (January 2015): 1–14.

78 This work resulted in the publication ‘Structure and Capacity of Australian Manufacturing Industries’, 1952.

79 Burch, 162–63. See for instance, Jones to Chandler, 8 January 1951. Box 23, Jack Jones Papers, SLV.

80 In 1940, Chandler and Jones’s decision to pursue National Forest and sanctuary status for the Lakes had been a compromise, based on the recognition that it would likely give the area greater protection (national parks during this period were run by committees of management with few resources).

81 Jones to Chandler, 28 July 1940, Box 23, Jack Jones Papers, SLV.

82 14 April 1970, Jack Jones to Monkhouse, Box 22, Jack Jones Papers, SLV.

83 Jack Jones, ‘The Hattah Lakes Camp-out, October 1951’, 232.

84 Milam and Nye.

85 Ibid., 5.

86 Jack Jones to Ben Eggleton, 26 May 1959. Box 20, Jack Jones Papers, SLV.

87 Burch has called these people the ‘white tribe’. Burch, 86–100.

88 Jack Jones to Ben Eggleton, 26 May 1959. Box 20, Jack Jones Papers, SLV.

89 Christopher Dummitt, ‘Modern Men: Taking Risks and Making Masculinity in the Postwar Years’, (PhD thesis, Simon Fraser University (ProQuest Dissertations Publishing), 2004), 5.

90 Susan R. Schrepfer, Nature’s Altars: Mountains, Gender, and American Environmentalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005).

91 National Parks Authority Annual Report, 1960, 10.

92 Burch, 164–65.

93 ‘VPNA Newsletter Request to the Government of Victoria Asking that All of the Kulkyne State Forest Be Made a National Park’ (October 1959), 10, Box 20, Jack Jones Papers SLV.

94 Ibid., 19.

95 Address to the Mallee Regional Committee, 18 November 1959. Box 20, Jack Jones Papers, SLV.

96 Request to the Government of Victoria asking that all of the Kulkyne State Forest be made a National Park, Victorian National Parks Association Newsletter, no. 57, October 1959.

97 For a discussion on the different stages of advocacy around bird protection, see Libby Robin, ‘Birds and Environmental Management in Australia 1901–2001’, Australian Journal of Environmental Management 8, no. 2 (1 January 2001): 105–13.

98 Libby Robin, Defending the Little Desert: the Rise of Ecological Consciousness in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998).