Avon River. But there’s a Catholic church that looks like a small cathedral, and there are halls and meetinghouses of other churches.
Developers eye York with glee; the friction is intense between those who would make a buck and leave and those who see York as a chosen lifestyle place. Bounded on one side by wandoo bushland and by York gum/jam tree woodlands on another, the place suffers more clearing and damage each year. It is conservative, but with a sprinkling of radicals who are generally tolerated because York prides itself on being a cultural place. That’s European-derived culture. But it’s also a center of Nyungar culture, where the strength lies. There is racism and division in the town, but possibly less so than elsewhere.
One of the current greats of Australian Rules football comes from York, and white and black are intensely proud of him. But the town is still subtly controlled by the power of land ownership. The big voices are the big farmers. I wrote a number of these stories in the historic York Post Office building, designed by Temple-Poole in the second half of the nineteenth century, where I had an office within the two-foot-thick stone walls. On the single main street running south to north, I looked out over the day-to-day activities of the town. An incident outside the bottle shop, dogs barking on the back of utes, as Australians call pickups.
Northam
Main town of the central wheatbelt and Avon Valley. A regional center of some seven thousand people, providing the only senior high school for vast distances. It services the broader farming community of the region. The railway here has been important over the years, and one of the largest inland grain-receival points sits on the outskirts of town. The wide paddocks that spread throughout the region carry crops of wheat, barley, oats, canola, and other seeds/grains. Wheat is the mainstay. It is railed and trucked from the bins to the ports (primarily Fremantle/Kwinana) for export. An historic and still functioning flour mill sits on the river at the southeastern end of town. Shearing is also a major industry, with shearing teams buying their gear, drinking, and often living there when not out working the sheds.
Northam has a regional hospital, the main regional courts, and a large police station. It is a violent town, with a high crime rate and often literally blood on the streets, especially outside the hotels. It used to have a small cinema complex, but that closed down because of late-night violence. It has an active and high-quality amateur dramatic company that uses a theater based in an old church building—farce and comedy are their mainstay, which draws locals. The high school puts on an annual play there—our daughter featured in the production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. There is also a regional art gallery. There are four large old-style drinking hotels, and a lengthy main street with shops, plus a small arcade.
Sports are a big part of the town’s life, dominated by Australian Rules football, netball, and cricket. This is true of most wheatbelt towns, but there is much more infrastructure in Northam. Our daughter used to bus a seventy-kilometer round trip to school. An historic town, with the legendary, introduced white swans that have been a feature of European colonization here for over a hundred years. It is the starting point of the famed (and environmentally destructive) Avon Descent, the longest whitewater boat race in the southern hemisphere; that’s in years when there’s any water to race along.
After the Second World War, the town housed many European migrants. Their tales of hardship adjusting to the heat and flies and Spartan conditions are told in a commemorative display at the tourist center. Ironically, given this, Northam has a racist history. Many of the Ballardong Nyungar families of the region were broken up, and the place is notorious for the removal from their Nyungar families of children who were considered to have “white blood.” These children were part of the horrendous reality of the Stolen Generations, the damage of which resounds to this day. Many of the children ended up at the Moore River Settlement, several days’ walk away.
Recently, Northam’s racism and bigotry have run out of control with the announcement of a refugee holding center, for Afghan males, to be established at the old army base. You cannot walk the streets without being confronted by signs screaming “Parasites,” or demonstrations with people wearing T-shirts that declare, “Send back their boats” or “Bomb their boats.” There is a more liberal side to the town (though small in number), who call for humanity and respect for all peoples.
But Northam is a divided town; its indigenous inhabitants experience racism on a daily basis. I was one of those who refused to shop at a major supermarket until charges were dropped against one Nyungar boy (and he was clearly labeled “black” as a pejorative in the media) who was threatened with serious theft charges for possessing an unpaid-for chocolate frog (given to him by a cousin).
On the positive side, there is a firm sense of identity in the black community, with two of the town’s primary schools having 40 percent or more indigenous pupils and significant cultural programmes. The Wheatbelt Aboriginal Corporation is also based there, and there are strong bonds across the various communities outside the racist elements.
Northam is a strongly Christian town (Irish Catholics have been an historically dominant group, along with Anglicans; Baptists and other Protestant denominations now have a strong presence), with deeply conservative views on race, sexuality, and ethnicity. It is also the arts center of the region. The banks and government offices are there, and people from a hundred kilometers or more away do their big shopping and essential business there.
Toodyay
Another early inland town, originally called Newcastle, and at first built on a flood area of the Avon River, despite warnings from Nyungar people that the settlers would be washed out in winter. The town was moved, and the name later changed to avoid clashing with one of the same name in the then colony of New South Wales.
“Toodyay” is derived from a Ballardong Nyungar word meaning “place of plenty.” The area around Toodyay remains rich in native bush and wildlife. There are wandoo, marri, and jarrah woodlands, and York and jam tree environments, such as on our own place. We live about fifteen kilometers north of the town, on a bush block that sees many kangaroos pass by on any given day; that has bobtails and western black monitors, mulga snakes and gwarders, and a wide range of birds, including twenty-eight parrots, red-capped robins, eagles, and tawny frogmouths. There’s an echidna on the block—I see its scratchings daily but have yet to come across it. Our place is strewn with granite and “Toodyay stone,” and there are large granite boulders at the top of the block. The soils around the shire vary from infertile sand to a richer red loam (still low in nutrients).
It’s a tough area—shearers (my brother, further north, is a shearer), farm laborers, bikers, fly-in fly-out miners (who fly north for two weeks on at the interior mines, and back for two weeks off), hobby farms and large spreads mixed together. Jack Daniels and beer are the drinks of choice, and the rock band AC/DC rules. Every year there is a jazz festival in the main street of town, and also the Moondyne Festival, named after a bushranger and escape artist who hid in the hills around the town for many years. Toodyay residents often see themselves as outlaws, and indeed some are. It’s a place of bushy beards and raven-haired women with tats. Alternative lifestylers (Orange People, Wiccans, hermits) live alongside horse breeders, middle-class wine imbibers, and weekend farmers traveling up from the city.
Toodyay is at the edge of the Darling Range, and the Avon River cuts through a range of smaller valleys and hills. It is considered picturesque and is much visited, but in many ways it is a hard-living and violent town. Ferociously hot during summer, it is a high fire-risk area because of the large amount of bush still nestled among the hills. Late in 2009, thousands of acres were devastated by fire, with the loss of thirty-nine houses, many sheds, and many animals. There were no human deaths, though a life was lost in a bushfire here two years before.
Mullewa
Another old inland town, but in the Murchison area six or more hours’
