Monday 28 January 2019

The Ecological and Environmental Catastrophe Visited Upon Australia's Inland River System, A Sense of Place Magazine, 29 January, 2019.





They blame climate change. They blame the drought. They blame everyone and everything but themselves.
The stench of millions of dead fish, the rotting corpses of kangaroos and sheep, the missing bird life, the farmers who can no longer farm, devastated indigenous peoples, an ancient, desecrated landscape, internationally significant wetlands nothing but dust bowls, all of this and more is happening across Central Australia — right now.
Decades of chronic government mismanagement and corporate greed have turned Australia’s most significant and extensive river system, the Murray-Darling, into a disaster of national and international significance.
The Murray Darling Basin covers more than a million square kilometres, draining some one seventh of Australia’s land area.
Menindee Lakes, January, 2019. Photographer Dean Sewell: “Animals are looking for water from these dried up lakes, and the residual waters that accumulate around the outlets, drainage points between the lakes. They get caught in this terrible mud. In extreme heatwave conditions. They do not live long.”
The meandering, often intermittent rivers that feed into the Murray Darling stretch across more than 3,700 kilometres and for much of their length flow inland.
They are unique in the world.
Australia’s hapless political and bureaucratic castes have squandered billions of dollars purporting to be environmentalists who care about the fragile ecosystems of the country’s arid and semi-arid inland.
Ram dying. Lake Cawndilla, NSW, 2019. Oculi Photographer Dean Sewell.
If you want to understand the underlying causes of mismanagement and administrative chaos, it is usually a case of just follow the money. And so it is in this case.
Turning public assets into private gain has reached new heights in Australia.
The outgoing conservative government, on the nose in the electorate and facing electoral wipeout in May, if it lasts that long, has a sour reputation as a pack of corporate crooks who have misused their political positions to plunder the public purse.
Rod McKenzie, Facebook. 2019.
The debacle visited upon a great swathe of the country is a case in point; the toxic blue green algal blooms poisoning once flowing rivers is a perfect analogy for a government in terminal decline.
Make no mistake: this situation is highly political and the incumbent conservatives are facing the full wrath of the electorate at both state and federal levels.
As senior editor at The Canberra Times Jack Waterford puts it, the dead and stinking fish are:
A floating monument to greed, corruption, maladministration and disastrous environmental management.
The opportunists who gifted water rights to irrigators are despised up and down the entire river system.
Bureaucratic empires have been built around the notion of sensitive environmental and water management of the inland river system.
But it was Big Money — the cotton and irrigation industries — which won the day.

There Are Many Beginnings To This Story

Map Courtesy of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation
There is history; decades of history. And there is the terrible present.
Only a few days into 2019 news of a massive fish kill in the Menindee Lakes complex in far western New South Wales hit the headlines and news bulletins.
There is a mountain of evidence; at first only posted by local pastoralists, soon to be taken up by the nation’s media.
The owners of the historic Tolarno Station have been amongst the most prominent activists, alerting the public and the media to the extent of the disaster.
The video below went viral, attracting millions of views and thousands of comments and shares.
These are not your run-of-the-mill activists. It takes a lot to turn the normally taciturn graziers and residents of Central Australia into political animals.
But turn they have.
Owner of Tolarno Rob McBride told A Sense of Place Magazine, on the day of yet another fish kill:
It’s going to get worse before it gets better.
This is nothing to do with drought. This is government policy, both State and Federal.
It has everything to do with greed, corruption and money.
This is a cataclysmic destruction of a river system.
For us there is no surprise.
Bureaucrats and politicians have done everything they could to undermine any integrity in the system. They should be held accountable for the destruction of the environment.
McBride said the public had already funded schemes, to the tune of $8 billion, to put water back in the river system through buybacks and government incentives.
Where is the water?
Where is the audit of where the money went?
The water went straight to cotton irrigators, absolutely.
People should go to jail over this. Absolutely.
People the world over need to understand that this has nothing to do with nature. These fish are dying in their millions because the system has been destroyed.
It has nothing to do with nature and everything to do with money.
Award winning news photographer Dean Sewell, who has recently toured the area and whose work is featured throughout this piece, says:
While all the news has been on the million dead fish in Menindee, upstream they’re already dead.
Hundreds of kilometer strips where all the fish are dead. There is no water up there. And what water there is has turned green and putrid.
Locals have prepared the following video as a way of explaining the catastrophe to an international audience.
Bill Johnson, a well respected environmental water management expert who previously worked at the Murray Darling Basin Authority and has been touring the affected areas, told A Sense of Place Magazine:
To describe what is happening here as an ecological and environmental catastrophe is understating what is going on. It is deeply serious.
This is the latest sign of complete catastrophic failure.
It has been heading this way for decades. This is a failure of water allocation policy. For all the talk, the endless meetings, consultations, inquiries and reports, rivers like the Darling should have come first.
It is not possible to remedy the situation around Menindee at present. Even heavy rains in the upper catchment will take months to arrive, even if we can persuade governments to let the water through rather than it being taken by the massive irrigation projects that line the length of the river.
Menindee is one of the last major breeding sites on the Darling River remaining for a number of freshwater fish. For the fish dying in those waterholes there is nothing that can be done.
Oculi Photographer Dean Sewell
Mr Johnson said there was no water in the upstream catchment and fish were in strife across the Murray Darling Basin.
There have been fish kills in the Namoi River, the famous Macquarie marshes and at Inverell.
There will be more kills.
Mr Johnson said the government had declared it would hold an inquiry into what killed the fish.
Yet another inquiry!!
We know what killed the fish.
One of the things we still don’t know is how much water is being taken out of the river, 99% of it by cotton irrigators.
No one will acknowledge how much water is being used.
That can only be because people don’t want to know.

A Wonderland At Risk

Cover story. The author is the one standing up taking a photograph.
Twenty eight years ago, as a staff reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald, I wrote a cover story for the paper’s weekend colour magazine, Troubled Waters: A Wonderland at Risk.
Even then, it was obvious trouble was brewing. One of the cores of the scandal that has now unfolded lies with the unique networks of ephemeral lakes and intermittent rivers which characterize the arid interior.
Scientists believe they are looking at the remnants of an ancient lake and wetland system which ran through the centre of the continent during wetter epochs. Hence the remarkably high number of birds the lakes attract.
As the land dried the birds adapted, being able, in one of the great scientific mysteries, to be able to detect water across hundreds of kilometres of arid land and to move between water sources.
A sight now rarely seen in the Murray Darling Basin. Photograph Greg White, 1991.
Skeletons of an extinct breed of fresh water dolphin, along with flamingos, have been found in central Australia.
While they did not make the adaption to a drier climate, many other species did, flying from one ephemeral lake to another across vast distances.
Twenty eight years ago I wrote:
Some attract waterbirds in numbers that make them the equal of the spectacular flamingo lakes of Africa and the migratory wetlands of Europe and North America. The density of bird life is two or three times that of Kakadu: 100,000 birds of more than 30 species may inhabit a single lake only a few kilometres long. Spoonbills and cormorants nest in drowned trees, colonies of pelicans rear their young on sand islands and banded stilts nest in shallow scrapes on the ground. Darters, herons, ibis, egrets, sandpipers and ducks mingle with flocks of black swans.
But all this is changing and the scandal is while Australia actively promotes international conventions to protect waterbird habitats, we simply do not know what impact human activity is having on our semi-arid wetlands.
Basic research is nonexistent: We do not know the impact of the cotton industry. Australia’s most profitable legal agricultural activity is spreading rapidly westwards with its attendant chemical runoff and manipulation of river systems.

Now We Know

Lake Woolpoolool, South Australia. Calperum Station. Photography by Dean Sewell.
Writing in The New Daily, senior journalist Michael Pascoe records that while spectacular fish kills creaste focus on a particular problem:
Steady degradation just eats away at the entire environment in that tricky way nature has of everything being connected.
The fish in their rotting riverside masses are extremely photogenic, at least from a news point of view. Their stink sparks predictable political blame games and, at least for a while, calls for action.
Yet the headline-grabbing dead fish have come late to the Murray-Darling ecological disaster story.
It’s much harder to focus outrage on something that’s not there, something that can’t be photographed. But like the dog that didn’t bark, the birds that are not there still bear powerful witness.
Image by Oculi Photographer Dean Sewell. Dead Turtle at Lake Bonney in Bamera, South Australia. Water had been cut off to keep the flows going to the lower Murray. The lake slowly evaporated, killing all the fish and turtles.
The disaster of missing birds has been rolling on for years, not that the relevant federal ministers doing the water deals seem to have cared.
This is government incompetence, pure and simple.
Professor Richard Kingsford, Australia’s most experienced and meticulous scientific expert on the bird life of Australia’s interior, spearheaded a University of New South Wales study which found that water bird numbers in the Murray-Darling basin were down about 70 per cent over the past three decades.
The birds have either died or they haven’t bred as much as they did in the past.
We separated that group into all of the birds that eat fish, all of the birds that eat invertebrates and vegetation, and what we’re seeing is that all of those groups are also declining, which tells you the whole of the ecosystem is in decline.

The Political Response: Shameful

The New South Wales Minister for Regional Water.
Seriously?!
Paid four times the average wage, Niall Blair appears to have been doing little if anything to earn his money.
Local Menindee resident Graeme McCrabb says despite the size of the fish kill no one from the Federal Government or the Murray Darling Basin Authority have visited.
This is the biggest environmental catastrophe in the history of the river, and no one is here. It beggars belief.
Niall Blair did visit, but toured what is left of the river by boat and did not meet locals, claiming police advised him of safety concerns.
The word on the ground is that the police offered no such advice.
As 150 locals gathered to meet him, Blair roared by at 40 knots in a speedboat — all around him the stench of dead fish.
And his stinking, sinking career.
Compounding the outrage, Blair failed to front or even phone in to a meeting of mayors from towns along the embattled Barwon-Darling river system who gathered at the government’s ministerial headquarters in Sydney to discuss the water crisis.
How truly, utterly, inexcusably gutless.
The mayors had traveled more than 1,000 kilometres to be there — at taxpayers expense. They were expecting to meet the responsible Minister, Niall Blair.
In the world’s driest continent, the Nationals, the party which has traditionally represented the interests of country people, are being directly blamed for selling off the inland’s scarcest and most valuable resource, water, to the cotton industry.
Hated up and down the river system, former Deputy Prime Minister, the National Party’s Barnaby Joyce, is directly in the line of fire after his scandal plagued period as Federal Water Minister.
Straight off, the dead and stinking fish symbolize the mismanagement, maladministration and corruption of water policy in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria.
It doesn’t take a great deal of extension to work it into an argument about the National Party’s intellectual and moral bankruptcy, particularly under former leader Barnaby Joyce, and its complete unfitness to govern.
Rural folk increasingly feel that way, wondering how a party established to represent rural and regional Australians became instead available for rent to big mining interests, the coal industry, the fracking industry and large-scale agribusiness, particularly when these interests threaten their livelihoods.
Jack Waterford. The Canberra Times.
As we said, there’s history, plenty of history.
Laughably former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was once the Minister for Environment and Water, back in 2007.
Regarded as the worst leader in the nation’s history, as part of his machinations in seizing power in 2015 Turnbull hived off the water portfolio from environment and appointed National Leaders Barnaby Joyce as Water Minister.
He must have known full well the consequences for the country’s ravaged interior of handing control of the river system to someone so closely linked to the cotton industry.
Water turns into what is known as acid water when it gets hyper-salinic. Picture by Oculi Photographer Dean Sewell. Acid Water, Bottle Bend, Mildura. Because of the acidic nature of it, particles will sink. The water takes on a super-clear appearance. It is as if you are looking through glass. But at the same time the cracked dry mud beneath it holds its form. Normally when water washes over cracked earth, it forms mad — but not when the water reaches this level of acidity.
Although he has now been pushed out of the top job, Turnbull’s fingers trail through the current catastrophe.
As Professor John Quiggin put it in a piece titled The Darling River fish kill is what comes from ignoring decades of science:
A multitude of actions Joyce took as minister, from blocking water buybacks to cutting the allocation of water to the environment were so damaging as to seem deliberately designed to destroy the fragile ecosystems of the Murray-Darling Basin, and to produce outcomes like those we see today.
Jack Waterford speaks for many critics when he argues the current catastrophe also owes much to the over allocation of water to irrigation farmers and to rorting of the whole system, with the connivance of public service regulators.
The fish don’t need a detailed inquest: just by themselves, they show that something has gone very badly wrong.
That federal ministers and some public servants in the primary industry department see their function as facilitating agriculture and maximizing its export revenue has also led to the corruption of the public stewardship they were supposed to deliver to the whole community.

Indigenous Heartbreak

Image by Oculi Photographer Dean Sewell. Land Clearing in St George, Queensland. “If you remove all your trees from the land, you alter rainfall patterns. And the runoff, which directly impacts on the upper reaches of the river system. These are semi-arid areas. They have delicate ecologies little understood and little suited to western styles of farming. The piles are ash of the vegetation which had been pushed into piles and burnt. You can see the fires still burning in the top right hand quadrant. If you look carefully you will see a bulldozer on the left.”
The Australian media is heavily manipulated. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is government owned and works as a kind of propaganda wing for the bureaucracy, while News Limited, owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, is closely aligned with and a champion of the conservative politicians now facing demolition at the polls.
While the collapse of Australia’s inland river system should be of interest to everybody, Guardian Australia has been one of the only news outlet devoting significant resources to the story.
For the graziers who built their properties over generations only to see them destroyed by the cotton industry and political bankruptcy, the situation is profoundly heartbreaking.
For the indigenous, who can date their linkages to the country back thousands of years, the death of the river system is emotionally and culturally devastating.
Image by Oculi photographer Dean Sewell. Land clearing, Cobar, western NSW. “There is so much land clearing going on. It is still going on unchecked.”
One recent Guardian Australia piece records:
Two rivers meet outside Walgett in north-west New South Wales: the Barwon and the Namoi. They are major tributaries in the Murray Darling system.
But they’re both empty, and this has never happened before.
Gamilaraay and Yuwalaraay elders who have lived on these rivers all their lives cry when they say they have never seen it as bad as this, and they doubt it can ever be recovered.
“This to me is the ultimate destruction of our culture,” Gamilaraay elder Virginia Robinson says, sitting with the Dhariwaa elders group in Walgett.
All people think about now is there’s no water. Aboriginal people were very close to nature and that’s all unbalanced now. There’s no nature to go back to.
We’ve got no water, no special places to go, no animals to hunt. Our totem animals are dead, their bones are everywhere.
When your totem animals are gone — the bandarr [kangaroo], the dhinawan [emu] — who are you as a person?
Wilcannia in western New South Wales was once the country’s third largest inland port.
Wilcannia Bridge Circa 1935. Courtesy National Library of Australia.
Not any more.
Now the river is a tragic series of toxic water holes.
The Barkindji people called the river Barka; and refer to themselves as The People of the River.
Barkindji elder Murray Butcher says hundreds of kilometres of a once permanent river are now bone dry as a result of mismanagement.
He has called on “all us river people all along our river to join forces to fight these big irrigators, government and water boards to do the right thing by our land and waters.”
He told the national broadcaster:
This river system is a very important river system for the whole of western New South Wales, not just economically but spiritually.
Our river is just about on the brink of dying.
We have cultures on this river that have been here for thousands and thousands of years, cultures that have been obliterated by government decisions and mismanagement.
Because of the decisions they are making, we are the people that are suffering.
Another elder, William ‘Badger’ Bates, told Guardian Australia:
We don’t need a lot of cotton. We need our water.
When they take the water from a Barkandji person, they take our blood. They’re killing us. It’s not just us Barkandji people who are feeling it. It’s the white people and other people too.
How can I teach culture when they’re taking our beloved Barka away? There’s nothing to teach if there’s no river. The river is everything. It’s my life, my culture. You take the water away from us; we’ve got nothing.
Health worker Annabelle King was part a healthcare access consultation with the local Indigenous people last year.
Initially we queried after hospital wait times, access to healthy food and hygiene.
It quickly it became evident that the river was central to the life, spirit and health and welfare for the community.
The destitute state of the river was heart-breaking. The river gives healthy fresh food, clean water, cultural exercise, it keeps the young people occupied and away from smoking and alcohol. The river was everything- the health of the community is the health of the river.

The Perfect Storm

Oculi Photographer Dean Sewell. Pamamaroo Lake, NSW, Australia.
It has been a perfect storm of corporate greed, political betrayal and astounding levels of government incompetence.
Billions of dollars have hemorrhaged from the public purse.
Fear of disease, including ameobic meningitus, is spreading.
Until now, politicians have escaped the censure they so richly deserve.
But Australia is in an election year.
Drought is gripping the country.
And the government has used the plight of farmers as a direct propaganda tool. The first act of Australia’s latest Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, was to fly to Queensland to announce various drought policies.
That is, he chose to use the plight of farmers for his own political gain; the same farmers who successive governments have afflicted with excessive regulation, crippling taxes, whose land they have allowed to be readily sold off to foreign interests. Successive governments have tolerated or facilitateted outlandish predatory banking practices which have destroyed thousands of enterprises.
And now, as the government faces a truly disenchanted electorate, the consequence of their incompetence is clear for all to see.
There have been numerous scathing reports. Yet more are due in the coming days.
Senior counsel assisting the South Australian Royal Commission into the Murray Darling and its administration, Richard Beasley, was blunt in his criticisms of the Murray Darling Basin Authority and its political masters scattered across the Federal, New South Wales, Queensland, South Australian and Victorian spheres.
Image by Oculi Photographer Dean Sewell.
Describing issues of “maladministration” and “unlawfulness” and “mismanagement of huge amounts of public funds”, Beasley sheeted home blame to those in charge.
While the Royal Commission report is expected to be released this Friday.
One such report, by the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, found excessive payments to irrigators, failing environmental flows and an ignorance of water extraction that is “inconceivable” given available technology
Key author of the report Dr Jamie Pittock said:
It’s the capture of state agencies by the powerful industry interests against the broader public interest.
There was institutional corruption.
It’s appalling that the health of the red gum forests continues to decline, and it’s appalling the number of water birds has flatlined.
Greens water spokesman Jeremy Buckingham has been batting on about the state of the inland rivers for years, with little if any impact.
He has finally been vindicated.
We are on the brink of failure because of recalcitrant states, a tame Murray Darling Basin Authority, a dysfunction water market that is being rorted, a lack of compliance, and National Party water ministers acting to destroy it”.
We have had cascading reports concluding the Murray Darling Basin Plan is failing and billions of taxpayer’s dollars are being wasted on projects that are not restoring our rivers and wetlands.
Bill Johnson is scathing about the bureaucratic and political responses.
“We don’t know, we can’t find out, it’s not our job,” that’s the attitude.
Federal and State agencies have all been saying it’s not our fault.
It’s like the Bart Simpson defence: I didn’t do it. Nobody saw me. You can’t prove a thing.
There is no doubt governments have abandoned the river.
When you abandon the river, you abandon the people who live along it.
Oculi Photographer Dean Sewell. Mannum, Lower Murray River. This picture won the Moran Prize for Contemporary Photography.


Thursday 24 January 2019

I Built No Schools in Kenya: Kirsten Drysdale's Year of Unmitigated Madness, A Sense of Place Magazine, 25 January, 2019.


I Built No Schools in Kenya

Kirsten Drysdale’s Year of Unmitigated Madness

Kenyan artist Dennis Muraguri. Image courtesy of the Talisman Restaurant.
This is not your standard white-girl-in-Africa tale. I fed no babies, I built no schools, I saved no rhinos. Self-discovery came a distant second to self-preservation on this particular adventure.
So says Kirsten Drysdale, who is better known as a charming, quick witted, upfront Australian television personality than as an author.
Her first book, I Built No Schools in Kenya, is published by Penguin Random House this month.
Back in 2010, between gigs, Drysdale claims she was was tricked into going to Kenya, a place she had never thought much about.
A friend called with a job offer too curious to refuse: a cruisey gig as a dementia carer for a rich old man. All expenses-paid, plenty of free time to travel or do some freelance reporting.
Kirsten Drysdale, in one of her roles as a presenter, writer and researcher on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s The Checkout.
Only Kirsten’s friend hadn’t given her the full story. It was only on arrival in Nairobi that she discovered the rich old man’s family was fighting a war around him, and that she would be on the front line.
Caught in the crossfire of all kinds of wild accusations, she also had to spy on his wife, keep his daughter placated, rebuff his marriage proposals, hide the car keys and clip his toenails, all while trying to retain her own sanity in the colonial time warp of his home.
“I didn’t really know what I was heading to,” Kirsten told A Sense of Place Magazine. “I didn’t go with the intention of writing about it.
“I came back and started telling people the story, and people said I should write a book.
“I was a bit hesitant. I was in my twenties when I went and I have a general rule that nobody under thirty should be writing a memoir. But I broke my own rule.
“It is a memoir about one year, and a very very bizarre experience. I hope the story is not so much about me as about what happened; the world I was in.
Of course Nairobi is more often in the news for terrifying terrorist attacks and associated mayhem than as a place for a coming-of-age adventure story.
Bank Slave’s Graffiti portrait of Lupita Nyong’o on outside wall of The Godown art centre. Photo by Margaretta Wa Gacheru
While Drysdale was caught inside a luxury mansion caring for a dementia patient, a time warp of colonial Kenya, the Kenyan army was invading Somalia and Al-Shabaab was threatening attacks.
“As soon as you drove through the gates you were in modern Nairobi,” she recalls. “It was an incredibly vibrant place. There is so much more going on in Africa than we tend to see.
“You have extreme poverty, but also a burgeoning middle class.
“If you went to a shopping centre it was like being in a mall at home. There are teenagers eating frozen yogurts, buying fashionable clothes, sitting on their phones.”
But terror is striking home.
“It’s strange and chilling,” Drysdale says. “I know so well the places where these things are happening.
“I remember the shopping mall attacks of 2013. It was weird to watch the coverage of it. A lot was shot on mobile phones from people stuck inside.
“Cafes, table and chairs where I had coffee with people, where it had been a peaceful ordinary place. It was incredibly shocking, and very very sad to see that happening in what was one of the more promising sides of Kenya.”
I Built No Schools in Kenya is a travelogue-tragedy-farce about race, wealth, love, death, family, nationhood, sanity, tranquilizers, monkeys, whisky, dementia and a bygone world.
“I found it a very difficult story to tell in book form. The whole way through I felt and still feel it would have been easier to write as a television script.
“Partly because of my day job, I work in TV.
“And so much of the story I wanted to tell was visual.”
Below is an extract.

The Situation: Nairobi, Kenya.

So here’s how it is: I’m a live-in carer for Walter Smyth. He is very rich, very old, very sick and very senile.
Over the next eight years, dozens of people will occupy this role. Most of them won’t last long. Some of them will literally run away in the dead of night after just a few weeks.
In comparison, I’ll be here quite a while. Eleven months all up. But I don’t know that yet. I can’t imagine what’s to come.
Walt doesn’t know it, but he has employed three women to look after him. There’s me; there’s my mate from high school, Alice; and there’s Millicent, a sweet old woman who is very into God. The three of us tag-team around the clock in eight-hour shifts, supervising Walt’s meals, his morning walks, his medication, his showers, his shits and his sleep. Alice and I are also supposed to spy on his wife, Marguerite, for his daughter, Fiona, who thinks Marguerite’s trying to kill him, even though she’s not.
I didn’t know the whole imaginary-murder-surveillance thing was part of the job description until I got here.
Millicent is an old family friend of the Smyths, a fellow former colonial, a couple of decades Walt’s junior. She blends in a bit better than Alice and me.
We’re in our mid-twenties and come from Mackay, a town in regional Queensland. We’ve had to learn the ways of this world.
The Kenyan household staff are just getting on with things as best they can. Most of them have been working for the Smyths for a very long time — though I don’t think it’s ever been quite the punish it is now that Walt’s sick and surrounded by a team of meddling mzungus (Europeans). Not that they ever complain.
Walt’s house is in one of Nairobi’s nicer suburbs. It’s one of the area’s older, more modest homes, surrounded by hedge-hemmed mansions boasting tennis courts and swimming pools. Someone very important has a place just down the road — in the evenings you can hear their helicopter coming in to land. When I jog past their high gates I’m watched by camera lenses and rifle sights, and barking dogs that scare me over to the other side of the road.

A Dying Breed

The Joy of the Rich. Nairobi artist John “Silver” Kimani.
As for Walt himself — well, he’s an anachronism. An old-school colonial from early establishment stock. His father was one of the first white men out here, one of those guys you imagine arriving with a sack of Union Jacks slung over his shoulder, marching along in a pith helmet from the coast to the Nile, laying claim to land with every few steps on behalf of the Empire and promising to ‘civilise’ the ‘natives’, as though there’s anything ‘civilised’ about subjugating people in their own country.
On Walt’s mantelpiece is a photograph of Teddy Roosevelt when he came to Kenya on a hunting safari in 1909. Except it wasn’t called Kenya back then; it was still the ‘British East Africa Protectorate’, one of the many pink patches on the map.
So you see, these people are a big deal around here. At least, they used to be. Modern-day Kenya barely knows or cares that they exist. Old colonials are literally a dying breed.
Walt has so much money it will never run out. It’s partly inherited and partly self-made. He was a farmer, of tea and coffee and cattle. I’m told by the household staff that he worked hard to turn unproductive land around, and was nearly bankrupted doing so.
Daniel arap Moi, Kenya’s second president, admired Walt’s farm so much he compulsorily acquired it from him in the 1980s. Walt was lucky to receive a good price. Independent Kenya, for the most part, made a point of being relatively gentle with its former colonial masters. Whether that was for better or worse depends on who you speak to.

It’s 1942. It’s 1985.

Gathering. Dennis Muraguri. Image Courtesy the Talisman Restaurant.
Now Walter Smyth’s in his eighties, and his mind is falling apart. He’s got vascular dementia: a demolition team of tiny strokes and little wrecking balls of sticky protein are destroying his brain, leaving a rickety frame of consciousness behind.
Walt grasps at the past and hallucinates much of the present.
His body isn’t quite as shaky as his mind, but he does have a pacemaker and a dodgy liver and kidneys that need keeping an eye on. Most days, Walt thinks he’s in England, where he lived half his life. He thinks it’s 1942 and he’s collecting Second World War bomb shrapnel from the fields near his school. Or he thinks it’s 1985 and his mother has just died and he needs to get his suit ready for her funeral in Dover.
Some days he does think he’s in Kenya — but that it’s 1956, in the middle of the Kenya Emergency, and he’s up on the tea farm, and needs to drive to the city for supplies, and might be attacked by Mau Mau terrorists on the road to Nairobi, and so needs to find his guns.
He never thinks it’s 2010 and he’s already at his house in Nairobi, the one he’s had for thirty years. Even that lion hanging on the dining-room wall doesn’t jog his memory. You’d think it would — he’s got scars all the way down his legs from its claws. Those yellow teeth were sunk deep into Walt’s foot when he finally managed to unjam his rifle and send a bullet through the side of its skull. Now the lion watches him eat, its jaw frozen in a silent roar.
There’s no good reason for my being here (though there are plenty of bad ones). I have no nursing experience. All I know about dementia is what I saw as my grandmother’s mind crumbled to dust in the latter years of her life: the way she would conduct orchestras at the dinner table using chicken bones as batons, or cut pictures of puppies out of tissue boxes and glue them to the back of her couch because they were ‘sweet’.
More than anything else, this whole story is the result of cosmic timing.
In September 2010, I’d just started working in television, back home in Australia. But Hungry Beast — the show I worked on — had finished and we weren’t sure it would get another season.
Having uprooted my life and moved to Sydney for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of working for Andrew Denton, I was in a weird place.
In one sense, I felt I had the world at my feet. But I wasn’t at home in Sydney. I was lonely, a bit lost, and in hindsight probably mildly depressed.
Just as I’d decided to move back to my family’s farm in Mackay for a while, Alice called from Nairobi with a somewhat intriguing proposal. She’d been hired by the Smyths through a carers agency while she was living in London, and when they decided to return to their home in Nairobi, she agreed to go with them. But the job was too much for one person alone — they needed more help.
‘They just want someone white, female, slim and switched on,’ she said.
‘Those first three seem a bit … icky, dude.’
‘No, no, no — it’s not like that. The thing is, we’re living in the house with Walt. So even though he doesn’t know what’s going on, we need to look like people he might have had in his home throughout his life. That’s why they can’t hire black carers — he’d never stand for it. And he’s terrible with fat people. Would comment on their weight all the time. Like, repeatedly, ’cos he forgets what he’s just said. It’d be way too awkward. But with me, he just assumes I’m some friend of the family or whatever. You’d fit right in.’
‘He sounds like a total arsehole.’
‘Oh no, he’s really quite sweet! Well, most of the time. I mean, obviously he’s a bit racist. And sexist. But that’s to be expected. He’s a product of his time! And look, he can get a bit cranky and frustrated now and then, but it’s easy enough to calm him down by flirting with him and making him laugh.’
‘Mm,’ I said, slightly revolted. ‘And all we have to do is make sure he doesn’t run off and get lost?’
Ssali Yusuf, Ladies’ Emancipation | Image Courtesy of Diani Beach Art Gallery, Kenya.