Book Review - Flying Fox and Drifting Sand by Francis Ratcliffe

Flying Fox and Drifting Sand by Francis Ratcliffe, with an introduction by Sir Julian Huxley

Sydney: Sirius Books / Angus and Roberston, 1963      (First edition 1938)

This is a wonderful book, both of Australian nature writing, and as a time capsule of Australian history. Francis Ratcliffe was an early ecologist of the Australian countryside, both in the tropical north and the central parts of Australia. Coming from England, he first came to Australia at the behest of the CSIR to investigate the breeding, eating, and migration habits of Flying Foxes, which were seen to be a menace to fruit growers in Northern New South Wales and Queensland. Later, he was employed to report on the erosion of the pastoral country in the North of South Australia and South-Western Queensland.

Flying Fox and Drifting Sand is Ratcliffe's account of these activities. It is not a scientific book, as his writing is more about the people he met and the adventures he had, rather than the outcomes of his "scouting", although that is there as well. What he does describe is a hard country and a harder life, and the destruction of the natural world.

Ratcliffe is often amazed at what people do to survive in these places, whether it's the Cedar-getters in Southern Queensland working on the side of precipitous mountains, or the drovers waiting out the dust-storms and drought in South Australia for better times and the chance of work. He loves their almost unfailing friendliness and hospitality, and their sheer grit.

What he struggles with is the countryside itself. The eeriness of the jungle unnerved him, as did the vast expanses of the Outback. His journeys in the Outback in particular were ones of constant tension, and fear that he might be trapped in that country for an extended period. This doesn't preclude him from wonderful descriptive passages describing the Saltbush, Dune and Channel Country of South Australia and Queensland.

The description of his journeys up the iconic tracks of the Outback are wonderful to read - it has to be remembered that much of this country had only been opened up a generation before, and that to drive these tracks was really an adventure, with vehicle rebuilds happening sometimes more than once a trip. His admiration for those locals who drove through with supplies and the mail is well-deserved.

Ratcliffe, in his research, shows that it is not nature that is the "problem", but Mankind. He showed that, given that there were millions upon millions of Flying Foxes, the damage they did to commercial crops was really inconsequential, given the cost of any remedial measures that could realistically have an effect.

What he finds in Outback South Australia and Queensland was altogether worse: overstocking was denuding the country of plant-life, and eroding the soil, turning the country to desert. The problem was (and is) simply that the country cannot support - 365 days a year, year in year out - a stocking ratio that provides an economic return. Once the country is despoiled, it is lost for at least a generation, or longer if there is no remedial action. It was Ratcliffe's first-hand experience of these problems that led him to loathe the sight of much of the country in that area.

This book has become a minor classic in Australia, reprinted often enough to be easily available second-hand, and is well worth reading for a taste of Australian bush life in the 1930s.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell