I WATCHED Evan Williams' heart wrenching 25 minute Al Jazeera news item on the North Queensland drought.
I have seen nothing on our droughts as tragically illustrated by Australian media.
He showed broken women trying to lift dying cows, shooting them in hundreds.
It reminded me of ABC items on drought in the Horn of Africa.
In those cases the United Nations gives aid.
Price-wise, Australian producers receive one third to half of what US producers receive - if they have any cattle that are still saleable.
Government in this land has abandoned agriculture while trumpeting the opening of supposedly huge markets in Asia.
Few news agencies talk of Australia's beef herd disappearing in record slaughter, live export and death in the paddock.
Government has stopped drought assistance and is concentrating instead on what to do with the mandatory $5 a head cattle levy paid by pauper producers.
This currently feeds the parasitic circus called the "meat structure".
Cattle Council of Australia (CCA), alone, has managed to be on 92 committees and now wants to control the $50 million-plus levy bucket, which is compulsory unionism so long opposed by The Nationals in other industries.
CCA's belated refusal to sign the Sustainable Beef Agreement showed realisation that Australia can't claim sustainability when so many Australian cattle die of starvation.
The clowns in the "circus" don't see that the multinational beef processors will be looking to Belarus (set to exceed our production within 10 years), Kazakhstan and other countries on the Asian steppes with much richer soil than Australia.
As we watch a repetition of the great Federation Drought of 1895-1905, Canberra and our State governments are performing a Nero violin concerto amid the dying embers of agriculture.
Canberra can transfer $500m-plus to the US munitions industry on bombs as we resume blasting the West's 20-year-old bombing range, aka Iraq.
They found $400m for a G20 extravaganza and $94m on a Royal Commission to try and disgrace Julia Gillard, but nothing to assist desperate farmers.
I have been re-reading Anne Baxter's Intermission.
The brilliant actress and granddaughter of Frank Lloyd Wright wrestled with the Australian inland from a background of US and European privilege.
She had married an American who bought land at Esperance in Western Australia and Gloucester.
She once discussed her struggles with "the Australian bush" over lunch with English-born writer Patrick White in Sydney.
As she left, White said "but didn't you know ? Australia doesn't like people".
She finishes that chapter with a very sober paragraph: "To me there was pathos and effrontery in the extraordinary efforts expended on much of that worn down land. The land, the land, the "man on the land". They said it in pubs, in political harangues, in newspapers and in magazines. I'd begun to think that one lived in America, in Europe or in Afghanistan but on Australia".
Are we repeating the pattern set for tens of thousands of years? "Move on" when the feed fails.
Don't dig your feet into what passes for soil. Don't try and enrich that soil, burn what is on it, flog the green shoots and move on to the coast as the kangaroos and original owners re-claim the inland.
