We were standing on a dusty hill in Navigators, 10 kilometres south-east of Ballarat, the thirsty surrounds of which bore the broken promise of a La Nina spell.
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In the distance, through the haze of the heat, stood two lone sheep - as still as statues - looking haughtily askance at the stranger on their turf. Notwithstanding the sheep's probing stare, a tranquillity draped the vast stretch of farmland around us - a tranquillity pierced only by the landscape's punishing dryness and the premonitory echo of a persistent northerly.
The beauty and tragedy of the place was, at once, almost tangible - you could feel it. Looking around, it was hard to fathom we were living in the age of climate breakdown; that there, on our immediate horizon, all manner of catastrophe lay in wait.
"I didn't realise until about 10 years ago how much I missed the scene of the horizon - how important it is to me," grazier Peter Crawford said, breaking my train of thought, as he took stock of the property he'd purchased four years ago.
"It's a bit like the pandemic these days with people who get frantic about no social contact," the 72-year-old went on to say. "Well, I don't need that; all I need is a horizon - it brightens me up."
Taken in isolation, these words summon an image of a man who, perhaps like his sheep, is content with solitude and a life devoid of human connection. Yet it's an impression which is, at best, partial.
Crawford, whose dialogue was suffused with the languorous, rural inflection of the western district, hails from a bygone era; one in which community spirit was, by rights, assigned a leading role. That afternoon, he regaled me of stories of times past where public assets - hospitals, parks or sporting grounds - were imbued with a sense of civic pride, neither possible without the other.
"At school we used to collect eggs for the hospital," he told me. "And there were always community working-bees or projects, where people would get together to raise money for different things."
"People back then weren't insular; they didn't necessarily think first about what's in it for them."
Precisely when that cultivated sense of community receded, making way for the primacy of self, wasn't immediately obvious. What seemed clearer - as Crawford alluded to - was that the pandemic, for all its woe, had at least exposed the specious trappings of that enduring neoliberal lie: that society does not exist.
Crawford, a fifth-generation farmer, described our habitual short-termism as an affliction on society, something that is, and always has been, an anathema to most farmers.
"A real farmer, a real grazier, plans for five or six generations," he said. "Most farmers aren't there for themselves or this generation; they're constantly planning for the future - they don't just let things happen."
The youngest of three sons, Crawford grew up on the open plains of a Dunkeld farm acquired by his forebears in 1862, now in the hands of his nephew. The landscape of the childhood he described was coloured by the ethics of hard work and progress, with an emphasis on the intergenerational bonds of common humanity - those which necessarily traverse the divides of race and class.
His father, by all accounts, was something of a pioneer in the Hamilton farming district.
"When I was so high," Crawford said, motioning about one metre, "my father became probably the first [farmer] in the area to plant a mile of trees - that was 1955."
"He did that for years and kept up with all the developments of farming, pasture and cropping, same as my brother when he took over.
"And if I can help the environment in any way I can, I will," he added.
By this point, Crawford and I had made our way down that sunburnt hill, which slowly descended into a flat alongside which a parched, winter creek ran. On either side of the creek stood tall native trees, whose broad, low-hanging charcoal and white branches enveloped the brood of black and brown lowline cows beneath them.
Trees, Crawford told me, gesturing to those nearest to us, serve a dual environmental purpose on farms in the dry, summer months. On the one hand, they provide welcome shelter to the stock, but they also shield the pasture from the extremities of the heat.
"You can see that it's green here," he said, pointing to the grass around us. "Whereas up there it's drier and brown; so, shade helps keep the feed consistent."
"It was once thought to be more productive to clear land, but people came to realise that trees actually help the farmland."
In more recent years, as farmers have reckoned with the environmental realities of climate change, different innovations in sustainable agricultural have begun to eclipse traditional farming methods.
Some farmers, for instance, have taken to breeding cattle that release lower levels of methane, while others have retreated from the use of pesticides and instead invested in the microbial diversity of their soil, recognising the correlation between soil health and crop productivity.
"Some people might regard that technology as harebrain or alternative, hippy technology," Crawford told me. "But I think it's alternative technology that's going to be used by everyone in the future," he added, after a long pause.
"There'll always be some who will keep clearing trees and using fertilisers over everything so they can get a crop in; well, I don't think that's the way."
Not that transition is necessarily without difficulty, as Crawford knows. In the 1980s, the lack of income generated on his own farm in Hamilton compelled him to sell up and channel what remaining funds he had into a building business which specialised in recycled, local materials. In time, that same business saw Crawford relocate his family to Ballarat.
"We were making 50 dollars a week on the farm," Crawford said. "To support my family, I had to sell, but I think if I knew what I know about animals now, I may not have left the farm."
When pressed on his meaning, he explained he'd since learnt sheep and cattle shared an ingrained, almost communal instinct to defend their most vulnerable - an instinct which seemed hardwired to their long-term survival as a species.
"I'd always thought sheep were stupid, but they're not; they're the same as these cows," he said, as he patted one by the name of Qumundi. To make the point, he recalled a recent incident on the property where his cattle, upon sighting a dog unknown to them in the distance, charged at the dog in lockstep in a bid to safeguard their young.
"This is what understanding animals do," Crawford quipped. "They protect each other."
Viewed that way, the more profound insight Crawford took from his cows' plucky display was a realisation that his livestock were not so wholly different to himself or his forebears - they can and do act in unison with a view to their future descendants.
It was, of course, also a reminder of community - those bonds of fellowship that contained echoes of Crawford's past. To his mind, community - that mentality of understanding that those who come after us will feel pain, fear, hope and anguish in the same way we do - was something that needed to reclaim its rightful place in the history of our present moment.
The latest IPCC assessment, released Monday, bears this out. Though we've reached the point of no return, we still have but a small window of opportunity to avoid the worst of catastrophic outcomes - death.
"Climate change deniers often say, 'the planet will survive', which is true - it will survive," Crawford told me. "But without community, people will not - they will die out."
It's a stark insight, but one I realised explained Crawford's love of the horizon. After all, horizons, much like periods of great social upheaval, have long held an epochal association. Throughout the ages they have denoted the dividing line between the shackles of the present moment and the redemptive promise of the future.
Climate change is, on any view, the great moral drama of our time, one to which we all play a part. But it's also a timed test. The question is, will we have the moral insight and heroic fortitude of Crawford's and his forebears' generations to rewrite the final act.
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