Inevitably, a well-worn political catch-cry appeared in media comments: if the government was putting the rural sector out of production, instead of supporting it, how could Australian farmers continue to ‘feed the world'? John Cobb described the purchase as an ‘anti-rural-Australia act'. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the local newsagent was ‘petrified' for the future of the town. Their scaremongering spread fear in a community already doing it tough. īourke shire councillors, vying for re-election in the weeks following the purchase, staged a rally protesting against the government's actions. According to Cobb, the outback community of Bourke, sixty kilometres upstream from Toorale, was ‘sacrificed to the environmental green-shoe brigade' by a government that ‘couldn't care less about the future of regional Australia'. The federal government has taken Toorale's water entitlements, and NSW National Parks is managing the 91,000 hectares of land. Toorale, at the junction of the Warrego and Darling rivers, is conspicuous for its squattocracy and corporate-farming heritage, as well as for being the place where Henry Lawson spent a month working as a rouseabout in 1892. ‘Why has the Rudd Government declared war on the town of Bourke?' he asked, after the British-owned Clyde Agriculture sold the iconic Toorale Station to the federal and New South Wales governments in 2008.

Take the National Party's John Cobb, the Shadow Minister for Agriculture. Speaking to people like Neville, and wandering through the country, offers the chance for a better understanding of rural place, agriculture and the environment than could ever be achieved by listening to headline-grabbing lobbyists, politicians and agro-industrial input suppliers – those who say they speak for and want to improve the lot of farmers and rural communities, but who are motivated by a desire for votes and money, and who are working on a national or international scale, not an ecological or bioregional one. Over the past two years, I have been travelling the Macquarie Marshes and Barwon-Darling country, researching the history of agricultural and conservation science. We'd also planned to fit in some time walking the floodplains, as well as hiking and camping at Mt Gundabooka National Park. I met Neville two years ago, when a colleague and I drove to Bourke to undertake research in the library's local-history collection. He's reflective, not reactionary, and this is probably why the good journalists often find their way to him when they report from a town that has long represented the quintessential ‘rural' locale in the Australian popular imagination. He's elderly, softly spoken, with a slight western drawl, and takes any opportunity to make a self-deprecating aside about his farming expertise. He lives where he farms, on the Darling River near Bourke, and this alone tends to set him apart. He's not American or British, and neither is his business. He doesn't have time for cotton-industry PR, and he doesn't talk fast. He doesn't hold a university degree, nor does he command tens of thousands of hectares. NEVILLE SIMPSON IS not your typical cotton farmer.

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