One State’ Salvation Jane is Another’s Paterson’s Curse!
I took a break today to chop Paterson's curse from around the farmhouse, here in the Victorian scrub. Anyone who has dealt with the stuff will understand why it called is Paterson's curse. It gets into disturbed ground, competes with better plants, produces prodigious quantities of seed and seems remarkably determined to remain wherever you would prefer it not to be.
But while I was chopping I remembered something my father told me long ago. He grew up in South Australia before selling up his sheep farm and moving the family here.
He called it Salvation Jane, as South Australians generally did, and said the name came from drought. When the country dried out and better feed disappeared, this otherwise unwanted plant could help keep sheep alive.
I checked the story when I came back inside. Father was substantially right.
The plant is Echium plantagineum, a Mediterranean introduction that became naturalised in Australia during the nineteenth century. In the eastern states it acquired the ominous name Paterson's curse. South Australians called it Salvation Jane. Old South Australian agricultural accounts explicitly describe it as a drought-resistant grazing plant valued by some pastoralists, while modern botanical sources still note its usefulness as stock feed in drier country.
There is an entire philosophy of pastoral life contained in those two names. Paterson's curse. Salvation Jane. Same plant. The difference is circumstance. That is something people who live entirely in cities can easily forget about agriculture. Nature does not divide itself neatly into useful things and useless things. Much depends upon what has happened this year, what animals you are running, what else is growing and whether rain has fallen.
In a good season Salvation Jane is a pest. It competes with desirable pasture, contaminates crops and hay and spreads with formidable efficiency. Around my farmhouse it is something to chop out before it gets any further. Then the rain stops.
The pasture disappears, the paddocks turn brown and suddenly the plant you cursed in September may be one of the few green things remaining that a sheep can eat. A curse becomes salvation.
There is another twist which makes the story even better. Salvation Jane really can be poisonous. It contains pyrrolizidine alkaloids that can produce cumulative liver damage in livestock. Horses and pigs are particularly susceptible. Sheep and goats are considerably more resistant, and sheep have grazed the plant extensively in Southern Australia. So even "salvation" requires qualification. Too much of your "salvation" can kill you, or at least livestock.
This seems to me an unusually Australian lesson. The history of pastoralism here has always been a history of living close to margins. European agriculture developed in environments where rainfall, although never guaranteed, was considerably more dependable than across much of Australia. The Australian pastoralist learned that the difference between abundance and disaster might be a few inches of rain arriving at the right time.
That produced a particular sort of practical intelligence. You did not necessarily ask whether something was good or bad in the abstract. You asked what use could be made of it under the conditions confronting you now.
A dam containing muddy water is unattractive until every other dam is dry. Scrub that appears useless may become shelter during a storm. An old shed that should have been demolished twenty years ago suddenly becomes valuable when machinery has to be protected. A weed becomes fodder when the grass has gone.
None of this means that weeds cease to be weeds. Salvation Jane became one of Australia's serious pasture weeds for good reason. It crowds out better species, produces enormous quantities of seed and can poison livestock. Agricultural authorities have spent decades trying to control it.
But perhaps the old South Australian name contains more wisdom than the eastern name. "Paterson's curse" gives a final judgment. "Salvation Jane" remembers an exception. And exceptions matter enormously when your livelihood depends upon animals, soil and weather rather than upon abstractions.
There is something else here that strikes me after remembering my father's explanation. Agricultural knowledge was once transmitted in precisely this fashion. A father told a son why a plant had a peculiar name. The son remembered the explanation sixty years later while chopping the same plant beside another farmhouse, in another state.
No textbook was involved. That does not mean every piece of inherited country wisdom was correct. Plenty was not. But much of it represented accumulated observation compressed into stories, sayings and names. "Salvation Jane" carries information. It tells you that however much you dislike this plant today, somebody once had reason to be grateful for it.
The name is almost a miniature oral history of Australian drought. Modern agriculture naturally wants classifications. There are pasture species and weeds, productive plants and invasive plants, things to cultivate and things to eradicate. Administration requires such categories. The paddock has always been less tidy.
Perhaps that is why I like the contradiction between the two names. It captures something larger than botany. Human beings are forever giving permanent moral labels to things encountered under temporary circumstances. Useful. Useless. Friend. Enemy. Success. Failure. Curse. Salvation.
Then circumstances change. What looked useless acquires value. What looked secure disappears. What appeared to be a burden becomes the thing that gets you through the bad season.
The old pastoralist understood this because drought did not permit much ideological rigidity. When sheep were hungry, the question was not whether a plant belonged in somebody's conception of the perfect pasture. The question was whether the sheep could eat it and survive until the rains came. There is a certain humility in that way of looking at the world.
This afternoon I was still chopping Salvation Jane away from the farmhouse. I have no intention of allowing philosophy to persuade me to let it take over the place. But I looked at it slightly differently after remembering my father. Today it was a weed. Once, somewhere in a drought-stricken South Australian paddock, it was salvation. Both statements can be true.
Perhaps that is why the plant has survived not only in Australian soil but in Australian language. We in the eastern states remembered the curse. South Australia remembered the day the curse became useful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echium_plantagineum
https://www.smh.com.au/national/salvation-jane-proves-a-blessing-20040118-gdi6i9.html
