A sun-scorched sign at the entrance to Birdsville informs visitors the town’s population is 115 – plus or minus 7,000 people.
The hordes of visitors who will flock to the far-flung town this week for its iconic horse races accounts for the numerical equivocation.
This annual event keeps Birdsville on the map, but such an influx of people in so remote a place creates its logistical crunches. The line for petrol and diesel will snake its way out of town and grocery shelves in the roadhouse stripped like pasture before a plague of locusts.
Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, for a town that is a gateway to the Simpson Desert, water will flow freely – Birdsville perches atop the Great Artesian Basin, one of the largest underground water sources in the world.
But one necessity can’t be tapped into, stockpiled or sustained by market forces throughout a scorching summer from which even locals will flee for weeks at a time: sufficient shelter.
And so, to accommodate many of its visitors, the town will rely on an age-old custom, repurposed for the modern day.
A makeshift town of swags, tents and caravans will spring up on a tract of land that encompasses the town: the Birdsville common.
These are no bucolic meadows grazed by the household cows of peasants. Here emus trot upon the martian red rocks of the gibber plains, willy-willys whir through salt pans and coolibahs spread their branches above the chalky water of the Diamantina River.
And, yet, the commons of the outback served much the same purpose as those codified in England eight centuries ago in the Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest.
Don Rowlands remembers when it was goats, not tourists, that roamed the 1,192-hectare town common.
“This town was raised on goat milk and goat meat,” the Wangkangurru Yarluyandi elder says. “All these little outback towns were. Bedourie, Windorah, Boulia, Birdsville.”
In the era before refrigerators and freight trucks, traditional owners and the frontiers people of the outback had to provide for their own perishables – and required the land to produce. Land, of course, was in no shortage upon the cattle stations that sprawl over tracts of channel country the size of European nations. But the townsfolk relied upon the common to source their protein.
During the day hundreds of the town’s goats would graze the common in one big mob, Rowlands recalls. And people in town would keep watch “for a ruckus” that might indicate a dingo attack.
“You’d be going about your business, but the goats would always be in your peripheral,” he says.
Then, at night, the goats would trot back, breaking off into smaller groups to seek the shelter of their own homes.
In this way the common and its livestock seeped into the fabric of daily life – Rowland recalls riding “poddy kids” as a boy.
“Sometimes, as a bit of fun, we’d have goat rodeos out there,” he says.
The common was also used to graze horses and droving cattle, and locals will still spell the odd horse among its dunes.
But the common is also put to more contemporary use by the likes of Zara and Tully Burke. The siblings, nine and six respectively, live on the outskirts of town. For them the common is a sprawling back yard. Most weekends you’ll find them riding dirt bikes around barrels and pegs staked out amid the saltbush, which suits mum, Courtney Thomas.
“The wildflowers are beautiful on the town common at the moment, the sand dunes are covered in poached egg daisies and annual yellowtops,” she says. “It’s very lovely living on the fringe of town.”
Today the town common is ostensibly managed by the Diamantina Shire council.
But senior lecturer in geography and planning at Macquarie University, Miriam Williams, says the idea of commons is largely defined by how a space is used and by the people who “common it”.
Land owned privately or by the state, from roadside verges to sports fields to old churches, can and do become commons. The ancient idea, she says, is gaining contemporary traction in the contemporary world.
“There is something really appealing about the idea of commons and commoning,” she says.
“Because it is not about individual wealth, it is actually about our collective wealth and our collective wellbeing and that, the benefit of a property, is shared amongst our community.”
Tyson Yunkaporta, senior lecturer of Indigenous knowledges at Deakin University, says that while the Birdsville common was born from European settler custom, its modern use has some echoes of earlier lore.
“We have areas where we care for each other and we have common areas for ceremony, even between different tribes,” the Aboriginal author and academic says.
“Birdsville races could be seen as a ceremony and a ritual.”
His partner, Megan Kelleher, whose PhD is exploring block chain and Indigenous knowledge systems, is quick to point out the differences.
There is not “the totemically assigned obligation” to care for country that helped Indigenous people avoid what European scholars would name the tragedy of the commons, nor “the deep knowledge of seasonality” accumulated over tens of thousands of years of continual occupation.
“Give them a minute, they’re evolving!” Yunkaporta counters. “They’ve only had 200 years.”
And the Birdsville common continues to change. Gone is the era of the goat. Don Rowlands’ mother-in-law had the last herd, back in the 1970s.
On race weekend, it’s first in best dressed for campers. Some people turn up weeks in advance to get a prime spot on the river.
Council installs rubbish skips and shower blocks temporarily, while an environmental levee added to the races tickets goes towards looking after the common.
And once the crowd deserts the desert, the common remains a place to wander freely and to roll a swag by the banks of the Diamantina.
“Anyone travelling through can rest in this common for a few days before putting back on the track,” Rowlands says.
“It’s just available for anyone and everyone.”
