Green thought, in a green shade,

Green views

The Watermelon Blog Green on the outside, social justice inside

"We can do better" (Kennedy)

Richest fluency

"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body." Walt Whitman

The Goodies

good television

good movies

good books

good poetry

more good books

good songs

good children

good boys

good people

good leaders

Try a lucky dip:

"Well it looks to me as if the whole heaven of the world is on fire now."

"landscape that had been farmed for 2000 years or more but had retained some biodiversity and variety."

"So now there are calls for children in schools to be only taught that nuclear power is good for you."

"One of those human-animal hybrids reared its head again the other day and said "Moooo"."

"If you want people to be always under control then simply abolish the concept of "private", and it will get rid of those silly philosophical arguments between teenagers on the meaning of life and the concept of identity."

"if you had to choose one person who is most responsible for the failure of governments, particularly the American and Australian governments, to act over the last critical ten years, Rupert Murdoch is your man."

"Now, for the first time we have a literally Earth-changing event, the effects of CO2 increase on the climate of the whole planet."

"The falseness of this argument is easy to spot because it is proposed by people who have never ever conceded that anything else Aborigines did was of any value."

"Lesser humans may look on aghast, as elections are fixed, opposition parties destroyed one way or another, lies told, courts and the boards of public bodies stacked with zealots, the media starved of information, laws broken, constitutions ignored, democracy trashed."

"In protests everywhere young people literally hug trees, believing, it seems, that there is some quality to a tree which allows a mystical connection with humans."

"Wow, I thought, Peter Costello has looked up from his "tax breaks for the rich spreadsheet" for a moment and smelled the carbon dioxide."

"the inability to do a Google search and instantly find an answer to a question you are pretending doesn't have an answer sure makes even a simple country boy put one flagellum with another flagellum to make three flagellae."

"these religious fundamentalists who spread the enormously damaging creationist propaganda, inflicting a kind of mental terrorism on schools, should also be on "no fly lists"."

"While most of us saw the dangers ahead for the only planet we can live on, representatives of the nuclear power industry, and their tame scientists, saw only a marketing opportunity."

"The ones who could express that love of country through creating art were lucky, but the others who came along to see it were part of that same community spirit."

"I wonder if John Howard has phoned any of his old high school teachers to say thank you for an Australian education?"

"The problem does not lie with the Iraqi people but with the fact that they have been invaded and occupied."

"before you can say "red sky at night, shepherd's delight", there will be the usual nonsensical calls for more and more dams to be built, or for rivers to be turned inland."

"I was again struck with the reality of how badly served are farmers by the leaders of the farmers' organisations."

"They are people who saw Orwells "1984" not as a warning but as a manual."

"Such approaches would certainly be much more productive, and much less damaging than a mistaken belief in the value and benign nature of "prescribed burning"."

"The strong element of belief is dangerous in science as in religion because it prevents people seeing things."

"Will the minister be happy when only 15 percent of Australians accept that humans evolved on this planet, or does he have a still lower figure in mind?"

"well, someone is going to make money out of the destruction of the planet and it might as well be me."

"The combination of course let Pauline Hanson and her shadowy backers and wacky supporters off the leash and the rest is history."

"It would be hard to see any politician arguing against the need for big business to be more accountable to the community that supports it."

"Add into the mix the shockjocks on radio and television shamelessly promoting prejudice and whipping up emotions."

"brown snake bodies wrapped around them."

"Grasslands grow where they do because of combinations such as poor soils, flat lands, high temperatures and low rainfall, they are not areas where Aboriginal burning removed forests."

"It is also often claimed that Australian ecosystems are adapted to fire. This is a bit like saying that lawns are adapted to lawnmowers."

"The business community, with the governments help, is about to send us back to those horse and buggy days of employers ruling the world."

"All care will be taken, they promise, qualified pharmacists running them."

"How could you let them subsume the economy and international interests of Australia into the interests of the Republican Party of the USA"

"but where are my slippers"

"then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies."

"I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators."

"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey"

"a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party."

"the evening star is coming."

"You might at least try to avoid the proposition that if there is a perceived conflict between business and "the environment" that there is no question but that the thing which goes is the environment."

"There may well be people who have a spiritual dimension to their feelings about forests, just as there are people who have a spiritual dimension to feelings about V8 cars or Collingwood football."

" the only thing the market is good at, the only thing it is really for, is taking care of business, and it does that very well."

" let us not go rushing into this religious stuff until we see if there is anything science can't explain."

" Remember Iraq. Remember the flowers that weren't strewn on the streets for the invading armies."
" we have to work with the effects of the "progress" that has been made since Ned Ludd and his merry band were smashing the new fangled weaving machines. Go Ned, I want to say."

" Hard to tell how long the eruptions of the religion plague will last, and what damage they will do."

" Greenhouse temperature rise is a massive refutation of the proposition that the world should be run by businessmen for businessmen."

" We are pulling up the drawbridge against the peasants."

" People in areas prone to bushfires are usually advised to develop an escape plan or action plan which includes having, in easily transportable form, the core possessions you want to survive."

" most of our members were probably Methodists, it being as hard to imagine teetotal Catholics and Anglicans as it was to imagine a drunken Methodist."

" he is playing , like the grasshopper, in the warm sun of high resource prices and plenty of tourists, what happens when the prices collapse and winter comes and the tourists do not?"

" as after walking all that way I think I am capable of looking after myself."

" They can be brought out onto the streets to have some rather odd laws three thousand years old put into their courthouses."

Strange

Bedfellows

John Howard

Kevin Rudd

Al Gore

George Bush

Malcolm Turnbull

Leon Trotsky

Thomas Huxley

Oliver Goldsmith

Kurt Vonnegut

Tony Blair

Samuel Pepys

Winston Churchill

Peter Costello

Joan of Arc

Fidel Castro

Sarah Williams

Peter Beattie

Ned Ludd

De-Anne Kelly

Barack Obama

Kylie Minogue

Tony Abbott

Alexander Downer

Barbaro

Sam Kekovich

Alan Bennett

Osama bin Laden

Rupert Murdoch

George Lakoff

Bjorn Lomborg

Adolf Hitler

Ayn Rand

George Orwell

Julia Butterfly Hill

Saddam Hussein

James Carville

Charles Darwin

Philip Cooney

Jacky Kelly

Irshad Manji

James Lovelock

Bob Hawke

Brendon Nelson

Barnaby Joyce

Robert Menzies

Robert Tressell

Slim Dusty

Noel Coward

Samuel Johnson

Walt Whitman

Edmund Hillary

Robert Byrd

Phillip Adams

Alisa Camplin

Arnold Schwarzeneger

Blogger's Cut

Best slices from the watermelon

Future to the back

Ox power

Whacko Texas

Ticked off

Inhaling the Sixties

God unwilling

Bakers Oven 5

Game over

All change for

Dog bites man

Whale tears

Flowers for bosses

Curtin spinning

Gotta love it

Dodgy intelligence

A glass darkly

Truth and consequences

Media-ocrity

Cant get me Im part of the society

Growing like woody weeds in the nanny state

Opened up a landscape

Chapter 9
‘The lightening was incessant during the whole night [of 6 February 1788] ... About 12 o’clock in the night one severe flash of lightening struck a very large tree in the centre of the camp ... The severity of the lightening on this and the two preceding nights leave no room to doubt but many of the trees which appear burnt up to the tops of them were the effect of lightening.’ (Bowes [1788] 1962:59)

‘Near this we saw a tree in flames [on 25 April 1788], without the least appearance of any natives; from which we suspected that it had been set on fire by lightning ... every part of the country, though the most inaccessible and rock, appeared as if, at certain times of the year, it had been all on fire. Indeed in many parts we met with very large trees, the trunks of which and branches were evidently rent, and demolished by lightning.’ (White [1788] 1962:126)

From my window I see a park-like scene in the distance, trees idyllically scattered across a neighbour’s paddock. It is a park created by axe and saw, 150 years ago, clearing thousands of trees from an area where Aborigines had lived for 50,000 years. Less than one tree in a hundred, perhaps less than one in a thousand, that was there at the time of white settlement is there now. It is a pattern repeated all over Australia. Fire doesn’t create parkland, clearing creates parkland, and Aborigines weren’t in the business of clearing trees.

As I write this, Australia, from Gippsland to the west, has been burning again. Over the Christmas break I watched two major bushfires, one to the west of the house, one to the east. Both were probably started by lightning, as were most of the dozens of fires around New South Wales. The major Gippsland fire may have started from an escaped campfire, a few other fires were probably deliberately lit.

Australia was burning before the people came, and indeed it is plausibly suggested that it was the smoke from bushfires that brought the first Aboriginal people to the northern shores. It has always been a bit of a puzzle about the first arrivals, because the water gap is so great that there is no land on the horizon to guide travellers. It could be that people came accidentally, blown away in a storm and finishing up on strange shores, but this seems a flimsy and unlikely way to colonise a continent. For the colonisation to be purposeful and deliberate and therefore include enough people to ensure success, there needed to be some way to know that Australia was here, waiting for its first people. Bushfires, with columns of smoke extending miles high would provide that aiming point — the continent was signalling.

But there may even be more to it than this. The first people came from a region where fire generally meant people, although it could mean volcano. It may be that people were aiming at what they thought was a volcanic eruption, but it seems much more likely that they thought that they were going to another land which had people. In the wet tropics, the idea that there could be a whole empty continent in which fires burned regularly as a part of a natural cycle, would have seemed impossible. After the first landing, the first people may well have been puzzled to discover that they had come to an empty land. The fire was on but there was no one home. It was a mistake which would continue to be made again and again by later visitors to these shores, and finally by some archaeologists. The concept that fire means people was as firmly ingrained in sailors and colonists from the cold damp lands of Western Europe as it was in the first settlers from the warm damp lands of South East Asia 50,000 years ago.

As I write this, firefighters all over eastern Australia are trying to contain fires started almost entirely by a series of lightning strikes during a period of electrical storms with little accompanying rain, and a very dry late spring. The smoke from the fires is clearly visible from the air, and would be clearly visible from the sea, from the decks of sailing ships full of intrepid explorers if any were still sailing up the eastern seaboard. When eighteenth and nineteenth century explorers and observers write about the smoke from fires, they constantly assumed they were seeing fires lit by humans, and undoubtedly they sometimes were. With the relatively high coastal population, the smoke from campfires, with multiple fires in each camp, would have been very numerous and highly visible. But other fires, lit by lightning, would also have often been observed, and not recognised as being of non-human origin. A UFO, cruising along the coast of Australia, say 500,000 years ago, would also have observed many fires. If fire was a sign of intelligent life in a galaxy far away, the aliens would have assumed that Australia was populated, but it wasn’t, and they would have found some difficulty in asking the kangaroos how the fires had got started.

In recent years some archaeologists have seized on pollen records and ethnography and historical records, to develop a theory that Aboriginal use of fire has greatly altered the Australian environment. From the moment they arrived, it is said, fires swept the country with greatly increased frequency, causing massive changes to the vegetation. This remained the case until after 1788, when the removal of many Aboriginal people from their lands, and the prevention of others from setting fires because of the risk to British property, greatly reduced the frequency of fire. The effect of this, it is said, has been to increase the growth of vegetation and therefore increase the risk of bushfires. It has been a theory seized upon by those who wish to manage the Australian environment by the use of fire in what is called ‘control burning’. It is also a theory which suits farming interests wanting to prevent undergrowth and retain grass, and continue the devastating clearance of trees on the grounds that there are ‘more trees now than there were 200 years ago’. Partly because it is a simple theory, and appealing, and partly because it presents Aboriginal people as ‘fire-stick farmers’, and partly because it suits vested interests, it is a theory endlessly presented as fact not only in the popular media but also in academic literature. People who the public should be able to rely on to cast a critical eye over such theories have simply swallowed and regurgitated it as if it has been engraved in stone and brought down from the mountain. It seems to be the only theory in the social sciences that has been accepted as fact. But it is only a theory, and one with little evidence or substance, particularly when the huge weight of consequences that it carries is taken into account.

The analysis of pollen grains and charcoal fragments has formed a major part of the theory about the effect of Aboriginal use of fire on the Australian environment. The results are presented as if some kind of experiment has been done where the arrival of humans on the continent can be correlated with a change of fire regime. The mistake that has been made is a classic one in science of deciding what the experiment was after you have conducted the tests and got the results. The pollen and charcoal graphs are extremely complex and are the end result of a complex natural sampling process from the environment to the deposit. The graphs produced are very wriggly lines with many peaks and troughs. There is so much variation in a long pollen sequence that significance could be ascribed to many different spots on it. We also don’t know when humans arrived on the continent, nor do we know when they occupied particular parts of the continent. The logic which has been used is to use the pollen record to decide that a particular change at a particular time is the result of human activity, then to use this as proof that humans had arrived at that particular time. It is generally not realised by the public that there is no independent test of this, that is there are no artefacts or other evidence of human arrival in an area when pollen evidence suggests a change has occurred, the theory is simultaneously the proof. The process can lead to absurdities.

When humans did arrive in Australia for the first time as owners and managers of an entire continent, they were given a list of instructions. One of the instructions said, ‘keep an eye on the fire, and if it needs maintaining, maintain it’. The ancient Greeks believed that all matter was composed, in different proportions, of four elements, earth, air, fire, and water. They might, had they known of the existence of other continents, have described continents in the same way. Australia, for the last 25,000 years, and at some earlier times too, is composed mostly of earth, fire and air, with precious little water. Other continents generally have more water and consequently less fire and earth (Antarctica of course is just water and air, or perhaps just air).

It is an equation much like the fire fighters use to assess risk — the fire triangle is fuel, heat, oxygen. The more of any element the bigger the fire. But the fire needs a spark. In Australia (and elsewhere) there are basically two potential sparks (leaving aside impossibly exotic options like volcanoes) — humans and lightning. For most of the millions of years before humans arrived, lightning had kept the home fires burning. Did the arrival of man with his fire sticks make a difference? A one word answer is ‘no’, a two word answer is ‘not really’, but there are longer answers still.

Fire is a good servant but a bad master. In my house, in summer, my nostrils sniff the air for the faintest smell of smoke as avidly as does any horse or dog or kangaroo. I watch for columns of smoke, visualising, again and again, how fire could rush up the hill towards us. But if you can be philosophic about it, fire is a natural part of the Australian environment and has been for millions of years. It is often claimed that plants and animals are actually adapted to fire, evidence of an extraordinarily long period (predating human arrival by millions of years) during which fire has been a more major feature of the Australian environment than that of any other continent, but this is probably not strictly true. Many plants are adapted to the environment in ways which are also valuable in times of fire, and animals are adapted to different habitats, and are therefore suited to different periods of vegetation regrowth following a fire (or following say a cyclone, a flood, or just a tree falling in a forest).

A tree which has the ability to regenerate from roots or lower trunk, when the upper tree dies as a result of being broken off in a storm, or falls over, rotten to the core, will also be able to respond when the upper part is killed by a fire. Seeds adapted to long hot droughts, and requiring a combination of heat and water for germination, will also find a fire (if followed by rain) a good stimulus for growing new seedlings. There does appear to be evidence that chemicals in smoke can help promote growth in plants, but whether this is a direct adaptation to fire, or some incidental effect of some other adaptation is uncertain. But glib statements that Australian plants and animals are adapted to fire should be treated with caution, and indeed it is difficult to see how such an adaptation could evolve.

It is also often claimed that Australian ecosystems are adapted to fire. This is a bit like saying that lawns are adapted to lawnmowers. All ecosystems, all over the world, have succession. This is what maintains the world environment, on average, in a steady state (or did before the irreversible changes, particularly such as those involving extinction and permanent damage to soils, of this century). The classic example beloved of ecologists is the tree falling in a forest. When a tree dies and falls, it leaves a space in the canopy through which direct sunlight can come, perhaps for the first time in a century. Additional moisture can also reached the ground, and is not absorbed by the roots of the tree. Almost immediately, as a result, the thin vegetation of the forest floor will thicken as grasses and herbs and shrubs become vigorous. Tree seedlings, dormant in seeds in the dark conditions, or surviving for a while as stunted seedlings can also begin to grow. Eventually these will begin to crowd each other out, the floor vegetation will reduce, and finally a single tree, the fastest growing species will fill the gap in the canopy again.

More severe disturbance, say from a cyclone, follows the same kind of sequence but on a larger scale. Depending on the climate and whether the disturbance is near the edge or the centre, and its severity, there can be a series of complete ecosystems, running from grassland, through shrubland, woodland, and back to forest. If the original ecosystem is a grassland, then the succession may just run through a series of annual grass species, then perennial species and some other non-grass plants being added to finally produce a highly diverse grassland community.

A fire is just another form of disturbance, and depending upon its severity will depend on where the succession starts from again and how long before it returns to the form it was in before the fire. But this isn’t an adaptation to fire as such, nor have Australian ecosystems evolved in such a way as to require fire to keep them in a particular state. Evolution can’t work like that.

Here is another triangle. The vegetation of a region depends upon soils, climate and topography. The fire regime that can exist in a region depends in turn on the vegetation (although like everything else to do with fire, this is much more complicated than it seems. Topography can also influence fire behaviour, and climate can also influence the likelihood of fire by the relationship between how good the growing season is, and how severe the drying season is that follows). The actual fire regime in a particular place at a particular time depends on the fire triangle — how hot is the weather, how much fuel is there, how windy is it. Before humans arrived, you could have mapped fire regimes (frequency and strength) across Australia over time. The map would have looked remarkably similar (except that it would have shades of red rather than shades of green) to the vegetation map, which in turn looks remarkably similar to the climatic maps.

Over time, from the ancient Mir satellite, you could have seen the fire regime map change across the Australian landscape, depending on whether the climate was going through a wet or a dry phase. But there would have been little or no change in that fire regime map with the arrival of humans 50,000 years ago. No, no, I won’t have that, that doesn’t accord with common sense. Of course there must have been more fire after human arrival, it’s just common sense.

Just as the common sense view is that Australian plants, animals and ecosystems are adapted to fire, rather like the common sense view that the sun goes round the earth, there is a body of opinion that believes that the Australian environment was created by Aboriginal use of fire, over the last 50,000 years. Here is the triumvirate of Norman Tindale, Silvia Hallam, and Rhys Jones, saying superficially different things, but really saying the same thing.

Rhys Jones said we need to take a hard look at any ecological change in the last 30,000 years and postulate a natural cause only if human causation can be eliminated. Norman Tindale said ‘true primaeval forest may be far less common in Australia than is generally realised’. Silvia Hallam said ‘these few Aborigines had opened up a landscape (my emphasis) in which it was possible for Europeans to move around, to pasture their flocks, to find good soils for agriculture .. The European communities inherited the possibilities of settlement and land-use from the Aboriginal communities.’ She further quotes an ‘empire builder’ of exactly 150 years ago, J.C. Byrne ‘But as they have been passing from creation they have performed their allotted task; and the fires of the dark child of the forest have cleared the soil, the hills and the valleys of the superabundant scrub and timber that covered the country and presented a bar to its occupation. Now, prepared by the hands of the lowest race in the scale of humanity ... the soil of these extensive regions is ready to receive the virgin impressions of civilised man ...’ (interesting that 150 years later, almost identical sentiments are being expressed by those bent on converting native title back to terra nullius, and completing the unfinished business of the empire builders).

We will concentrate on Silvia Hallam here, because the two men get a guernsey elsewhere, and her important work has received little attention. The guts of it is this. Aborigines regularly burned the bush. In doing so they kept pushing the ecosystems back to an earlier successional stage, rather in the way that mowing grass maintains it as a lawn. In the case of forests and woodland, such burning had a number of effects. It reduced the number of trees in a given area (presumably both by killing existing trees and preventing regrowth, though I don’t know that this has been spelled out) and stopped a shrub layer developing. As a result there was a greater growth of grass than there would otherwise have been, and the burning maintained this grass to in an early successional stage so it was good for herbivores. The motive for this was that Aborigines would then be able to be more successful in hunting (as a result of the greater number of kangaroos). It is also believed that more useful plants were encouraged to grow.

This idyllic state continued for many thousands of years. When Europeans arrived in 1788 they were stunned to see the ‘park-like’ Australian environment everywhere, and quickly took advantage of it, with very little effort, to graze sheep and cattle. The irony was that the maintenance of an environment fit for hunter-gatherers had also unknowingly been the maintenance of conditions ripe for invasion by pastoralists.

Now this is a lovely idea, a kind of Dreamtime story which ought to be true. It ought to be true in the same way that the worlds in the movies directed by Stephen Spielberg ought to be true, or those created in the books by Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams.

When the redcoats landed at Sydney Cove in 1788 they saw what they believed to be wilderness. It was disturbing to live in a wilderness, if you had grown up to believe that nature was meant to be tamed, and the manicured landscapes, with long histories of human modification, were the way the environment was meant to be. This sense of being disturbed by an untamed landscape has permeated the Australian psyche ever since. My grandfather Charles Henry Young felt it, trying to clear giant trees with axes in the Margaret River area of SW Western Australia in 1929, as much as any other explorers or farmers before or since. The land needed to be cleared, turned into something like parkland, with grand old spreading trees dotted here and there among lush green grass.

What Tindale, Hallam and Jones were saying was that the Australian landscape was a managed landscape, created over many thousands of years. But ironically, because both Aboriginal people and their actions had been largely invisible to Europeans, the managed landscape of 1788 had been allowed to turn into wilderness. Paradise had been lost, and the only way to get it back was to do as the Aborigines had done and burn the bush regularly. It is an argument resurrected every time there is a bushfire everywhere. Fire is a part of the fear of the Australian wilderness, and it must be used to control the environment for people, rather in the way people want to remove sharks from the sea.

But there is precious little sign of a lost paradise in the early writings, unless they are read with extremely flame-coloured glasses.

Sydney Cove 1788 could and should be the ideal setting for the movie (Pleistocene Parkland) as directed by Silvia Hallam.

‘Morning Governor Phillip’ ‘Morning Captain Tench. I was just thinking what a lovely morning it was to found a new civilisation in the southern seas.’ ‘Yes Governor. And what an extraordinarily good spot. The whole of this world class harbour already surrounded by parkland.’ ‘I agree. Look, over there we can put Government House, just needs an entrance drive for the carriages of guests, and we can have marvellous garden parties on the grass among those widely spaced trees.’ ‘Yes, and if you look further, there are the Botanic Gardens, just need a few beds of petunias and they are away with a tourist attraction at little cost.’ ‘Now we are in the realm of fantasy Watkin, who on earth will sail for 9 months to see gum trees and koalas, the Japanese? But seriously, we need to feed this motley crew of likely lads and lasses. If you will just arrange for the sheep and cattle to be dropped over there they will find instant pasture and the odd shady tree. Should have lamb chops for that first garden party in no time.’ ‘Right you are sir. Isn’t it odd that the natives we glimpse occasionally in the distance didn’t develop agriculture in an ideal setting like this. Anyone would think they were happy to just prepare the scene for people from a higher civilisation. Maybe in two hundred years time they will be protesting in that park over there with masses of Aboriginal flags.’ ‘You are in a droll mood today Watkin. There will never be another flag raised in Australia but the British flag, I can guarantee that right now. All ashore.’

All fantasy of course (no one would believe that the British flag would really still be flying!). The reality was of thick forest all around the harbour. The illustrations show this, and the real words of the players (lovingly compiled by John Cobley in the wonderful account of the first year of the colony, Sydney Cove 1788, a work that should be better known) paint a vivid picture.

27 January 1788 — ‘full of trees which will take some time to clear away.’ January 1788 — ‘it is surprising such large trees should find sufficient nourishment, but the soil between the rocks is good, and the summits of the rocks, as well as the whole country round us, with few exceptions are covered with trees, most of which are so large that the removing them off the ground after they are cut down is the greatest part of the labour ... there are some parts of this harbour where the trees stand at a considerable distance from each other.’ 3 February 1788 — ‘About 4 mile higher than where the ship lay, the country was open and improved the farther we went up and in most places not any underwood — grass very long.’ February 1788 — ‘By the end of the month, the stock which had been landed on the east point of Sydney Cove had eaten all the grass there.’ 20 March 1788 — ‘The other escaped through a thick brush which the natives don’t like to go into.’ 15 April 1788 — ‘we got into an immense wood, the trees of which were very high and large, and a considerable distance apart, with little under or brush wood. The ground was not very good, although it produced a luxuriant coat of a kind of sour grass growing in tufts or bushes, which, at some distance, had the appearance of a meadow land, and might be mistaken for it by superficial examiners.’ 17 April 1788 — ‘Mr Ball found all the country he crossed to be a jumble of rocks and thick woods, except one small spot.’ 22 April 1788 — ‘we proceeded for a mile or two, through a part well covered with enormous trees, free from under-wood. We then reached a thicket of brush-wood, which we found so impervious, as to oblige us to return.’ 24 April 1788 — ‘We proceeded to trace the river or small arm of the sea. The banks of it were now pleasant, the trees immensely large, and at a considerable distance from each other; and the land around us flat, and rather low, and well covered with the kind of grass just mentioned.’ 25 April 1788 — ‘The country around this spot was much clearer of underwood than that which we had passed during the day. The trees around us were immensely large.’ 26 April 1788 — ‘well wooded, and covered with long sour grass, growing in tufts.’ April 1788 — ‘The number of sheep which were landed in this country were considerably diminished; they were of necessity placed on ground, and compelled to feed on grass, that had never been exposed to air or sun, and consequently did not agree with them.’ 14 May 1788 — ‘The sides of this arm [of the harbour] are formed by gentle slopes, which are green to the water’s edge. The trees are small, and grow almost in regular rows, so that, together with the evenness of the land for a considerable extent, it resembles a beautiful park.’ (at last, at last!) 28 May 1788 — ‘We then had to ascend a steep rocky hill, thickly covered with brushwood’ July 1788 — ‘The natural grass was thin, and very few of the sheep brought from the Cape of Good Hope remained.’ 23 August 1788 — ‘This, like every other part of the country we have seen, has a very indifferent aspect ... the coast indeed is very pleasant, and tolerably clear of wood.’ 24 August 1788 — ‘The major part of them were sitting in the long grass a little inland.’ 28 September 1788 — ‘though the soil is in general a light sandy soil, it is, I believe, as good as what is commonly found near the sea-coast in other parts of the world. The great inconvenience we find is from the rocks and the labour of clearing away the woods which surround us, and which are mostly gum-trees of a very large size ... It is the rank grass under the trees which has destroyed [the sheep, only 1 of 70 surviving by now].’

I have quoted from these observations at some length to give an impressionistic view of the environment of Sydney Cove in 1788. It is not the picture of an environment created by fire-stick farming. The loss of the sheep, not an auspicious start for the world’s greatest sheep nation, helplessly watching them die one by one over a nine month period, must have been heartbreaking. They couldn’t survive just on the grass, the only ones that did were the ones that had supplementary feeding around the tents.

Almost everywhere you looked the trees were old growth and there were masses of them, standing shoulder to shoulder like a marine guard. There was thick undergrowth and long lank grass, not the signs of country recently and systematically burnt. Occasionally they found relatively open areas, along arms of the harbour, or where there were particular soil types, or a particular topography. It may be that some of the small relatively open areas had been burnt some years previously. Certainly the exploring parties saw fire. They saw trees burning that had clearly been struck by lightning, and they saw trees burning that had been occupied by possums, where Aborigines had lit a fire at the base to smoke them out. They also found abandoned camp fires. Worgan recorded (on 28 May 1788) a fire burning in ‘healthy brushwood’. He couldn’t understand why Aborigines would have done this deliberately, if they had, but the ‘wind was blowing very fresh today, and perhaps this may favour their designs, if they had any at all, in burning this stuff ... whenever the wind blows strong, there are a number of these kinds of fires about the country. I have been induced to impute them to accident, from the natives conveying lighted touchwood about the country with them’. He thought ‘their being so careful of preserving fire as long as they can seem to imply that the producing of it is a work of great labour to them, for they even carry these lighted sticks in the bottom of their canoes.’

It is surprising (given the fire-stick farming theory) to find how little emphasis there is on fire around Sydney Cove, in the observations of the first few years. Apart from Worgan, there seems to be only Lieutenant Ball who had remarked (by 29 April 1788) that ‘every part of the country, though the most inaccessible and rocky, appeared as if, at certain times of the year, it had been all on fire.’ Phillip confirmed this observation and was later to apparently expand on it when he noted, in February 1790 (and my keyboard melts as I transcribe his words), ‘my intentions of turning swine into the woods to breed there have been prevented by the natives so frequently setting fire to the country’. But these are generalisations, and not supported by the observations they stem from. And most significantly, the vegetation which was observed, briefly, in its natural state around Sydney Cove, was not vegetation which had been much influenced by fire at all. It had certainly not been burnt in a way required by the fire-stick farming model.

Untold masses of trees were removed from the colony in the first year. Trees were removed to make living space, but also for building materials, roofing materials, fencing, bridges and firewood. Extra carpenters were called for at one stage to try to get people out of tents and into buildings, and some massive buildings were being constructed. Indeed at one stage, suddenly realising that the clearing was going too far, Phillip declared a reservation — ‘The run of water that supplied the settlement was observed to be only a drain from a swamp at the head of it; to protect it, therefore, as much as possible from the sun, an order was given out, forbidding the cutting down of any trees within fifty feet of the run.’ It was the first ‘National Park’ declared in Australia, and symbolically it had to be declared to prevent further environmental degradation as a result of over enthusiastic tree felling, within two months of the colony arriving. Every day there seems to have been tree felling activity, and by the end of the first year, a visitor not realising the extraordinary industry with which the task of clearing had been attacked (even the roots of trees were grubbed out) might well think that the normal environment of this landscape was park like. It is the first of many examples, both actual and symbolic, where European views of the landscape have masked Aboriginal ones.

But how have these European views come into being?

Opened up a landscape
fire

25 December 2005
Category History Conquerors
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