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No. You only need look at the map of Australian vegetation as it was 200 years ago to instantly disprove this proposition. Vegetation patterns are directly related to climate, soil, topography and evolutionary history. This could not be the case if Aboriginal use of fire had had any impact. 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. The forests grow where they do now just as they did in the past. Changes in distribution of vegetation over time are directly related to climatic changes. There is also no evidence that the form of vegetation in a particular area is related to use of fire. The early reports of occasional landscapes described as 'park-like', so important in the fire-stick farming idea, have no bearing on it. Early European observers of Australia knew that Aborigines didn't practise agriculture. Here was the only continent on which no one practised agriculture. This being the case, the early observers knew that what they would be seeing as they explored was a wilderness of forests with thick undergrowth. There was no other alternative possible, if people didn't clear land it was wilderness. They were therefore surprised, and found it noteworthy, when they came across areas that had less undergrowth and apparently more widely spaced trees. Such reports were therefore accentuated (and the normal landscape ignored), and accentuated too because the colonists were farmers and were looking for areas to pasture sheep and grow crops. Observers had no way of knowing that variations in soils, topography and climate could cause significant variations in Australia without human intervention. Nor did they usually know whether a fire might have influenced the landscape some years before, nor, if it had, how that fire had started. It is far less excusable for writers 200 years later to also expect to see thick forest everywhere and to ignore all the descriptions of non-parklike conditions. There is also a propensity to take not just observations by early nineteenth century observers at face value, without any attempt to establish what they could have observed and what they actually were observing and whether they had an agenda which influenced what was reported, but also their theories about what was going on. There is an amazing trust in the observations and ideas of untrained observers, writing long before the development of modern science or anthropology, and who were dealing with a complex society which is only now, after some 50 years of sophisticated observations, beginning to be understood.
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