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
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.
"You are a person of some interest,one comes to you and takes strange gain away." (Pound)
"I find that I can have no enjoyment in the world but the continual drinking of knowledge. I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good for the world." (Keats)
"nothing startles me beyond the moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights - or if a sparrow come before my window I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel." (Keats)