The Biggest Estate on Earth

by Bill Gammage

  Burning every 2–4 years promotes perennial grasslands. In 1788 these were common, which means they got with unbroken regularity the fires they needed. They also carried annuals, bulbs and tubers killed by hot fire, but needing ash to thrive, and cool fires every 2–3 years to open the perennial canopy. No random bushfire could strike that balance, or let such unlike partners flourish so widely. All have declined since 1788.50 Spinifex country supports no food plants until it is burnt, when plants like Desert Raisin appear and fruit prolifically. Fruit production then drops annually until in about 5–8 years, depending on the rain, Spinifex has again smothered the plants.51 Of twelve food plants in the Centre, five need fire, three tolerate it, and four are killed by it. All twelve flourished in 1788, so people managed them with different but adjacent fire regimes over many centuries. Peter Latz concluded that central Australians ‘may have, quite literally, made the country what it is today by their use of fire’.52 Many other plants need particular and distinct fire at the right time and with the right frequency and intensity (ch 3).

  Most curious, these different fires made similar plant patterns across Australia. Crucial as burning was to help plants thrive, something more was going on. Dawson thought the country inland from Port Stephens

  truly beautiful: it was thinly studded with single trees, as if planted for ornament . . . It is impossible therefore to pass through such a country . . . without being perpetually reminded of a gentleman’s park and grounds. Almost every variety of scenery presented itself. The banks of the river on the left of us alternated between steep rocky sides and low meadows: sometimes the river was fringed with patches of underwood (or brush, as it is called) . . . in Australia, the traveller’s road generally lies through woods, which present a distant view of the country before him . . . The first idea is that of an inhabited and improved country, combined with the pleasurable associations of a civilized society.53

  Trees planted as if for ornament, alternating wood and grass, a gentleman’s park, an inhabited and improved country, a civilised land. Much of Australia was like this in 1788. After ‘bush’, a word from southern Africa, the most common word newcomers used about Australia was ‘park’. This is striking, for three reasons. First, ‘park’ was not a word Europeans elsewhere associated with nature in 1788. Until ‘national park’ was coined in the United States much later, a park was man-made. Second, ‘park’ did not mean a public park as today, for few existed in Europe in 1788. It meant parks of the gentry, tastefully arranged private estates financed by people comfortably untroubled by a need to subsist. Third, few today see parks in Australia’s natural landscape. Most use another US word with the opposite meaning: ‘wilderness’, which they imagine is untouched forest, beyond the pale, inhospitable. Farming people think like that.54

  Parks chequered Australia. In New South Wales, south of Parramatta in April 1790 John Hunter ‘walked through a very pleasant tract of country, which, from the distance the trees grew from each other, and the gentle hills and dales, and rising slopes covered with grass, appeared like a vast park’.55 At Bong Bong Lachlan Macquarie named Throsby Park for its ‘very park-like appearance’.56 On the lower Talbragar John Oxley remarked, ‘Many hills and elevated flats were entirely clear of timber, and the whole had a very picturesque and park-like appearance’, and south of Walcha he found ‘the finest open country, or rather park, imaginable: the general quality of the soil excellent’.57 HT Ebsworth stated, ‘Brush Wood is seldom to be seen where the soil is good, the land is lightly timbered, resembling a Gentleman’s park occasionally, but the traveller is soon obliged to lose this idea by finding no Mansion at the end of the scene: He journeys on, as it were, from Park to Park all day’, and near Port Stephens, ‘The hills are everywhere clothed with wood, with constant verdure beneath it: unaccompanied by any Brush or Underwood, so that one is often forcibly reminded of Gentlemen’s pleasure grounds.’58 On the Hastings SA Perry noted, ‘Most of the country . . . resembled extensive parks, the ground being gently undulated—thinly timbered without underwood—the bottoms rich alluvial land, & the whole covered with grass.’59 In 1829 JB Wilson observed, ‘So much has been said of the scenery in New South Wales resembling noble English domains.’60

  It was the same in the other colonies. George Haydon recalled southwest Victoria as ‘Beautiful plains with nothing on them but a luxuriant herbage, gentle rises with scarcely a tree, and all that park-like country . . . just enough wooded without inconveniencing the settler, whilst there is no lack of good timber for every purpose he may require.’61 Near Mt Alexander the bush

  was typical of a great portion of the pastoral lands of Victoria. It consisted of undulating open forest-land, which has often been compared, without exaggeration, to the ordinary park-scenery of an English domain; the only difference which strikes the eye being the dead half-burnt trees lying about. To bring it home to the comprehension of a Londoner, these open forest-lands have very much the appearance of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, presenting natural open glades like the east end of the former.62

  In Tasmania John Hudspeth praised ‘the beautiful and rich valley of Jericho . . . more like a gentleman’s park in England, laid out with taste, than land in its natural state’,63 and George Frankland thought the Hampshire Hills afforded ‘an instance of the beautiful natural decoration of some of our scenery, for that park like ground is entirely in a state of Nature’.64 In Queensland Mitchell called the scenery near St George ‘park-like and most inviting’,65 and JE Dalrymple admired the Valley of Lagoons ‘with its rich grass, lofty gum-trees, and lotus-covered lagoons, till the hills on either side sweeping backwards, the beautiful open forest-ridges opened out in scattered timber, like an English park’.66

  In South Australia JF Bennett described the Mt Barker district as ‘fine undulating country . . . being partly wooded, partly clear . . . more the appearance of an immense park than anything that one would naturally expect to find in the wilds of an uncultivated land’.67 John Morphett wrote, ‘The country from Cape Jervis upwards is very picturesque and generally well timbered, but in the disposition of the trees more like an English park than what we could have imagined to be the character of untrodden wilds.’68 WH Leigh thought the same district ‘a wild but beautiful park, which reminded one of the domain of an English noble’,69 and the overlander Alexander Buchanan considered the west side of the Murray below the Big Bend ‘really most beautiful, like a gentleman’s park all the way. Fine plains and thinly studded with trees. Grass up to the horses’ knees; indeed it was like riding through a ryegrass field.’70

  East of Perth George Moore stated, ‘To the distant eye the country has the appearance of being well wooded, but I should not say it was thickly timbered. In some places there are open plains that resemble well ordered parks.’71 His neighbour William Shaw estimated, ‘the trees [do] not exceed more than eight trees to an acre and [are] laid out by nature in the most park-like scenery’.72 Near Bunbury John Barrow thought ‘the whole country wears the appearance of an English park’.73 In Arnhem Land near the end of a tough journey, Leichhardt could still note that plains ‘which had been burnt some time ago, were now covered with delightful verdure. This, with the dark green belt of trees which marked the meanderings of several creeks, gave to this beautiful country the aspect of a large park.’74

  Parks even dotted arid land. West of the Darling Daniel Brock wrote of Lake Victoria, ‘the banks present nothing but park-like scenery—groups of gum trees most tastefully disposed’,75 and Sturt found ‘a beautiful park-like plain covered with grass, having groups of ornamental trees scattered over it . . . I never saw a more beautiful spot. It was, however, limited in extent, being not more than eight miles in circumference . . . encircled by a line of gum-trees.’76 On Eyre Peninsula Eyre ‘passed through a very pretty grassy and park-like country’.77 North of Glen Helen in the Centre Egerton Warburton observed, ‘The country today has been beautiful, with park-like scenery and splendid grass’,78 and in the west Petermanns
Ernest Giles noted ‘a fine piece of open grassy country—a very park-like piece of scenery . . . natives were burning the country’.79 In even bleaker country north of Lake Eyre, JW Lewis met ‘a plain thickly grassed and studded with fine green gum trees, most park-like in appearance’.8081

  Newcomers were often less flattering in describing Australia (harsh, barren, impenetrable, miserable, useless, sterile, waste), but parks were common and widely distributed. It might seem a small jump to think them man-made as in Europe. In fact the leap was so vast that almost no-one made it. Almost all thought no land in Australia private, and parks natural. To think otherwise required them to see Aborigines as gentry, not shiftless wanderers. That seemed preposterous.

  The parks have gone. Overgrazing had a transforming impact. Parks were exactly what European land hunters wanted, and how heavily they overgrazed them is notorious.82 The land cannot have been so heavily grazed in 1788. As well, 1788’s controlled fire stopped when Europeans arrived. Today’s bushfires devastate, and decimate species which flourished during millennia of Aboriginal burning. In heath near Kiama (NSW), ground parrots needed fire every 3–7 years to balance food and shelter. In 1788 they got this, but after 1788 they got infrequent hot fires, and by 1968 had died out. In the north the same may have happened to the paradise parrot. Since 1788 at least 23 mammal species have become extinct, and since about 1940 almost a third of world mammal extinctions have been in Australia. Recognising how extensive such changes have been, to plants, animals and the land, is crucial to understanding how constant and purposeful 1788 management was.83

  2

  Canvas of a continent

  Some critics assume that early colonial artists romanticised their landscapes, making them inaccurate. Certainly artists like John Glover, Eugen von Guerard and Joseph Lycett squeezed scenes horizontally to fit more in, or embellished foregrounds with romantic but transient detail, but this does not make their landscapes inaccurate. Almost all the scenes reproduced here let me or others pinpoint where the artist sat to draw them.1 A memorable example was when I was edging sideways across a paddock to align features in Lycett’s Lake George (picture 51). Intent on the painting, I stepped unseeing onto stones of the road Joseph Wild’s convicts built in 1820, which Lycett’s foreground depicts. Lycett enlarged foreground rocks and mistook distant cloud shadows for land, but key features are easily identified. Von Guerard’s accuracy is so well known that since the 1960s his 1855 View of Moroit or Tower Hill (Vic) has been used to recreate its vegetation.2 His North-east view from the top of Mount Kosciusko (1866–8) is in fact a northeast view from the top of Mt Townsend, where his rocks are instantly recognisable. I found such accurate depiction so often that if I could not recognise a location I assumed I was in the wrong place.

  Artists like Lewin and Glover (pictures 14, 16) took the trouble to say that their scenes were accurate. About 1825 Augustus Earle painted plains and open forest near Cluny (Tas), and commented that it showed ‘the general appearance of the country in its natural state, perfect park scenery’.3 In 1982–3 Dacre Smyth searched for 51 von Guerard locations and readily found almost all. He commented on ‘how accurate von Guerard usually was in his delineation of the topography. At times I found that even the rocks in his foregrounds were still unmistakeable today.’4

  Others had cause to be accurate. Allan Cunningham (picture 36) was a botanist; Robert Hoddle and Edward Bedwell (pictures 19–20, 58) were surveyors. Lycett painted under the patronage first of commandant James Morrisset at Newcastle, then of Governor Lachlan Macquarie at Sydney. These officials wanted accuracy, to show people at home what Australia was like.

  Tellingly, artists sometimes depict vegetation details we know are correct, but they as newcomers did not. The shoreline tree clumps in Lycett’s Lake George turn out to be eucalypt stands protected from fire by granite outcrops. The small eucalypts, wattles and casuarinas in Glover’s Mills’ Plains regenerate just so after fire; the post-fire regrowth on the foreground eucalypt in his The River Derwent and Hobart Town (1831) is a detail no Englishman could invent. Even later, Fred McCubbin’s Down on his Luck (1895) shows one big fire-scarred eucalypt amid dense wattle and sheoak regeneration, just as you would expect of southeast land released from fire.

  Accuracy is not surprising. Artists were the photographers of their day. Why invent a landscape that viewers might know was false, when the original was so novel? It was safe to embellish a transient foreground, but not the broad span of the land, for along with its people and animals this was a main reason for painting Australia at all.

  If a scene was painted before Europeans changed it, as these scenes were, it can be immensely valuable in showing how Aborigines shaped Australia. It can show where to look and what to see. So do early survey plans. The main thing newcomers looked for in Australia was grass (ch 7). Surveyors were ordered to describe and depict pastoral potential, and they speckled their plans with details of grass, open and dense forest, and sterile land, allowing us to compare vegetation then and now. Many plans plot land now under buildings or farms, but others display dramatic differences in vegetation, most commonly grass in 1788 but trees or scrub now. This provokes a useful question: if trees grow there now, why not then? Paintings and plans reveal other odd plant associations, for example good soil/open forest/no undergrowth. Unnatural but common, this can only have been caused by deliberate and repeated fire.

  The pictures here sample hundreds of illustrations depicting aspects of 1788 management. Pictures 1–12 present plants as historians, recording their past. They show how eucalypts respond in distinctive ways to light (pictures 1–4), drought (pictures 7–8) and fire (pictures 5–9). These characteristics let people use fire to distribute trees in patterns, and so to regulate where animals lived. They also let historians see an Aboriginal presence in early landscape art and on the ground today. Knowing how Australian plants respond to light, drought and fire is invaluable in detecting unnatural plant patterns, hence the effects of controlled fire as distinct from bushfire, and so the presence of Aboriginal management. Pictures 10–12 illustrate the impact of heavy grazing in European times, implying Aboriginal restraints on grazing in 1788. Pictures 1–12 use as examples plants readily recognisable in colonial art: principally eucalypts, but also acacias and Kangaroo Grass.

  Pictures 1–12 help show the firestick in pictures 13–58: paintings, drawings, plans and photographs unconsciously displaying aspects of 1788 management. Most are early colonial, chosen because they show country untouched by Europeans, or a European impact apparent but slight. Some show what plants did when Europeans ended 1788 fire, but pictures of vegetation even possibly changed by Europeans have been excluded. Pictures 13–30 show the broad-scale impact of 1788 fire or its absence; 31–7 illustrate edges; 38–52 show edges used in more complex plant associations; 53–8 show people using templates; 59 shows European tree clearing which illuminates some benefits of 1788 mosaics.

  Much can be learnt by studying these examples; much more by comparing them. To see unnatural plant patterns in one picture is persuasive; to see in pictures across Australia the same patterns in different climates and terrain and among different plant species is powerfully convincing; to see those patterns in both mainland Australia and Tasmania is extraordinary. These islands have been separate for 11,000 years, as Ian Thomas observed a ‘degree of isolation . . . unparalleled in the known history of the world’.5 Yet in 1788 a Tasmanian would have recognised a Queenslander’s care for country, if not how it was done. This comparison alone, seemingly so long sustained, implies universal ends served by myriad local means, and justifies accepting what Aborigines did as managing a continental estate.

  PICTURES 1–4: LIGHT

  1. Swamp Gum southwest of Scottsdale, Tasmania, January 2011

  Edwina Powell, Launceston. Compare pictures 2–4, 13–16.

  1

  Light shapes eucalypts. In shade they grow straight, on a shade edge they bend and branch to the light, in light they spread. A e
ucalypt’s shape is thus a history of its surrounds (ch 3). Mountain Ash (Swamp Gum in Tasmania) is familiar as tall, straight forest in cool wet regions. Unlike most eucalypts it is fire sensitive. Its wet forests suffer fire rarely, but when fire comes it is a raging furnace, and the trees die. Then in the rich ash thousands of seedlings race straight up, battling their neighbours for light.

  This Swamp Gum is about 210 years old. It is this shape because it lives in the open, with plenty of light. Why, if this species usually grows in dense thousands after fire? A bushfire would kill it and replace it with swathes of competing seedlings, whereas in a long absence of fire this land becomes rainforest. Only centuries of controlled fire could burn back adjacent rainforest without ever touching this fire sensitive tree. It is near springs on an old walking track. It tells of Tasmanian management.

  Spread indicates spacing (ch 3). Just as trees spread in the open, flagpole stands signal density even after local conditions reverse. This generates useful questions. Does the shape and spacing of one tree generation match earlier or later generations nearby? If not why not, and when was the change? If a generation is missing, for example if there are no really old trees, why? Are there anomalies: the same species in open woodland and adjacent thick forest, clumps in grassland, scrub regenerating in so-called frost hollows, trees invading grass edges? All these raise the possibility of past human intervention.