The Biggest Estate on Earth

by Bill Gammage

  50

  The patterns vanished very quickly. An 1886 report stated, ‘brigalow is spreading very much and taking possession of most black soil flats . . . a great portion of the country that is now open, will be dense brigalow scrub in five or six years and . . . the pasture will deteriate [sic] considerably’. Brigalow was also invading Gidgee plains, Mulga had appeared, and False Sandalwood (Budda) was now common. Along Nebine Creek, an inspector lamented in 1910, ‘the best grasses, cotton and saltbush have been almost destroyed by drought, heavy stocking and rabbits’, yet even in wet times grass and saltbush decreased and scrub increased. After 1886 a century of ringbarking, pulling and burning controlled Gidgee, Mulga and pine, but not Brigalow or False Sandalwood. On the contrary, ‘Attempts to clear sandalwood country have invariably resulted in its thick regeneration.’ By 1985 a ground survey on Bundaleer, including part of Ups & Downs, found almost all the saltbush gone, much less grass, much more Brigalow and Gidgee, and dense False Sandalwood, even though the station pulled and burnt extensively in the 1960s and 1980s.161

  Bundaleer’s experience typified the back country, although pine was usually the problem (ch 11). If Aborigines could maintain good grass and saltbush, why can’t Europeans? Stocking rates are a factor: heavy grazing selectively eliminates fodder plants. 1788 stocking rates not only avoided this but allowed for drought, whereas for decades European stocking rates did not, though some do now. Observers have concluded that firing scrub only makes it thicker (ch 6), yet people burnt clear in 1788. They knew which fire regime worked. We don’t.

  Kadina and Bundaleer are in country not remotely like Branxholm, Cape York or Gatcomb, yet their plant patterns are similar. I once assumed that different environments would impose different 1788 patterns. Not so. Across Australia the end was the same: to make resources abundant, convenient and predictable. Only the means varied.

  51. Joseph Lycett (c1775–1828), View of Lake George,

  NSW, from the north east, 1821

  52. Lake George from the northeast, 24 January 2009

  51: PIC U467, NLA [from Lycett 1825]. 52: David Paterson, Canberra.

  Compare pictures 1, 3–4, 13, 38–9, 43–7, 50, 53–7.

  51

  Macquarie and Oxley visited Lake George on 27 October 1820, and Oxley’s 1822 map shows that they met it near this scene. Macquarie wrote, ‘The last 4 miles to the lake was through fine open forest land or rich plains . . . chiefly clear of timber’, and next day, ‘open forest, plains, and meadows for 7 or 8 miles at least, the soil generally good, fine herbage, and full of fine large ponds & lagoons . . . full of black swans, Native Companions, and ducks’.162 Joseph Wild, who built the road Macquarie followed, wrote similarly:

  Emu very plentiful and seen in small Flocks—tracks of some large Kangaroos found but none seen in the Neighbourhood—Swans, Geese and Ducks of different kinds in abundance . . . the Grass had been burnt in the neighbourhood of the Lake by the Natives and was springing into nice feed . . . The Plains towards the Eastward are of immense Extent, clear of wood, all beautiful Land, not swampy, though many small Lagoons of fresh Water.163

  Europeans invariably admired this country. Allan Cunningham, WH Breton, WE Riley and others wrote of ‘rich grazing lands’ full of emus, brolgas and plains turkeys, and a lake teeming with swans, ducks, eels and crayfish.164 The lake may have been a sanctuary, its waters safe, its shores fire-cleaned. Govett described it in 1832:

  52

  Its western side runs in almost a straight line, and a high steep grassy ridge falls close upon its banks the whole distance . . . The writer himself has seen a cloud of wild ducks, extending for apparently a mile in length, alight upon the waters of Lake George, till they appeared like an island, or an extended sandbank.165

  In mid-summer 1831 Hoddle thought the lake

  a fine sheet of water. The country around . . . for several miles was on fire, which rendered travelling difficult and dangerous. I felt extremely unwell from inhaling the smoke and dust of burnt embers . . . The immense bodies of fire must be extremely prejudicial to life, from its exhausting oxygen of the atmosphere. I am in constant dread of having my Tents burned by the fires, which have destroyed the herbage for many miles . . . There are immense numbers of Ducks, and some Black Swans.166

  This seems a summer clean-up fire, unlike the pick fire Wild saw.

  Hoddle surveyed around the lake. South were ‘grassy hills’ well timbered today, and a ‘grassy flat’ with an ‘edge of scrub’. West was an ‘open grassy Range’, also well timbered now. By May 1833 Hoddle was mapping regenerating ‘mimosas’ and ‘small wattle’, signalling the recent end of 1788 fire.167

  Lycett never saw the lake: he may have copied Evans, who was with Macquarie. His view spans about 240 degrees—picture 52 deletes its left edge. He drew background hills and foreground rocks bigger than they are, across the lake he mistook cloud shadow for a peninsula as can happen today, and he mistook trees for Oondyong Point (named after a district leader), which runs into the 2009 skyline at right. Yet his topography is accurate. Along the shore his three tree copses are on granite outcrops; in picture 52 the site at right is still a copse, that at centre is barely visible through the dead tree, that at left is the bare hillock. The copses indicate fire never hot enough to crest the rocks, yet keeping adjacent grassland clear. At far left in picture 51 a forest–grass edge is where the lake is reached today, and about where Macquarie met it. This was probably an Aboriginal road. At front left a lone Grass Tree confirms regular burning. None are there now, but a few hills southwest of the lake have stands. Remnants of Wild’s road in the foreground can be seen today.168

  Lycett painted a template. The hill is grass, correctly with an emu. Sensibly it would have carried fire-welcoming yams, tubers and bulbs, but today it is improved pasture, and apart from a few grass orchids shows little evidence of plant food. It drops to a grass flat, which on the same soil abruptly becomes dense forest, then another grass flat, then the lake. The lone forest survivor, a Yellow Box perhaps 350 years old, stands at centre in picture 52. Depending on the wind, a flat could be lit for pick, and feeding animals trapped between forest and slope, or forest and lake. Picture 54 depicts hunters using this template type near Newcastle.

  PICTURES 53–8: TEMPLATES IN USE

  53. Joseph Lycett (c1775–1828), Aborigines

  hunting kangaroos, c1820

  PIC R5681, NLA [from Lycett 1830]. Compare pictures

  13–14, 21, 32, 36, 38–41, 43–7, 49–51, 54–8.

  53

  Lycett never visited Tasmania, and Tasmanians did not use woomeras. Despite his book title this is probably near Newcastle, where Lycett was a prisoner in 1815–17, and commandant James Morrisset encouraged him to draw. He was in effect Morrisset’s photographer. Unlike his Tasmania and Lake George copies, this may be an original, completed in Sydney in 1819–22, and sanitised by his lithographer.169

  Lycett shows how edges and grass corridors worked. The near trees once grew straight in tall thick forest, then the land under them was made grass, with little undergrowth. A grass lane divides forest from water, and kangaroos laze and feed on it, just as on golf greens today. One might be speared; the rest will flee down the lane to the men hidden in ambush.

  54. Joseph Lycett (c1775–1828), Aborigines using

  fire to hunt kangaroos, c1820

  PIC R5689, NLA [from Lycett 1830]. Compare pictures 13–14,

  21, 32, 34, 38–40, 43–7, 49–51, 53, 55–8.

  54

  This is probably near Newcastle. It shows a common template and its use. Dense forest rises from low ground between grassy hills. A sharp edge divides trees from grass. Fires drive kangaroos to the spears. Hunters wait. They are not chancing on game, but predicting when and where it will come. They are also protecting the forest, firing its lee edge so that the wind takes the flames into the grass. When the wind lay the other way they would burn the opposite edge. Skilful burning has kept the forest dense, the grass open,
the game convenient. If people spread enough templates around, they could always hunt somewhere, and if they planned burning cycles they could shepherd game from one template to the next.

  Lycett shows tops clear and bottoms forest. This is sensible: low, wet ground is hard to burn. But in drier country hills inhibit grass, so people left them treed and cleared flats and valleys. Some newcomers puzzled at the difference (ch 1). It was because ends were universal but means adjusted locally.

  People usually burnt from eucalypts into grass, but from grass into rainforest (ch 6). In 1910 John Mathew recalled that Moreton Bay people ‘used to fire the grass in a line from one projecting point of the scrub to another and force the game away to a corner, formed by the scrub margin’, and that when ‘the grass was dry enough to burn, one party having been distributed along the margin of a scrub, another party set fire to the grass some distance off; the game, obliged to seek shelter in the scrub, became easy marks for the persons posted along its edge’.170

  55. Joseph Lycett (c1775–1828), Aborigines spearing fish, others

  diving for crayfish, a party seated beside a fire cooking fish, c1820

  PIC R5686, NLA [from Lycett 1830]. Compare pictures 13, 34, 39, 43–5, 51–3.

  55

  This is near Newcastle, and is sometimes taken to be Redhead Bluff. It may be. What is now a rocky shore there may have collapsed since Lycett’s time, but if so the slope, the far shore, and the short rock shelf lack Lycett’s usual accuracy. It may also be Glenrock further north, an important place in 1788.171

  Lycett depicts a grass corridor like the ‘grassy hill’ where Newcastle was established.172 Well-timed fire did this. Clear of houses forest now crowds coastal cliffs, and at Glenrock and elsewhere the edge between it and the older forest Lycett depicts can still be seen. Pictures 34–5 and 50 show similar waterfront corridors, as does Robert Westmacott’s Bulli from the Coal Cliffs (1840–6).173 In northern Tasmania in 1823 Charles Hardwicke saw ‘the whole distance along the Sea Shore . . . plains extending from 3 to 4 miles inland covered with small heath rather more than ankle deep . . . They . . . are sheltered by clusters of lofty trees growing a little above the Sea beach. They are much frequented by Natives and kangaroo are extremely numerous.’174 In 1848 William Carron described Tam O’Shanter Point in north Queensland: ‘The open ground between the beach and the swamp varied in width from half a mile to three or four miles. It was principally covered with long grass, with a belt of bushy land along the edge of the beach.’175 It is rainforest now.

  The corridors were for travel, hunting and fish lookouts—note the people on the cliff. A similar spot on the New South Wales south coast is still called Black Gins Lookout, and at Milner Point (SA) Snell reported in 1850, ‘The children and Lubras remain on the cliffs and by their shouts and yells tell the fellows in the water where the fish are.’176 Unlike today’s wilderness, Lycett shows people enjoying the grassland they have so carefully tended. No wonder Cook saw the east coast ‘chequered with woods and lawns’.177

  56. John Skinner Prout (1805–76), The River

  Barwon, Victoria, January 1847

  BG. A black and white lithograph is in Booth 76.

  Compare pictures 13–14, 33–5, 41, 53–4, 57–8.

  56

  Prout sketched this view, now Queen’s Park, about a decade after Geelong was surveyed just downstream in 1838. Simpkinson de Wesselow was with him and sketched the same scene: it shows no hut, people or sheep, but almost exactly the same vegetation.178 If settlers cleared trees here, they have not yet destroyed 1788 patterns.

  Without controlled fire the steep slopes would be forested, but though settlers used them least they are almost bare. Trees line the river, and on the flat, colouring has obscured some grass necks pushing into forest then rising to a low central ridge part trees, part grass. Grazing animals have feed and shelter and possums have trees, making both abundant and vulnerable.

  Prout thought this land idyllic, and near here in 1841 Anne Drysdale wrote,

  This place is really beautiful. A short distance from the Barwon, which is a noble river: all so green & fresh, with trees of the finest kinds . . . scattered about, & in clumps, like a Nobleman’s Park. The clumps are formed by a burning of a large fallen tree; the ashes have the property of bringing up a clump of Wattles or gums, &c.179

  People made the land beautiful, but settlers took it because it was useful. Paddocks in forest gave them water, pasture, timber and security. By shaping land so carefully for grazing animals, people paved the way for pastoral occupation. The more carefully they made the land, the more likely settlers were to take it.

  57. Robert Dale (1810–56), A panoramic view

  of King George’s Sound, WA, 1832

  PIC NK759/1 (l) and NK759/2 (r), NLA.

  Compare pictures 18, 39, 42–3, 49–51.

  This is the north end of Dale’s wonderfully detailed 2.74-metre panorama, which Moore called ‘a very good representation of the Sound and harbour’.180 The foreground vegetation is dense, but Grass Trees flower in it. This requires fire. Burn rings on Grass Tree trunks indicate many more fires before 1788 than after,181 even though people used the fronds to roof huts.182 In 1788 who could burn, how much, when and why, was intricately regulated (ch 6).

  The view is roughly north from Mt Clarence towards Oyster Harbour and King’s River. At centre the government farm at Strawberry Hill sits on ploughed grassland, but in 1832 it was only 4–5 years old, and had cleared less than 6 acres. Beyond it Dale described ‘a large plain, interspersed with small lakes, and wooded with clumps of Melaleuca and Banksia’.183 Where not buildings or a golf course, this is forest today. Dale shows tree–grass belts and clumps associated with slopes and water. The rest of his panorama duplicates these patterns, and they extended beyond. ‘Towards the interior’, Dale wrote, ‘small lakes, thick woods, and open patches, reach to the utmost bound of sight.’184 The patterns also appear in William Westall’s King George’s Sound, view from Peak Head (1801) and LJ Jacottet’s Vue de Port du Roi Georges (1833). Controlled fire made them, and Dale shows fires, small and local, nearby and inland.

  57

  This is dry, sandy country, not easy to make grass thrive in. On richer soil near the Kalgan River, Joseph Wakefield found ‘the Grass soft and high with long thistles, the Trees large and in most parts thinly scattered, and the views extensive, diversified and beautiful’.185 The richest soil grew the fewest trees, but Charles Darwin’s estimate was more generally applicable:

  Everywhere we found the soil sandy, and very poor; it supported either a coarse vegetation of thin, low brushwood and wiry grass, or a forest of stunted trees . . . In the open parts there were many grass-trees . . . The general bright green colour of the brushwood and other plants, viewed from a distance, seemed to promise fertility. A single walk, however, was enough to dispel such an illusion; and he who thinks with me will never wish to walk again in so uninviting a country.186

  Yet grass thrived well enough for fires to frighten newcomers, and in 1847 Western Australia passed an ordinance to flog or imprison Aborigines for lighting them.187

  58. Edward Parker Bedwell (1834–1919), Somerset, Cape York, 1872

  PIC R3929 LOC2121, NLA. Compare pictures 13–14, 21, 32, 55, 57.

  58

  Bedwell was surveying this coast for the Royal Navy. His ship, SS Llewellyn, lies in the narrow strait between the mainland (front and left) and Albany Island (centre). Somerset is behind the beach at left. Settlers arrived in July 1864 and left in 1877, so Bedwell’s scene is late, but it matches written accounts from 1864–5 (ch 8). This is a 1788 landscape.

  Somerset lay in coastal rainforest, including plants found nowhere else, some still not identified. People traded and fought with Torres Strait Islanders who were gardeners, but did not copy them, even though they cleared rainforest, tropical gardening’s hardest task, and made the ground rich in yams. Most food came from the sea, yet they maintained the land with fire, diversifying it as
elsewhere in Australia.

  Albany Island is grass with tree-lined shores and ridges part-forest. PP King noted a similar pattern in northwest Australia:

  The trees on the tops and sides of the hills had lately been burned: in the shady parts, however, near the water, the shore was lined with several plants which had escaped destruction . . . and on the top of the hills and shelving places half way down, were observed several coniferous trees . . . at this season in fruit.188

  The two headland crests flanking Somerset beach have been cleared to enjoy the view, and to see dugong, turtle, fish or canoes. Headland slopes carried rainforest, but slightly inland this pattern changed. ‘The ridges are generally clothed with scrub’, Surveyor Richardson reported in 1865, ‘although on the south-east side of the town the slopes are bald. The land between the ridges slopes down gently to the beach of each bay, being in some instances more openly timbered.’189 This diverse country is now reverting to rainforest.

  PICTURE 59: A EUROPEAN MOSAIC

  59. A Kangaroo Island mosaic, 18 April 1983

  SV Y 2979, photo 63 (DEN R) (detail) c~ Jean and Ron Nunn, Adelaide.

  Compare pictures 13–58.

  59

  No-one lived on Kangaroo Island in 1788: it was the isle of the dead. From the early 1800s sealers and runaways lived on the coast, but this area west of Parndana was rarely visited.190 Bushfires periodically swept the island, but it remained dense scrub—an indication that controlled fire made grass elsewhere.