by Bill Gammage
Trees can grow densely in these places now. Why not then? Charles Darwin implied an answer:
The woodland is so open that a person on horseback can gallop through it. It is traversed by a few flat-bottomed valleys, which are green and free from trees: in such spots the scenery was pretty like that of a park. In the whole country I scarcely saw a place without the marks of a fire; whether these had been more or less recent—whether the stumps were more or less black, was the greatest change which varied the uniformity.20
West of Bathurst (NSW) Allan Cunningham crossed ‘a fine, rich, grassy tract of country, which, however, has at this period rather a bare and naked aspect, having been fired by the natives . . . The soil throughout this day’s journey is good and rich . . . and abounds with emu and kangaroo’, and approaching the Macquarie, ‘having passed the grassy forest land near the creek’, he
arrived at the margin of an open plain . . . Stretching over the plain about a mile we passed through a very sterile scrubby district, somewhat elevated, thickly wooded . . . This brush continues for . . . 12 miles, and we pitched our tent near some holes of water, where there was burnt grass for the horses.21
North of Camperdown (Vic) George Russell discovered a
great extent of deep rich soil, many hundreds of acres being almost without a tree . . . covered with a rich sward of kangaroo-grass. The country around had all been burnt by bush-fires during the previous summer, and the grass that was now growing on the ground was as green and luxuriant as if it had been a field of grain. The kangaroos here were very numerous . . . They came down from the wooded hills near Mount Leura in the afternoons to feed on the green grass . . . It was a striking sight to see them bounding along in hundreds.22
In central Tasmania Robinson found that the Brady’s Sugarloaf district was ‘frequently burnt by the natives and is fine hunting ground for them . . . open plains of good land free from timber bounded by grassy hills. It is a delightful country . . . arrived at a plain which the natives had set on fire and the trees round the plain was still burning’,23 and Hellyer found climax rainforest country grassy . . . The timber found on these hills is in general of fine growth, very tall and straight; some of it would measure more than 100 feet to the lowest branch. The trees are, in many places, 100 yards apart. They . . . will not in general average ten trees to an acre. There are many square miles without a single tree.24
To describe open country he used agricultural language: it had ‘a cultivated & diversified appearance from its having been lately burnt in several extensive tracts, looking fresh & green in those places, & in others so completely covered with fields of blooming heath, that it resembled vast fields of clover divided by shrubs’. In a brilliant insight, he suspected their purpose: ‘It is possible that the natives by burning only one set of plains are enabled to keep the kangaroos more concentrated for their use, and I can in no way account for their burning only in this place, unless it is to serve them as a hunting place.’25 In 1788 people judged that grass needed rich soil more than trees, and moved forest to suit. Being able to do that made almost any plant distribution possible.26
People moved plant communities to associate their resources. Much grass and few trees was a valuable and extensive association. Batman found Bellarine Peninsula (Vic)
excellent, and very rich—and light black soil, covered with kangaroo grass two feet high, and as thick as it could stand . . . The trees not more than six to the acre, and those small sheoak and wattle . . . Most of the high hills were covered with grass to the summit, and not a tree, although the land was as good as can be. The whole appeared like land laid out in farms for some hundred years back, and every tree transplanted. I was never so astonished in my life.27
A tourist in Victoria noted,
Everywhere but on these fertile spots the trees straggle away from each other, or form themselves into picturesque clumps: sometimes leaving wide plains untenanted by a solitary shrub, at other times capriciously dotting the expanse, as if planted by the hand of art. Rarely do they stand so close as to prevent a free passage between their trunks; so that you may gallop for miles under their shade, over hill and dale, without meeting any other obstacle than that caused by fallen timber. In truth, as has often been remarked, an English park, with its lawn and scattered trees, gives a better idea of the prevailing scenery than anything else.28
Persuading fire to do that took finesse and persistence.
Grass and woodland often alternated along water. This can occur naturally, when streams bend into forest on one bank and leave grass on the other, as perhaps east of Darwin, where the Adelaide was flanked by ‘rich grassy plains, but each alternate reach wooded on the opposite side’.29 In 1788 it also occurred unnaturally, where no bends were. Upper Lachlan plains ran ‘alternately on each [bank], and nearly the same size; opposite to the Plains are Woodlands’.30 On the Macquarie ‘park-like’ country was ‘alternately plain and brush, the soil on both of which was good’.31 Upper Hunter plains were on
alternate sides, the whole distance, varying in breadth from one half to two miles. Some parts are without timber, and others have no more than enhances, rather than detracts from, their value, with an inexhaustible soil, and a natural herbage, but little inferior to the most improved English meadows.32
On good water both banks might be grass (pictures 33–4). In Queensland in 1829, Lockyer Creek’s banks were ‘a succession of grassy meadows, singularly level and occasionally so thinly and lightly wooded, as scarcely to furnish two or three trees in the area of an acre; indeed in some parts, patches of plain broke upon us, without a tree or a shrub for half a mile’.33 In the 1840s Murrumbidgee flats were ‘impossible . . . to be finer . . . extensive rich grassed meadows, with a few clumps of trees . . . a succession of ornamental parks that would vie with the finest forest-lands in the world’.34 In the mallee east of Angaston (SA) Sturt met a ‘dark and gloomy sea of scrub . . . but it may be said, that there is an open space varying in breadth from half-a-mile to three miles between the Murray belt and the river’.35 In Ayers Range (NT) Giles ‘came to a number of native huts . . . of large dimensions and two storied’ in scrub by a creek:
On each bank of the creek was a strip of green and open ground, so richly grassed and so beautifully bedecked with flowers that it seemed like suddenly escaping from purgatory into paradise when emerging from the recesses of the scrubs on to the banks of this beautiful, I might wish to call it, stream . . . Natives had been here very recently, and the scrubs were burning, not far off to the northwards, in the neighbourhood of the creek channel.3637
Off water too, one forest type might give way within metres to another, or to grass. ‘It is a singular character of this remarkable country’, Leichhardt observed, ‘that extremes so often meet; the most miserable scrub, with the open plain and fine forest land; and the most paralysing dryness, with the finest supply of water’.38 In Queensland Karl Domin found ‘Most interesting . . . the contrast between the open forests and vine scrubs . . . The line of demarcation between them is most distinct, a phenomenon which is unique in the whole world.’ He saw similar edges in Lancewood scrub between Jericho and Alpha ‘with a most decided line of demarcation’. Very different forests had parallel sharp-edged associations. He decided that ‘the open forests in all parts of Queensland are not a natural association, but a secondary one, changed through the influence of their aboriginal inhabitants, mostly by means of bushfires’.39 Sturt nominated three inland landscapes:
first, plains of considerable extent wholly destitute of timber; secondly, open undulating woodlands; and, thirdly, barren unprofitable tracts. The first almost invariably occur in the immediate neighbourhood of some river . . . The open forests, through which a horseman may gallop in perfect safety, seem to prevail over the whole secondary ranges of granite, and are generally considered as excellent grazing tracts . . . The barren tracts . . . may be said to occupy the central spaces between all the principal streams.40
While generally true
of the first two in 1788, though not now, this was only partly true of the third. Explorers found both grass and dense timber off rivers. Hume and Hovell met frequent vegetation changes in northern Victoria. Hills north of the Ovens had ‘brushwood’, no trees on their north sides, and thick timber on top. North of the Goulburn was 4–5 miles of ‘burnt grass . . . O n one side of the creek is a sort of meadow, but the . . . soil, being good, produces an abundance of fine grass and the whole, both hills and lowlands, are thinly covered with timber.’ On King Parrot Creek, after three days’ solid scrub-bashing, sometimes having to walk hundreds of yards on logs, Hovell wrote in exasperation:
To describe this brush or scrub is almost impossible, as it cannot be compared with any that is known in the Colony. Suffice to say that it is worse than any that is known in it, or worse than any jungle in any other country . . . we could not see either over or under, nor two yards before.
They battled on to ‘a small plain . . . The farther we get from the mountains the more open we find the country, till at last we find the hills almost destitute of trees and the lowlands but thinly covered also.’41 Hovell’s lowlands are now farms, but where untended his high country is unbroken forest. He and Hume crossed a patterned landscape.
In very different country, ‘dense’ Mulga near Newcastle Waters (NT), Stuart met similar patterns. From grass on a cracking clay plain, he crossed a soil boundary into ‘wooded country . . . in some places very thick, but in most open . . . At the end of eighteen miles I again got into the grass country.’ Next day he met ‘a dense forest of tall mulga, with an immense quantity of dead wood’ very difficult to move through. It became more open, then so thick that he turned back to a plain where fire had ‘burned every blade of grass, and scorched all the trees to their very tops’. In 2001 Peter Sutton found very dense scrub where Stuart mapped ‘open’ country in 1862.42 Southwest of Bourke (NSW) in 1875, George Fortey reported:
The country being fine and open up to this and about two miles further on when I got into pretty thick scrub for about Four miles it then opened into Plains interspersed with Giddia which appeared to be the general character of the country as far as the eye could reach . . . I passed into some Mulga Scrub for about three miles and then into [a] very soft plain with a little Scrub and which had evidently been cleared by fire, so I could judge by the dead Timber lying about which extended for about 4 miles then into scrub for about 3 miles.43
Europeans tend to quarantine ‘good’ country from ‘bad’, condemning dense forests, scrub and heath. Yet these split up grass and open forest, and had Dreamings and value. Heath was home to berries, tubers, animals and birds.44 In northeast Tasmania Robinson came on country ‘sterile and consists of heathy hills and undulating and open forest. Opossums were in abundance . . . The whole of this country is much resorted to by natives. Forest kangaroo were to be seen all the journey.’45 Eyre pointed out:
the very regions, which, in the eyes of the European, are most barren and worthless, are to the native the most valuable and productive. Such are dense brushes, or sandy tracts of country, covered with shrubs, for here the wallabie, the opossum, the kangaroo rat, the bandicoot, the leipoa [mallee fowl], snakes, lizards, iguanas, and many other animals, reptiles, birds, &c., abound; whilst the kangaroo, the emu, and the native dog, are found upon their borders, or in the vicinity of those small, grassy plains, which are occasionally met with amidst the closest brushes.46
Rainforest carried scrub wallabies, cuscus, flying foxes, gliders, brush turkeys and their eggs, pythons and their eggs, black bean, cunjevoi, yam, fig and fern root—a food and medicine bonanza.47 It too was split up. On the Hastings (NSW) Oxley saw it alternating with ‘open forest with good grass, casuarina or beefwood, and large timber’, and next day remarked, ‘the brush land is of the richest description . . . the forest ridges between the brushes were well clothed with grass’.48 In the Nambucca (NSW) back country Hodgkinson had to cut through miles of thick brush, but on emerging ‘crossed alternately low forest ranges clothed with thick succulent herbage and brushy hollows containing limpid pebbly creeks, until we began ascending a long narrow brushy slope which led us to the summit of a high range’ timbered with ‘gigantic’ Blackbutt, forest oak and ‘rich grass’. Many mountains were ‘covered with one universal brush similar to that on alluvial land’, but next day he climbed a ridge through brush and gigantic ferns and palms to a razor-back crest where ‘grass was of the greatest luxuriance’. For weeks he passed through country ‘either very lightly wooded and grassy, or else covered over with brush timber and entangled vegetation. Most of the park-like hills rose in round conical summits.’49 Using early portion plans, WK Birrell found the same associations in the Manning Valley, and concluded, ‘It is likely that this was a disturbed forest community brought about as a result of the repeated firing of the original vegetation cover, over many centuries, by Aborigines hunting small animals.’50 East of Circular Head (Tas) in 1829, the ‘first eight miles of the coast ran through a thick forest, after which comes a succession of small plains, which lie in the midst of the forest . . . From the last of these plains . . . the road passes through four miles more of forest.’51 Northwest of Innisfail (Qld) Palmerston saw ‘alternate scrubby and open spurs steeply narrow down and connect with alternate scrubby and grassy plots below, and near the river’s border’,52 and in southeast Queensland Allan Cunningham reached an ‘extensive patch of plain . . . flanked on its west and north-western sides by densely brushed rocky ridges . . . abundantly watered by a chain of ponds . . . The soil . . . exceedingly rich . . . the rocky barrier to the westward . . . clothed with so thick a jungle of twining plants.’53
Two expeditions showed the value of dense eucalypt forest. In 1792 John Wilson, a First Fleet emancipist, quit Sydney and became a tribal man. In May 1797 he was proclaimed an outlaw, but in November returned, and in January 1798 led Governor Hunter’s servant John Price, who kept a diary, and a man named Roe southwest. They reached the Wingecarribee–Wollondilly junction northwest of Berrima. In what is now mostly dense forest, they crossed ‘fine open country, but very mountainous’, grass meadows, thinly timbered plains, and scrub and vine brushes, including Bargo Brush, soon notorious for poor soil, stringybark, and tangles of scrub and fallen timber. In one memorable week, Price noted the first koala, the first lyrebird, the first gang-gang cockatoo and the first mainland wombat recorded by a European. The gang-gang was new to Wilson, but he knew the wombat and the koala, giving their Aboriginal names, wombat and cullawine, from which no doubt ‘koala’ derives (pronounce it). He knew the lyrebird but called it a pheasant, which perhaps is why today it has no familiar Aboriginal name. It is telling that no-one in a settlement thirsty to discover new fauna had reported these animals. Their country was wilderness, bad, formidable, seeming untouched. Wilson knew them because Aborigines valued them, and made or left habitats for their benefit.
In March 1798 Wilson led another party to Mt Towrang east of Goulburn, well past those Blue Mountains so famously crossed in 1813. He found ‘a most beauti-full country, being nothing but fine large meadows with ponds of water in them; fine green hills, but very thin of timber’. They are very thick of timber now. The party also met ‘barren’ scrub. Wilson’s unknown diarist saw that kangaroos and sometimes emu swarmed on grass and left ‘no signs’ in scrub, but not that those ‘fine green hills’ would be ‘barren’ too, without fire.54 Both had value: as Robinson remarked in Tasmania, ‘in mountainous country I live on badger, porcupine, rats, grubs and opossum; in clear country on kangaroo’.55
Hamilton Hume knew that pastures were paddocks. He was native born, a better bushman than any migrant. In 1821 he explored the upper Shoalhaven with Nullanan from the Cowpastures and Udaaduck from Lake Bathurst. On 28 November they met people and stopped with them for the day to ‘gain from them what information I could respecting the Country’. They assured Hume of an easy track east to the coast. He ‘caught them several Kangaroos with which they were much pleased’, and
they told him where there were plenty. South, they said, you come to a scrubby hill called Coorook [Currockbilly] abounding in ‘Roombat & Coolers’. Beyond was ‘a very fine country with extensive plains’: kangaroo country. They were describing dense forest alternating with grass, and what lived where.
Hume saw such country. He described ‘extensive meadows of rich land thinly wooded; Kangaroos are here in great plenty’, the Shoalhaven shallow with a pebbly bottom and ‘well Stocked with Water Fowls as Ducks, Black Swans &c, on the Banks and adjacent thereto are numbers of What we call in this country Wild Turkey . . . several good meadows along this Stream’. He ‘passed over some Bushy hills . . . came on good Forest Land Fine Grass . . . ascended a Forest Hill . . . crossed a pretty Rivulet’ abounding in eels, wound through some ‘fine meadows’, ‘entered a thick brush which continued for 3 miles . . . passed over some clear barren Hills’. He was just west of the Pigeon House, probably on the Sugarloaf—dense forest now, but he named it Mt Barren, stating ‘This Hill commands a very extensive view of the Country in every direction particularly to the N.W. & N. as far as the eye can reach it is without Timber or Grass of any Kind, on account of its being so barren’. Most of the country from Lake Bathurst to the Pigeon House, he concluded, ‘is well adapted for Grazing and in many parts for Cultivation . . . and quite easy of access’. This is not the thick forest of today’s Shoalhaven back country, but Hume proved his accuracy by walking in one day from three miles south of the Pigeon House to 30 miles north of it through parts now almost impenetrable, and swimming a flooded river. He stopped ‘in a thick Barren Brush quite destitute of Grass’.56 As early as 1851 WB Clarke unwittingly reported Shoalhaven trees regenerating. From Oranmeir he described ‘a series of “bald hills” . . . running southward on each side of the Shoalhaven . . . These “bald hills” [are] . . . clothed with a scrub of Causarina, seldom more than two feet in height, and mostly not more than one.’5758
