by Bill Gammage
East of Rylstone (NSW) he sketched a more open template:
a timbered grassy country about four miles, when we entered the open bare lands of Daby, through which the Cugeegong winds . . . well covered with an abundance of grazing herbage, thinly wooded, having patches perfectly bare of tree or shrub, and of an exceedingly rich, black, moist, loamy soil, adapted to all the purposes of agriculture . . . [Northwest is] a rising forest land, tolerably well watered, lightly timbered, and occasionally interspersed with confined brushes.42
On the upper Hunter Lang found a complex and beautiful template:
a peninsula, which the natives call Narragan . . . without exception the finest piece of land, both for quality of soil and for beauty of scenery and situation I have ever seen . . . over its whole extent patches of rich grassy plain, of thirty or forty acres each, alternate with clumps of trees or narrow beltings of forest, as if the whole had been tastefully laid out for a nobleman’s park.43
On Mowle (Molle?) Plains in northwest Tasmania, Hellyer
entered a green forest belt which encircles its Westn end. This green forest is very free from underwood and the trees are wide apart . . . the soil being excellent & nearly level, exactly similar to the adjacent plain . . . [It] does not extend ½ a mile through. Just beyond it was a marshy patch . . . [then] a fine tract of dry open forest which I regretted to find did not extend far . . . There is much good grass in it . . . Entered upon a large tract of heathy country . . . it appeared to have been burnt last summer, it is about a mile wide from E to West &more than double that extent in length . . . [crossed a creek into green forest with possums] leaping from tree to tree in all directions.44
Hodgkinson wrote of the upper Macleay (NSW),
The alluvial brushes on its banks are now frequently superseded by park-like forest ground . . . and luxuriant grassy flats of the greatest richness, lightly timbered . . . on the south side is Dongai Creek. In the narrow valley of this stream, the land is of the richest quality possible, consisting of a narrow border of alluvial flats, covered with broad-bladed grass, growing breast high [Blady Grass, which flourishes after fire], and with a few large blue gum trees scattered so far apart as to offer no impediment to immediate tillage . . . [It] is hemmed in on both sides by fertile ranges, well clothed with grass, and lightly wooded . . . their sloping sides, covered with bright green verdure, contrast strongly with the dark glistening green of the brush vegetation which occasionally invades some of the hills.45
Off-farm these hills carry rainforest now.
Jack encountered a template sequence about 65 kilometres south of Cape York. From ‘a narrow belt’ of dense vine scrub, he went over heath for 400 yards to a scrub-fringed creek, crossed a mile of open country split by two boggy pandanus gullies, entered dense scrub he had to cut through, then a mile of forest with brush undergrowth, more scrub to cut through, 800 yards of heath and brush to a creek, and two miles to ‘a belt’ of scrub (pictures 44–5). Next day he followed the ‘edge of the scrub’ then cut through it for a mile, partly on ‘a TRACK CUT one or two seasons ago BY THE NATIVES’. He emerged into half forest, half scrub to a creek, then scrub, then dense scrub to ‘a sort of pocket’, where he camped.46 All this is climax rainforest country.
Exploring with Mitchell, Granville Stapylton conveyed how templates varied the land. On the Glenelg near Casterton (Vic) he exclaimed
By Jupiter this is a paradise of a country An Eldorado The Cowpastures are positively inferior to it in excellence Here we have undulating ground clear of timber except occasional picturesque clumps of Trees Mould of the finest and richest black soil of great depth, and grass and herbage so verdant and thick that the ground is literally matted with it,
but a few miles south he met ‘a barren sandy Heath . . . Encamped near a swamp great vicissitudes attend exploring From a Paradise in the morning we are led into a desert at night . . . Alas Alas how vain sometimes are the hopes and projects of weak mortals.’47 He was in Australia Felix, which Haydon described as
Beautiful plains with nothing on them but a luxuriant herbage, gentle rises with scarcely a tree, and all that park-like country . . . The greater part of the country has that happy medium of being just enough wooded without inconveniencing the settler, whilst there is no lack of good timber for every purpose he may require. It has been my lot to travel for many days through a country, the only hindrances being an occasional scrub, or belt of thickly wooded forest, a large lagoon, or a deep flowing river where the ground was spread with eternal verdure.48
In 1839 William Russell detailed a template north of Shelford (Vic),
a valley extending from half to three quarters of a mile in breadth, stretching as far as the eye can reach, and on each side are sloping banks—one of them thinly wooded, the other with very little wood upon it at all. At the back of the huts is another gentle rising hill, well wooded, which almost unites the two hills on each side . . . the river Leigh . . . is marked by a row of White Gum trees on each side . . . The valley is . . . of rich alluvial soil and without either bush or tree and all ready for the plough.49
Northeast of Derby in northwest Australia, James Martin came on a ‘Happy Valley’ of fire sensitive pines and palms in burnt grassland,
of no great breadth (say an eighth of a mile at the widest), clothed with a very carpet of green grasses. The first pines we had seen here fringed our track and formed . . . picturesque clumps of eights and tens intermingled with palms, acacia, eucalypti, and melaleuca, of great variety and beauty. A deliciously cool and clear stream of water flowed everywhere copiously along the valley . . . [which] terminated in a happier circular plain of about half a mile diameter, covered with the most luxuriant grass, not less than three feet high and perfectly level; this plain was bounded by timber of different kinds . . . the neighbourhood had been lately burnt, was easy to travel over, well watered and grassed, and had an abundance of fine timber.50
He depicts pleasant campsites with palm foods and water comfortably near a small enclosed plain to lure and trap.
Off the coast, and perhaps on it, swamps were 1788’s richest resource. They supplied fish, shellfish, birds, eggs, frogs, snakes, bulrush, reeds and nardoo, a staple harvested from wet alluvial soils for flour. ‘Large lagoons full of fish or mussels form a greater attraction to the natives than a stream too shallow for large fish’, Leichhardt noted.51 In summer and autumn Murrumbidgee people frequented swamps rather than the river, and the rest of their country in winter and spring.52 In the eastern Riverina and South Gippsland, people blocked water to extend swamps,53 and on the Roper (NT),
Being so shallow and wide-spreading, the lagoons would dry up early in the Dry were it not that the blacks are able to refill them at will from the river, for here the Roper indulges in a third ‘duck-under’, so curious that with a few logs and sheets of bark the blacks can block the way of its waters and overflow them into the lagoons, thereby ensuring a plentiful larder to hosts of wild fowl, and, incidentally, to themselves.54
Roper people also built stake, bark and mud dams to stop lagoons and vine-forests drying out, attracting birds and nourishing plants ‘so that we can get plenty of food easily’.55
Naturally people made swamp surrounds to suit. Near Narrandera plains adjoined every known swamp,56 and in northwest Victoria Beilby met
hills fringed with dense mallay [mallee] . . . [Then] sandy desert which had been covered with heath, but was lately burnt . . . a small grassy knoll . . . having a native well, and near it a small swamp in which wells had recently been dug to retain the surface water . . . dense mallay . . . a pretty plain fringed with lofty pines and he-oaks, with clumps of mallay studding it here and there . . . a tract of mallay which had been burnt two or three years ago.57
At a big swamp near Dunkeld (Vic) Robinson wrote,
The whole face of the country had been burnt and the rushes of the swamp and the young grass . . . had attained a growth of seven or eight inches and a most verdant appearance. The land round the
swamp is elevated and undulating, of good quality and lightly timbered. It is a very fine country and the scenery beautiful . . . Turkey frequent this country.58
On Carmichael’s (now Deering) Creek in the west MacDonnells (NT), Giles found ‘an open grassy swamp or plain’:
The little plain looked bright and green . . . The grass and herbage here were excellent. There were numerous kangaroos and emus . . . [and] many evidences of native camping places about here; and no doubt the natives look upon this little circle as their happy hunting grounds. Our little plain is bounded on the north by peculiar mountains; it is also fringed with scrub nearly all round . . . thick, indeed very dense, scrub, which continued to the foot of the hills; in it the grass was long, dry, and tangled with dead and dry burnt sticks and timber, making it exceedingly difficult to walk through. Reaching the foot of the hills, I found the natives had recently burnt all the vegetation from their sides, leaving the stones, of which it was composed, perfectly bare . . . [South is] scrub . . . recently burnt near the edge of the plain; but the further we got into it, the worse it became.59
He might have been in Tasmania.60
Westernport east of Melbourne illustrates how carefully swamp templates were made. Behind the bay sat the big Kooweerup Swamp, with smaller swamps nearer the shore. In 1798 George Bass described the land as
low but hilly . . . the soil almost uniformly the same all round—a light brown mould free from sand . . . grass and ferns grow luxuriantly, and yet the country is but thinly and lightly timbered . . . Little patches of brush are to be met with everywhere, but there are upon the east side several thick brushes of some miles in extent, whose soil is a rich vegetable mould. In front of these brushes are salt marshes.61
In 1826, a decade before Melbourne was occupied, Westernport had a tourist boom. At least four parties visited, and around those ‘salt marshes’ found a varied landscape. D’Urville thought it ‘rather like our royal forests round Paris’, yet took it to be natural. ‘The open terrain’, he wrote,
is delightfully undulating. Here there are fine stands of trees easy to penetrate, elsewhere vast grass-covered clearings, with well-defined paths and linked one with the other by other tracks [tracts] so regular and well defined that it is hard to conceive how these could have happened without the help of man.62
FA Wetherall reported swamps ‘interspersed with a few elevated patches of rich meadow and occasional rows of Tea tree’, the rising ground nearby ‘most beautiful . . . Trees are dispersed in clumps over an extensive plain of rich meadows . . . at least 10,000 acres . . . unencumbered with brushwood.’ The meadows carried ‘luxuriant grass’ which ‘the frequent fires of the Natives keep free from brambles, or obstacles of that sort. Behind this, clumps of jungle begin to appear, and, becoming gradually closer and more prolonged, at length intermix with reeds, and prevent all progress in that direction.’63
Hovell may have ventured into that ‘jungle’. He met an ‘impassable Tea Tree brush’, then ‘a barren tract of Country of an heathy description, in parts it was covered with low brush, in other places it was swampy, and in consequence of its having been burned previously the stumps of brush were sharp and made it very unpleasant walking’. Then
after crossing a fine Meadow of 1/2 or 3/4 Mile in width entered into a Tea Tree brush which after going a short distance into it, I had every reason to repent—it became so very thick and in other parts it had been burned, and the young wood growing up between the old pallid trees, which hid them from our sight, this occasioned us many a fall.64
A Tasmanian paper reported Westernport as made, valuable and beautiful:
In parts it resembles the park of a country seat in England, the trees standing in picturesque groups to ornament the landscape . . . In other parts the eye roams over tracts of meadow land, waving with a heavy crop of grass, which, being annually burned by the natives, is reproduced every season,65
and in 1839 Stokes thought the area had ‘in many places a most inviting rich park-like appearance, swelling on all sides into grassy downs, with patches of open woodland interspersed’.66 Even in the 1950s the tea-tree was broken by curious grassy ‘avenues . . . completely devoid’ of trees.6768
In dry country people made dams for animals and caches for themselves, and managed nearby land more intimately than far places. In northwest Victoria dams were
made to hold storm-water, which was led into them by surface drains. They were sunk in hard clay . . . and were from 4 to 8 feet deep, perfectly circular, and most accurately sunk, the bottoms made concave, so that the last drop of water might be more easily baled out. The bushes around the edges of these ‘wells’ twined, apparently by art, to dome-shaped arbore over them.69
A clay dam on the Bulloo east of Tibooburra (NSW) was 120 metres long, up to 2 metres high and up to 6 metres wide at the base. People camped by it, but made a track to a stone arrangement 3 kilometres west, edging parts with parallel stone lines.70 Perhaps this led them off the dam when game was wanted, a supposition propped by a template dam Giles lyrically described at Pylebung southeast of Ooldea:
The moon had now risen above the high sandhills that surrounded us, and we soon emerged upon a piece of open ground where there was a large white clay-pan, or bare patch of white clay soil, glistening in the moon’s rays, and upon this there appeared an astonishing object—something like the wall of an old house or a ruined chimney. On arriving, we saw that it was a circular wall or dam of clay, nearly five feet high, with a segment open to the south to admit and retain the rain-water that occasionally flows over the flat . . . [It] was two feet thick at the top of the wall, twenty yards in the length of its sweep, and at the bottom, where the water lodged, the embankment was nearly five feet thick. The clay of which this dam was composed had been dug out of the hole in which the water lay, with small wooden native shovels, and piled up to its present dimensions.
Immediately around this singular monument of native industry, there are a few hundred acres of very pretty country, beautifully grassed and ornamented with a few mulga (acacia) trees, standing picturesquely apart. The spot lies in a basin or hollow, and is surrounded in all directions by scrubs and rolling sandhills . . . there was a sandhill with a few black oaks (casuarinas) growing upon it, about a quarter of a mile away. A number of stones of a calcareous nature were scattered about on it . . . I was surprised to find a broad path had been cleared amongst the stones for some dozens of yards, an oak-tree at each end being the terminal points. At the foot of each tree at the end of the path the largest stones were heaped; the path was indented with the tramplings of many natives’ feet.71
Mulga stood ‘picturesquely apart’ here, yet unburnt Mulga clumps densely. People had dug a dam, burnt a grass-shelter template around it, and moved away to let it work. Desert dams were ‘fairly frequent’ around Ooldea.72 In ‘probably the worst desert upon the face of the earth’, Giles found Boundary Dam, an earth wall in mallee on the South Australian–West Australian border:
This would be considered a pretty spot anywhere, but coming suddenly on it from the dull and sombre scrubs, the contrast makes it additionally striking. All around the lake is a green and open space with scrubs standing back, and the white lake-bed in the centre. The little dam was situated on a piece of clay ground where rain-water from the foot of some of the sandhills could run into the lake.73
Three weeks later he found a dam ‘lying in a small hollow, in the centre of a small grassy flat . . . Further up the slopes, native wells had been sunk in all directions, in each and all of which was water.’74 The dams and grass were for animals, the wells for people.75
People therefore dug wells where water was not scarce, for example in the Blue Mountains, and near swamps between the Murchison and the Hutt (WA).76 They dug more in desert, making them too deep for animals or covering the openings. In the bed of a Diamantina (SA) tributary Sturt found a well 7 metres deep, and paths ‘to almost every point of the compass’. One led to ‘a village consisting of nineteen huts�
�.77 West of Lake Torrens (SA) Tom Worsnop chanced on a template based on a well in ‘dense mallee scrub’,
an open space of about sixty or seventy acres, almost circular in form. On the fringe of the mallee, and well in the shade around the whole place, were mounds of bones of animals and shells of native fruits, particularly the quondong or native peach, all of which had been broken or bruised by large stones still left there . . . this place must have been for ages the favourite resort of native tribes . . . The most remarkable feature . . . was a hard limestone crust which was raised like a small mound about the middle of this open space. Through the highest point . . . the natives had sunk a well 12ft deep, had then in a westerly direction cut a drive 10ft long, and tapped a most delicious spring of cool water . . . Down the sides of the well holes for the hands and feet had been cut in the hard limestone rock.78
In ‘dreadful’ scrub near Streaky Bay (SA) which required ‘keeping the axes constantly at work’, Eyre
succeeded in slowly forcing a passage . . . emerging in about seventeen miles at an open plain behind Point Brown, and in the midst of which was a well of water. The entrance to this well was by a circular opening, through a solid sheet of limestone, about fifteen inches in diameter, but enlarging a little about a foot below the surface. The water was at a depth of about ten feet.79
In northeast South Australia Sturt saw how wells extended access to dry plains:
we noticed some natives, seven in number, collecting grass seeds on them, on which alone, it appears to me, they subsist at this season of the year . . . Their presence . . . assured us that there must be water somewhere about, and as on entering the plain . . . we struck on a track, I directed Mr. Browne to run it down, who, at about half a mile, came to a large well . . . nine feet deep,80
and at Inkadunna Soak south of Katajuta (NT), Giles
was fortunate to discover a small piece of flat rock, which was hardly perceptible amongst the grass; on it I saw a few dead sticks, and an old native fireplace, which excited my curiosity, and on riding up to it, I found to my astonishment under the dead sticks two splendid little rock-holes or basins in the solid rock, with ample water in them for the requirements of all my horses.81
