The Biggest Estate on Earth

by Bill Gammage

  What people did ask was, ‘Why have we been dispossessed? What have we done wrong?’ Ahead of advancing Europeans smallpox chastised them (ch 5), and after 1788 disease after disease struck them, unseen and unexpected: measles, venereal, leprosy, smallpox again, flu. A great burden descended, reproaching them for generations, so that they met newcomers militarily and psychologically disabled. Yet no epidemic disease struck the Tasmanians, who suffered as much as mainlanders or worse. Technological differences mattered: the gun, the horse, the poisons. The advantage of muskets over spears is exaggerated, and guns and horses did not save people elsewhere who used them against whites, but it is easy to find examples where they led to successful ‘dispersals’. People fought by ambushing isolated whites; whites fought from a base, a refuge, and a store. Storing is an immense military advantage. It releases people from a constant food quest, letting individuals and armies stay in the field. Except in parts of Asia, no people successfully resisted European occupation, but farmers and storers held out longer and won better compromises. People stored in 1788 (ch 10), but not to dependence, perhaps especially after epidemics in effect doubled resources. Many a shepherd survived siege with a hut, gun, powder and flour, whereas time and again Aborigines holding a military advantage over Europeans had to disperse for food. Stores negated mobility. The plodding newcomer might be slow, but sooner or later he got there.

  Above all, there were fundamental differences in thinking. In the white world savages had no place, though their souls might; in the Dreaming all things had a place, so newcomers must be accommodated. Even before they quit Britain Europeans intended to possess; in Australia people could not even be certain that the newcomers meant to stay, or if so on what terms. Both could attach to land and devote lives to its care, but in 1788 one saw a landscape rich in lore and Law, while the other saw profit. One defended by religious sanction, the other by force. One cared for a local fragment, the other was a fragment of an export economy, inspired and trammelled from overseas.

  The most catastrophic idea was the notion of race. In 1788 Europeans were beginning to assume a hierarchy of races, with themselves at the top. Almost all Australians could have no concept of race until there was more than one, after invasion. The difference crippled all the negotiations people attempted in 1788, rejected their compromises, and mocked what efforts they made to ‘be like us’.

  Life and land may not have been perfectly balanced in 1788. Near Narrandera grassland may have been expanding at the expense of forest, and as Oxley hinted, plants and seasons don’t repeat perfectly:

  clear plains extended to the foot of very lofty forest hills . . . their surfaces were slightly broken into gentle eminences with occasional clumps, and lines of timber. Their white appearance was occasioned by the grass having been burnt early in the year, and the young growth killed by the frosts.23

  Fire in particular exacted a price. It can cause salination and erosion,24 though probably not under 1788 management. It reduces surface water, kills fire sensitive plants and animals, and impoverishes soil as compost becomes uncommon and ash the readiest nutrient. Latz saw the Simpson as desert man-made by fire, ‘the only large area of Australia where Eucalypts are totally absent and the only place I know where you can . . . not hear a single bird call!’25 Mitchell noted, ‘the trees and shrubs being very inflammable, conflagrations take place so frequently and intensively, in the woods during summer, as to leave very little vegetable matter to return to earth’.26 Sturt judged:

  The proportion of bad soil to that which is good . . . is certainly very great . . . the general want of vegetable mould over the colony [is due] chiefly to [fire] . . . whereby the growth of underwood, so favourable in other countries to the formation of soil, is wholly prevented . . . There is no part of the world in which fires create such havoc . . . The climate . . . and the wandering habits of the natives . . . which induce them to clear the country before them by conflagration, operate equally against the growth of timber and underwood.27

  Gunn attributed

  the general poverty of the Soil in V.D.L. [Van Diemen’s Land] to the habit the Aborigines had of regularly burning the Bush, thereby preventing that accumulation of decayed vegetable matter . . . which would otherwise have necessarily occurred . . . The Natives burned the Country . . . to clear the way & enable them to walk more easily, but also the season after a fire the grass springs up luxuriantly & tender & the kangaroos resort to those places & are therefore more easily killed.28

  Yet if people did jar the land’s regenerative capacity, imbalances were slight and their threat remote. What came after 1788 was much more serious. Damage then was ignorant rather than wilful, but revolutionary. Mitchell depicted how a small local change heralded general destruction. In 1845 he returned to springs he camped at in 1835:

  instead of being limpid and surrounded with verdant grass, as they had been then, they were now trodden by cattle into muddy holes where the poor natives had been endeavouring to protect a small portion from the cattle’s feet, and keep it pure, by laying over it trees they had cut down for the purpose. The change produced in the aspect of this formerly happy secluded valley, by the intrusion of cattle and the white man, was by no means favourable, and I could easily conceive how I, had I been an aboriginal native, should have felt and regretted that change.29

  In 1853 John Robertson perceptively traced how slight changes could accumulate quickly and devastatingly:

  When I arrived [in 1840] . . . I cannot express the joy I felt at seeing such a splendid country . . . The whole of the Wannon [Vic] had been swept by a bushfire in December, and there had been a heavy fall of rain in January (which has happened, less or more, for this last thirteen years), and the grasses were about four inches high, of that lovely dark green; the sheep had no trouble to fill their bellies; all was eatable; nothing had trodden the grass before them . . . I looked amongst the 37 grasses that formed the pasture of my run. There was no silk-grass, which had been destroying our V.D.L. pastures . . . The few sheep at first made little impression on the face of the country . . . [Then] Many of our herbaceous plants began to disappear from the pasture land; the silk grass began to show itself in the edge of the bush track, and in patches here and there on the hill. The patches have grown larger every year; herbaceous plants and grasses give way for the silk-grass and the little annuals . . . The consequence is that the long deep-rooted grasses that held our strong clay hill together have died out; the ground is now exposed to the sun, and it has cracked in all directions; also the sides of precipitous creeks—long slips, taking trees and all with them. When I first came here, I knew of but two landslips, both of which I went to see; now there are hundreds found within the last three years . . . all the creeks and little watercourses were covered with a large tussocky grass, with other grasses and plants, to the middle of every watercourse but the Glenelg and the Wannon, and in many places of these rivers; now that the soil is getting trodden hard with stock, springs of salt water are bursting out in every hollow or watercourse, and as it trickles down the watercourse in summer, the strong tussocky grasses die before it, with all others. The clay is left perfectly bare in summer. The strong clay cracks; the winter rain washes out the clay; now mostly every little gully has a deep rut; when rains falls it . . . rushes down these ruts . . . carrying earth, trees, and all before it . . . Ruts, seven, eight, and ten feet deep, and as wide, are found for miles, where two years ago it was covered with a tussocky grass like a land marsh.30

  All pastoralists want good grass, but not all think long term to get it, and an export economy chokes their cash and choice. Early pastoralists mimicked 1788 fire, but without its subtlety and variety. Until fences and haystacks made fire an enemy, they burnt for fresh pick. ‘The custom of setting the dry grass on fire is very prevalent throughout the colony, as the young grass shooting up soon after affords fine feeding for cattle, &c’, Bennett reported.31 In 1824 WC Wentworth declared this practice ‘necessary and useful’.32 But almost all pastoral
ists used clean-up fires, burning large areas rather than templates, and setting cooler autumn fires more pliant than 1788’s summer fires. ‘In the western desert,’ Burrows wrote in 2003,

  there has been a momentous change in the scale and intensity of fires over the last 40 or 50 years, where the Aboriginal people have not been active on the land. Under Aboriginal management we know that the mean burnt patch size was up to about 30 hectares, with most patches being less than five hectares. Today . . . the mean fire sizes are around 34,000 hectares, with the largest fires burning in excess of 500,000 hectares . . . My Aboriginal informants tell me that fires on this scale are unprecedented and are no good [pictures 29–30].33

  As a result, in the Centre Spinifex is spreading at the expense of other grasses, and ‘savage wildfires’ have ‘scourged’ the Lake Amadeus country, carbonising topsoil, eradicating native plants and animals, and turning pleasant places into ‘a wilderness of spinifex’.34 A west MacDonnells area where Stuart found grass now carries Spinifex,35 and parts of the Centre full of life then would hardly run a rat to the square mile now. In inland Western Australia, Spinifex has replaced other grasses because pastoralists overgraze and winter-burn.36 East Gippsland stockowners

  aimed to burn about 1000 acres or so each spring or summer to provide feed for the following winter, the main idea being that this would confine the cattle to a small area and make for easier musterings. A different patch would be fired each year and after a few years the original patch would carry enough fuel to be burnt again. They would thus work the forest after the style of a rotation. However the fires often burnt a larger area than they bargained on, and kept on burning until a rain extinguished them. The result was good enough, say the old timers, because it kept the forest clean of scrub,

  but only for a time.37 Eventually the scrub thickened (ch 6), the government ordered the cattlemen to stop, and some did.38

  While this mistake was common, so was its opposite—no fire at all. Converting fire from ally to enemy was most damaging. West of the Glenelg (Vic),

  The country when we took it up was lightly timbered . . . [It] remained open until brush fences were started, and the use of wholesale fire given up. This gave the timber a chance of going ahead as it liked. Something favourable to the honeysuckle started it first on the light sandy soil, and it became a dense scrub . . . Then bulloak sprang up everywhere, taking possession of the best of the country. Where the seed came from is a mystery. Red gum also went ahead.39

  Rolls reported similar regeneration in northern New South Wales.40 Regeneration manifests what far-reaching control fire once had. In 1898 Brian and Jenny Wright’s 20-acre block north of Brisbane was ‘dense vine scrub’. By 1981 it was largely clear and heavily grazed. In 1991 the stock was taken off, and although there were no wattles within 5 kilometres, by 2001 two wattle species were thriving. Their seed lay in the soil, predating the vine scrub. Under the wattle, Red Cedar, Silky Oak, Birds Nest Fern and vines appeared, and Gympie Messmate blew in from a neighbouring state forest.41 This is climax rainforest country. Twice it was suppressed, once by 1788 fire, once by stock, twice it returned, before 1898 and after 1991.

  If the sward was dense or the soil unyielding, scrub and tree regeneration might be slow, but usually was rapid. By edge invasion or from seeded soil, ready opportunists raced to colonise land people denied them in 1788. Breton claimed,

  Land which at my former visit to New South Wales (1830) was entirely clear of wood, is now (1833) thickly covered by trees of some size; and it always happens, that land once cleared and neglected for a year or two, becomes concealed by a forest far more dense than any before seen upon it.42

  In 1860, less than 30 years after most Tasmanians were ‘removed’, Gunn wrote,

  my impression is, that nearly all the level land which I saw lower down the Leven must at some time have been open grassy plains, as the greater portion of the trees seem to be under that age. A very considerable extent of the Surrey Hills is also becoming rapidly covered with forests of young Eucalypti, so as to render it probable that they will also in time become useless for pasture purposes. The want of the usual and regular aboriginal fires to clear the country seems to be the cause.43

  Mitchell condemned an Imperial order to stop such fires:

  The omission of the annual periodical burning by natives, of the grass and young saplings, has already produced in the open forest lands nearest to Sydney, thick forests of young trees, where, formerly, a man might gallop without impediment, and see whole miles before him. Kangaroos are no longer to be seen there; the grass is choked by underwood; neither are there natives to burn the grass . . . These consequences, although so little considered by the intruders, must be obvious to the natives, with their usual acuteness, as soon as cattle enter on their territory.44

  Rolls knew the New South Wales Pilliga as dense forest, but when Oxley saw it in 1818

  there was little forest there as the word is used now . . . ‘Brush’ he called it in small areas, ‘a very thick brush of cypress trees and small shrubs’. ‘Scrub’ he called the stunted growth on the dry ridges, ‘mere scrub’. Most of it, about 800,000 hectares, was a ‘forest’ of huge ironbarks and big white-barked cypress trees, three or four only to the hectare. We would . . . call it open grassland . . . Australia’s dense forests are not the remnants of two hundred years of energetic clearing, they are the product of one hundred years of energetic growth.45

  In western New South Wales Jim Noble found that scrub took over grassland within twenty years of settlement. All the problem seedlings, White Cypress, Budda, Yarran, Bimble Box, were fire sensitive, and all made headway because fire stopped and grazing thinned the perennial grass. Where in 1788 the country was grass with patches of scrub, from these refuges the scrub spread inexorably.46 High country grass near Jindabyne (NSW) was by 1949 ‘overgrown with thick scrub’,47 and near Canberra dense forest now covers land where once a horse could gallop.48

  In Queensland Judith Wright tracked changes to Wadja Plain west of the Dawson. When Leichhardt saw it in 1844 it was open forest, recently burnt; by 1900 it was choked with wattle and scrub; by 1917 it was ‘thickly timbered, with much undergrowth’, and it was still so in the 1970s.49 The Longreach district was once so grassy that Europeans thought it could not grow trees, but Aborigines said,

  ‘Look at the trees growin’ at Longreach since white man’s been there because he wouldn’t let the fires go.’ You see, that was all plain country, nothing . . . you see old photographs . . . and it’s all empty . . . the old Aboriginals will burn the bloody lot and took all the trees out. So they said, ‘Black soil won’t grow trees’ but you go there now . . . and the trees are back.50

  By 2000 Seven Emu Station on the Gulf (NT) had carried cattle for 80 years, but ‘everywhere’ grass then was scrub now.51 In 1903 Alfred Norton recalled that despite grazing, since 1857 ‘the brigalow has spread very largely on Juandah and Hawkwood [south of Taroom, Qld] . . . At that time it was comparatively open and much of the scenery was very beautiful, numbers of bottle trees of great size standing out on the open patches or growing along the edge of the brigalow.’52 In western Tasmania trees invaded grassland so densely that they made travel difficult and living impossible.53

  In Western Australia, Henry Bunbury wrote in 1836 of ‘bush fires’ every 2–3 years by which

  the country is kept comparatively free from under wood and other obstructions, having the character of an open forest through most parts of which one can ride freely; otherwise, in all probability, it would soon become impenetrably thick . . . This has already been proved in the case of Van Dieman’s Land, where, in consequence of the transportation of the Natives to Great or Flinders Island, and the consequent absence of extensive periodical fires, the bush has grown up thick to a most inconvenient degree . . . It is true that we might ourselves burn the bush, but we could never do it with the same judgement and good effect as the Natives, who keep the fire within due bounds, only burning those parts they
wish when the scrub becomes too thick or when they have any other object to gain by it.54

  Go into a native forest, look at trunk size and distribution (ch 3), and widespread regeneration becomes obvious. On this count alone, Australia in 1788 was made, not natural.55

  The most notorious regenerator was cypress pine in inland eastern Australia. Two species are common: Black Cypress on hills, White Cypress or Murray Pine on sand or loam. In 1788 they grew either as open woodland where people could ‘see for miles’, or in ‘various sizes and dimensions from seedlings, generally growing in clumps, to lofty trees of about 60 feet’.56 This did not last. Pine is an excellent milling timber, impervious to white ants. Loggers attacked it enthusiastically. It hit back hard. Especially after rain, within weeks of logging millions of seedlings emerged. Squatters employed gangs of ‘scrubbers’, often Chinese under a contractor, to clear the pine. It came back denser. Scientists were amazed at its speed and extent. One wrote that it took ‘possession of thousands of acres of what was, at one time, splendid pastoral country’,57 another that what was mainly eucalypts with a few pines before clearing in the 1860s became by the 1880s pine scrub so thick that it smothered all other trees,58 a third that in 1863 ‘there was little or no pine scrub in the Lachlan district’ but by 1883 ‘the pine had taken possession’.59 He pronounced the pine ‘impassable’, and his seedling count let Elaine van Kempen calculate a density of 6.35 million per hectare.60 Stations were abandoned, station owners who fought ruined. ‘When my firm first bought the place’, the manager of Nymagee (NSW) stated in 1900,

  it was open box country, covered with a waving mass of herbage . . . I thought it was a pastoral paradise. That was before the growth of the pine scrub. When I came up in 1885, the pine scrub had started to spread to an enormous extent. I scrubbed the place in 1886, again in 1890, and later in 1894, and some of it is now nearly as bad as ever.61