A second economic consequence of low Australian soil productivity involves agroforestry, or tree agriculture, as discussed for Japan in Chapter 9. In Australian forests most of the nutrients are actually in the trees themselves, not in the soils. Hence when the native forests that the first European settlers encountered had been cut down, and when modern Australians had either logged the regrowing natural forests or invested in agroforestry by establishing tree plantations, tree growth rates have been low in Australia compared to those in other timber-producing countries. Ironically, Australia’s leading native timber tree (the blue gum of Tasmania) is now being grown more cheaply in many overseas countries than in Australia itself.
The third consequence surprised me and may surprise many readers. One doesn’t immediately think of fisheries as dependent on soil productivity: after all, fish live in rivers and in the ocean, not in soils. However, all of the nutrients in rivers, and at least some of those in oceans near the coastline, come from the soils drained by the rivers and then carried out into the ocean. Hence Australia’s rivers and coastal waters are also relatively unproductive, with the result that Australia’s fisheries have been quickly mined and overexploited like its farmlands and its forests. One Australian marine fishery after another has been overfished to the point of becoming uneconomic, often within just a few years of the fishery’s discovery. Today, out of the nearly 200 countries in the world, Australia has the third-largest exclusive marine zone surrounding it, but it ranks only 55th among the world’s countries in the value of its marine fisheries, while the value of its freshwater fisheries is now negligible.
A further feature of Australia’s low soil productivity is that the problem was not perceptible to the first European settlers. Instead, when they encountered magnificent extensive woodlands that included what may have been the tallest trees in the modern world (the blue gums of Victoria’s Gippsland, up to 400 feet tall), they were deceived by appearances into thinking that the land was highly productive. But after loggers had removed the first standing crop of trees, and after sheep had grazed the standing crop of grass, the settlers were surprised to discover that trees and grass grew back very slowly, that the land was agriculturally uneconomic, and that in many areas it had to be abandoned after farmers and pastoralists had made big capital investments in building homes, fences, and buildings and making other agricultural improvements. From early colonial times continuing until today, Australian land use has gone through many such cycles of land clearance, investment, bankruptcy, and abandonment.
All those economic problems of Australian agriculture, forestry, fisheries, and failed land development are consequences of the low productivity of Australian soils. The other big problem of Australia’s soils is that in many areas they are not only low in nutrients but also high in salt, from three causes. In southwestern Australia’s wheat belt the salt in the ground arises from its having been carried inland over the course of millions of years by sea breezes off the adjacent Indian Ocean. In southeastern Australia, Australia’s other area of most productive farmland rivaling the wheat belt, the basin of Australia’s largest river system, the Murray and Darling Rivers, lies at low elevations and has been repeatedly inundated by the sea and then drained again, leaving much of the salt behind. Still another low-lying basin in Australia’s inland was formerly filled by a freshwater lake that did not drain to the sea, became salty by evaporation (like Utah’s Great Salt Lake and Israel’s and Jordan’s Dead Sea), and eventually dried out, leaving behind salt deposits that became carried by winds to other parts of eastern Australia. Some Australian soils contain more than 200 pounds of salt per square yard of surface area. We shall discuss later the consequences of all that salt in the soil: briefly, they include the problem that the salt is easily brought to the surface by land clearance and irrigation agriculture, resulting in salty topsoils in which no crop can grow (Plate 28). Just as Australia’s first farmers, without modern analyses of soil chemistry, could not be aware of the nutrient poverty of Australian soils, they similarly could not be aware of all that salt in the ground. They could no more anticipate the problem of salinization than of nutrient depletion resulting from agriculture.
Whereas the infertility and salinity of Australia’s soils were invisible to the first farmers and are not well known outside Australia among the lay public today, Australia’s water problems are obvious and familiar, such that “desert” is the first association of most people overseas to mention of the Australian environment. That reputation is justified: a disproportionately large fraction of Australia’s area has low rainfall or is extreme desert where agriculture would be impossible without irrigation. Much of Australia’s area remains useless today for any form of agriculture or pastoralism. In those areas where food production is nevertheless possible, the usual pattern is that rainfall is higher near the coast than inland, so that as one proceeds inland one first encounters farmland for growing crops, plus half of Australia’s cattle maintained at high stocking rates; farther inland, sheep stations; still farther inland, cattle stations (the other half of Australia’s cattle, maintained at very low stocking rates), because it remains economic to raise cattle in areas with lower rainfall than sheep; and finally, still farther inland, the desert where there is no food production of any sort.
A more subtle problem with Australia’s rainfall than its low average values is its unpredictability. In many parts of the world supporting agriculture, the season in which rain falls is predictable from year to year: for example, in Southern California where I live, one can be virtually certain that whatever rain falls will be concentrated in the winter, and that there will be little or no rain in the summer. In many of those productive overseas agriculture areas, not only rain’s seasonality but also its occurrence is relatively reliable from year to year: major droughts are infrequent, and a farmer can go to the effort and expense of plowing and planting each year with the expectation that there will be enough rain for that crop to mature.
Over most of Australia, however, rainfall depends upon the so-called ENSO (the El Niño Southern Oscillation), which means that rain is unpredictable from year to year within a decade, and is even more unpredictable from decade to decade. The first European farmers and herders to settle in Australia had no way of knowing about Australia’s ENSO-driven climate, because the phenomenon is difficult to detect in Europe, and it is only within recent decades that it has become recognized even by professional climatologists. In many areas of Australia the first farmers and herders had the misfortune to arrive during a string of wet years. Hence they were deceived into misjudging the Australian climate, and they commenced raising crops or sheep in the expectation that the favorable conditions greeting their eyes were the norm. In fact, in most of Australia’s farmlands the rainfall is sufficient to raise crops to maturity in only a fraction of all years: not more than half of all years at most locations, and in some agricultural areas only in two years out of 10. That contributes to making Australian agriculture expensive and uneconomic: the farmer goes to the expense of plowing and sowing, and then in half or more of years there is no resulting crop. An additional unfortunate consequence is that, when the farmer plows the ground and plows underground whatever cover of weeds has sprung up since the last harvest, bare soil becomes exposed. If the crops that the farmer then sows do not mature, the soil is left bare, not even covered by weeds, and thus exposed to erosion. Thus, the unpredictability of Australia’s rainfall makes growing crops more expensive in the short run, and increases erosion in the long run.
The principal exception to Australia’s ENSO-driven pattern of unpredictable rain is the wheat belt of its southwest, where (at least until recently) the winter rains came reliably from year to year, and where a farmer could count on a successful wheat crop almost every year. That reliability propelled wheat within recent decades to overtake both wool and meat as Australia’s most valuable agricultural export. As already mentioned, that wheat belt also happens to be the area with particularly extreme
problems of low soil fertility and high salinity. But global climate change in recent years has been undermining even that compensating advantage of predictable winter rains: they have declined dramatically in the wheat belt since 1973, while increasingly frequent summer rains there fall on harvested bare ground and cause increased salinization. Thus, as I mentioned for Montana in Chapter 1, global climate change is producing both winners and losers, and Australia will be a loser even more than will Montana.
Australia lies largely within the temperate zones, but it lies thousands of miles overseas from other temperate-zone countries that are potential export markets for Australian products. Hence Australian historians speak of the “tyranny of distance” as an important factor in Australia’s development. That expression refers to the long overseas ship journeys making transport costs per pound or per unit of volume for Australian exports higher than for exports from the New World to Europe, so that only products with low bulk and high value could be exported economically from Australia. Originally in the 19th century, minerals and wool were the main such exports. Around 1900, when refrigeration of ship cargo became economic, Australia also began to export meat overseas, particularly to England. (I recall an Australian friend who disliked the British, and who worked in a meat-processing factory, telling me that he and his mates occasionally dropped a gallbladder or two into boxes of frozen liver marked for export to Britain, and that his factory defined “lamb” as a sheep under six months old if it was destined for local consumption, but defined it as any sheep up to 18 months old if it was destined for export to Britain.) Today, Australia’s principal exports remain low-bulk, high-value items, including steel, minerals, wool, and wheat; increasingly within the last few decades, wine and macadamia nuts as well; and also some specialty crops that are bulky but that have high value because Australia produces unique crops aimed at specialty niche markets for which some consumers are willing to pay a premium, such as durum wheat and other special wheat varieties, and wheat and beef raised without pesticides or other chemicals.
But there is an additional tyranny of distance, one within Australia itself. Australia’s productive or settled areas are few and scattered: the country has a population only that of the U.S., scattered over an area equal to that of the U.S.’s lower 48 states. The resulting high costs of transportation within Australia make it expensive to sustain a First World civilization there. For example, the Australian government pays for telephone connection to the national phone grid for any Australian home or business at any location within Australia, even for outback stations hundreds of miles from the nearest such station. Today, Australia is the most urbanized country in the world, with 58% of its population concentrated in just five large cities (Sydney with 4.0 million people, Melbourne 3.4 million, Brisbane 1.6 million, Perth 1.4 million, and Adelaide 1.1 million as of 1999). Among those five cities, Perth is the world’s most isolated large city, lying farther than any other from the next large city (Adelaide, 1,300 miles to the east). It is no accident that two of Australia’s largest companies, its national airline Qantas and its telecommunications company Telstra, are based on bridging those distances.
Australia’s internal tyranny of distance, in combination with its droughts, is also responsible for the fact that banks and other businesses are closing their branches in Australia’s isolated towns, because those branches have become uneconomic. Doctors are leaving those towns for the same reason. As a result, whereas the U.S. and Europe have a continuous distribution of settlement sizes—large cities, medium-sized towns, and small villages—Australia is increasingly without medium-sized towns. Instead, most Australians today live either in a few large cities with all the amenities of the modern First World, or in smaller villages or else outback stations without banks, doctors, or other amenities. Australia’s small villages of a few hundred people can survive a five-year drought, such as arises often in Australia’s unpredictable climate, because the village has so little economic activity anyway. Big cities can also survive a five-year drought, because they integrate the economy over a huge catchment area. But a five-year drought tends to wipe out medium-sized towns, whose existence depends on their ability to provide enough business branches and services to compete with more distant cities, but which aren’t big enough to integrate over a huge catchment. Increasingly, most Australians don’t depend on or really live in the Australian environment: they live instead in those five big cities, which are connected to the outside world rather than to the Australian landscape.
Europe claimed most of its overseas colonies in hopes of financial gain or supposed strategic advantages. Locations of those colonies to which many Europeans actually emigrated—i.e., excluding trading stations where only relatively few Europeans settled in order to trade with the local population—were chosen on the basis of the land’s perceived suitability for the successful founding of an economically prosperous or at least self-supporting society. The unique exception was Australia, whose immigrants for many decades arrived not to seek their fortunes but because they were compelled to go there.
Britian’s principal motive for settling Australia was to relieve its festering problem of large numbers of jailed poor people, and to forestall a rebellion that might otherwise break out if they could not somehow be disposed of. In the 18th century British law prescribed the death penalty for stealing 40 shillings or more, so judges preferred to find thieves guilty of stealing 39 shillings in order to avoid imposing the death penalty. That resulted in prisons and moored ship hulks filling with people convicted of petty crimes such as theft and debt. Until 1783, that pressure on the available jail space was relieved by sending convicts as indentured servants to North America, which was also being settled by voluntary emigrants seeking improvement of their economic lot or else religious freedom.
But the American Revolution cut off that escape valve, forcing Britain to seek some other place to dump its convicts. Initially, the two leading candidate locations under consideration were either 400 miles up the Gambia River in tropical West Africa, or else in desert at the mouth of the Orange River on the boundary between modern South Africa and Namibia. It was the impossibility of both of those proposals, evident on sober reflection, that led to the fallback choice of Australia’s Botany Bay near the site of modern Sydney, known at the time only from Captain Cook’s visit in 1770. That was how the First Fleet brought to Australia in 1788 its first European settlers, consisting of convicts plus soldiers to guard them. Convict shipments went on until 1868, and through the 1840s they comprised most of Australia’s European settlers.
With time, four other scattered Australian coastal sites besides Sydney, near the sites of the modern cities of Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, and Hobart, were chosen as locations of other convict dumps. Those settlements became the nucleus of five colonies, governed separately by Britain, that eventually became five of the six states of modern Australia: New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, and Tasmania, respectively. All five of those initial settlements were at locations chosen for advantages of their harbors or locations on rivers, rather than for any agricultural advantages. In fact, all proved to be sites poor for agriculture and incapable of becoming self-supporting in food production. Instead, Britain had to send out food subsidies to the colonies in order to feed the convicts and their guards and governors. That was not the case, however, for the area around Adelaide that became the nucleus of the remaining modern Australian state, South Australia. There, good soil resulting from geological uplift, plus fairly reliable winter rains, attracted German farmers as the sole early group of emigrants not from Britain. Melbourne also has good soils west of the city that became the site of a successful agricultural settlement in 1835, after a convict dump founded in 1803 in poor soils east of the city quickly failed.
The first economic payoff from British settlement of Australia came from sealing and whaling. The next payoff came from sheep, when a route across the Blue Mountains 60 miles west of Sydney was finally discovered in
1813, giving access to productive pasture land beyond. However, Australia did not become self-supporting, and Britain’s food subsidies did not cease, until the 1840s, just before Australia’s first gold rush of 1851 at last brought some prosperity.
When that European settlement of Australia began in 1788, Australia had of course been settled for over 40,000 years by Aborigines, who had worked out successful sustainable solutions to the continent’s daunting environmental problems. At the sites of initial European occupation (the convict dumps) and in subsequently settled areas suitable for farming, Australian whites had even less use for Aborigines than white Americans had for Indians: the Indians in the eastern United States were at least farmers and provided crops critical for survival of European settlers during the first years, until Europeans began to grow their own crops. Thereafter, Indian farmers were merely competition for American farmers and were killed or driven out. Aboriginal Australians, however, did not farm, hence could not provide food for settlements, and were killed or driven out of the initial white settled areas. That remained Australian policy as whites expanded into areas suitable for farming. However, when whites reached areas too dry for farming but suitable for pastoralism, they found Aborigines useful as stockmen to look after sheep: unlike Iceland and New Zealand, two sheep-raising countries that have no native predators on sheep, Australia had dingos which do prey on sheep, so that Australian sheep farmers needed shepherds and employed Aborigines because of the shortage of white labor in Australia. Some Aborigines also worked with whalers, sealers, fishermen, and coastal traders.
Just as the Norse settlers of Iceland and Greenland brought over the cultural values of their Norwegian homeland (Chapters 6-8), so too did the British settlers of Australia carry British cultural values. Just as was the case in Iceland and Greenland, in Australia as well some of those imported cultural values proved inappropriate to the Australian environment, and some of those inappropriate values continue to have legacies today. Five sets of cultural values were particularly important: those involving sheep, rabbits and foxes, native Australian vegetation, land values, and British identity.
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