The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia

The

BIGGEST

ESTATE

on EARTH

Other books by Bill Gammage

The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War

An Australian in World War I

Narrandera Shire

The Sky Travellers: Journeys in New Guinea 1938–1939

Co-authored:

The Story of Gallipoli

Co-edited:

Australians 1938

Crown or Country: The Traditions of Australian Republicanism

Hail and Farewell: Letters from Two Brothers Killed in France in 1916

Six Bob a Day Tourist

The

BIGGEST

ESTATE

on EARTH

HOW ABORIGINES MADE AUSTRALIA

BILL GAMMAGE

First published in 2011

Copyright © Bill Gammage 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To the people of 1788,

whose land care is unmatched,

and who showed what it is to be Australian

Fire, grass, kangaroos, and human inhabitants, seem all dependent on each other for existence in Australia; for any one of these being wanting, the others could no longer continue. Fire is necessary to burn the grass, and form those open forests . . . But for this simple process, the Australian woods had probably continued as thick a jungle as those

of New Zealand or America . . .

THOMAS MITCHELL, SYDNEY, JANUARY 1847

. . . observing that the grass had been burnt on portions of the flats the Blacks said that the rain that was coming on would make the young grass spring up and that would bring

down the kangaroos and the Blacks would spear them from the scrub.

OSWALD BRIERLY, EVANS BAY, CAPE YORK, 1 DECEMBER 1849

CONTENTS

Illustrations

Thanks

Sources

Abbreviations

Definitions

Foreword by Henry Reynolds

Australia in 1788

Introduction: The Australian estate

1. Curious landscapes

2. Canvas of a continent

Why was Aboriginal land management possible?

3. The nature of Australia

4. Heaven on earth

5. Country

How was land managed?

6. The closest ally

7. Associations

8. Templates

9. A capital tour

10. Farms without fences

Invasion

11. Becoming Australian

Appendix 1: Science, history and landscape

Appendix 2: Current botanical names for plants named with capitals in the text

Notes

Bibliography

ILLUSTRATIONS

All illustrations are in chapter 2.

Pictures 1–4: Light

1. Swamp Gum

2. Yellow and Apple Box

3. White Gum

4. Blakely’s Red Gum

Pictures 5–12: Fire

5. Snow Gum

6. Eucalypts and acacias

7. Ribbon Gum

8. River Red Gum

9. Snappy Gum

10–11. Kangaroo Grass

12. Eaglemont 1889

Pictures 13–22: Broad-scale fire

13. Endeavour River 1770

14–15. Esk River 1809 and 2008

16. Mills’ Plains c1832–4

17. Onkaparinga 1838

18. Adelaide c1840

19. Ginninginderry c1832

20. Near Melbourne 1847?

21–2. Mt Eccles 1858 and 2007

Pictures 23–30: Arid-zone fire

23–4. Spencer’s Kantju 1894 and 2005

25–6. Spencer’s Uluru 1894 and 2005

27–8. Mountford’s Uluru 1938 and 2005

29–30. Great Sandy Desert 1953 and 2005

Pictures 31–37: 1788 fire patterns—edges

31. Constitution Hill c1821

32. Lively’s Bog 1998

33. Wannon Valley 1858

34. Wingecarribee River c1821

35. Swan River 1827

36. Mt Lindesay c1829

37. Milkshake Hills 2002

Pictures 38–41: 1788 fire patterns—patches and mosaics

38. Snowy Bluff 1864

39. Deadman’s Bay c2001

40. Bunya Mountains 2003

41. Near Mudgeegonga 1963

Pictures 42–52: 1788 fire patterns—templates

42. Wineglass Bay c2001

43. Branxholm 1853

44–5. Cape York 1891

46–7. Gatcomb 1949 and 1984

48. Gatcomb 2002

49. Kadina 1874

50. Bundaleer 1877–8

51–2. Lake George 1821 and 2009

Pictures 53–58: Templates in use

53. Hunting kangaroos c1820

54. Using fire c1820

55. Spearing fish c1820

56. Barwon Valley 1847

57. King George Sound 1832

58. Somerset 1872

Picture 59: A European mosaic

59. Kangaroo Island 1983

THANKS

This book is about achievements of people I never knew. Far too late, I thank them.

Before everyone else I thank my wife Jan. She has always helped my work, but for this book more than any other she gave up much, with extraordinary patience and good humour over many years. She made the book possible.

I next thank three friends, clear-eyed readers: Henry Nix, Henry Reynolds and Denis Tracey, for polishing a draft and for help along the way. I thank Henry Reynolds especially, for years of encouragement, and for his generous foreword.

I thank the Humanities Research Centre at the ANU for hosting my research, and an ARC Fellowship for generously supporting part of it. I thank Pip Deveson, Leena Messina, Mike Powell, Jill Waterhouse and especially Gurol Baba for help with images, and I thank the staff of the archives and libraries listed in the Abbreviations, especially my friends at the National Library of Australia. I thank Elizabeth Weiss at Allen & Unwin for her promptness, courtesy and efficiency.

The following list makes clear how impossible it is to thank as they deserve the many other people who helped me:

ACT: Bryant Allen, Don Baker, John Banks, Tim Bonyhady, Ian Brooker, Phil Cheney, Bill Clarke, Bob Cooper, Jan Cooper, Helen Digan, Mary Eagle, Brian Egloff, Barney Foran, Kevin Frawley, Alison French, Ian Gammage, Jake Gillen, Jack Golson, Janda Gooding, Peter Greenham, Chris Gregory, Niel Gunson, Stuart Hay, Luise Hercus, Robin Hide, Geoff Hope, Iain McCalman, Neal McCracken, Kim McKenzie, George Main, Sally May, John Merritt, Howard Morphy, John Mulvaney, Daphne Nash, Hank and Jan Nelson, Jim Noble, Penny Olsen, David Paterson, Nic Peterson, Tony Vale, Gerry Ward, Elizabeth Williams.

France: Laurent Doussot.

NSW: John Blay, Denis Byrne, Janet and Jim Fingleton, Nic Gellie, David Goldney, Helen Harrison, David Horton, Christine Jones, Ian Lunt, John McPhee, Chris Moon, Eric Rolls and Elaine van Kempen, Yuji and Hiroko Satake, Rob Sellick, Stan Walton, Peter and Bunty Wright.

NT: Dave Bowman, Jim Cameron, David Carment, Stuart Duncan, Ted Egan, Margaret Friedl, Punch and Marilyn Hall, Dick Kimber, Chris Materne, Julia Munster and Sam Spiropoulis, Vern O’Brien, Tom Vigilante, James Warden, Samantha Wells.

NZ: Ian Campbell.

Queensland: John Bradley, Athol Chase, Mac Core, Arch Cruttenden, Russell Fairfax, Rod Fensham, Bill Kitson, Kate Lovett (Steve Parish Publishing), Yuriko Nagata and Terry Martin, Melissa Nursey-Bray, Anna Shnukal, Brian and Jenny Wright.

SA: Carmel and Eric Bogle, Philip Clarke, Rob Foster, Tom Gara, Diana Honey, Rob Linn, Leith MacGillivray, John and Sue McEntee, Jean and Ron Nunn, Bernie O’Neil, Mick Sincock, Peter Sutton.

Tasmania: Jayne Balmer, Mick Brown, Graeme Calder, Sib Corbett, Fred Duncan, Louise Gilfedder, Andrew Gregg, David Hansen, Margaret Harman, Bill Jackson, Jamie Kirkpatrick, Greg Lehman, Jon Marsden-Smedley, Bruce McIntosh, Bill Mollison, Mike Pemberton, Edwina and Mike Powell, Mitchell Rolls, Lindy Scripps, Bill Tewson, Ivor and Sheila Thomas.

Victoria: Corinne Clark, Peter Coutts, Julia Cusack, Beth Gott, Jeanette Hoorn, Lynne Muir, Mathew Phelan, Judy Scurfield, Frances Thiele, Ian Thomas.

WA: Geoff Bolton, Jack Bradshaw, Neil Burrows, Peter Gifford, Ian Rowley, George Seddon, Tom Stannage, Roger Underwood, Dave Ward.

SOURCES

Few sources here come directly from Aboriginal people. Over the years Aboriginal friends and acquaintances in Narrandera, Alice Springs, the Coorong and northern Tasmania have taught me, but this book discusses all Australia, and I had neither the time nor the presumption to interrogate people over so great an area on matters they value so centrally. Instead there are three main source categories:

• writing and art depicting land before Europeans changed it

• anthropological and ecological accounts of Aboriginal societies today, especially in the Centre and north

• what plants tell of their fire history and habitats.

I have tried to exclude sources reflecting such natural determinants as soil or salt rather than human impact. No doubt I have not always succeeded. To compensate for this, and to defuse a charge deniers of Aboriginal impact make—that there is no evidence for it—I have accumulated a wide range of sources. They come from across Australia—not from every corner, but from more than enough corners to join the dots, for no people would apply such detailed skill and knowledge for so long to most parts, yet not manage the rest, or not know how. I hope the sheer volume and detail of the evidence might support the book’s central argument: that the 1788 landscape was made, that so many records over so great an area cannot all be wrong.

They are a fraction of what exists. Much lies unread or unnoted in the historical record which might answer important questions about Aboriginal land management. At least some answers are lost, but I believe more is possible than this book offers. It is only a start. It merely offers clues on what to look for on the ground and in the records, so that one day Australians might see more clearly the great story of their country.

ABBREVIATIONS

1. Institutions

2. Sources

DEFINITIONS

1788

The century or so of first contact between Aborigines and Europeans after white settlement began at Sydney Cove. In that century the contact frontier moved on and out until almost all Australia was known to the newcomers. The great world later found people it did not know of, but they knew of it, and in various ways awaited or avoided its coming. ‘1788’ includes these contacts.

‘1788’ is also shorthand for the beliefs and actions of Aboriginal people at the time of first contact. Thus 1788 fire refers to the deliberate use of fire as a land management tool, while since 1788 indicates a subsequent change to 1788 practice.

English stumbles to find apt words for 1788. Hundreds of pages try to define Aboriginal social units (tribe, horde, clan, mob, language group, family, kin) without achieving clarity or consensus. This book too uses words capable of imprecision:

animals

Usually includes birds, reptiles and insects.

association

Plant communities deliberately connected; a plant mosaic lacking enough evidence to identify as a template.

barren

1) treeless, or 2) useless to settlers.

bushfire

A fire accidentally or naturally lit. Some prefer the US word ‘wildfire’, but this implies that these fires are difficult or impossible to control, and that what they burn is wilderness. For Australia, and I believe elsewhere, both assumptions are wrong for 1788, and constricting, even defeatist, for today.

estate

Australia including Tasmania. Although comprising many ways of maintaining land, and managers mostly unknown to each other, this vast area was governed by a single religious philosophy, called in English the Dreaming. The Dreaming and its practices made the continent a single estate. In today’s terms, it blended a continuum of like-minded managers, mixed farms, and national parks.

people

Aborigines. Europeans are called ‘newcomers’ or an equivalent. It seems unjust to deprive Aborigines of the most common term for humanity simply because Europeans turned up, especially at a time when they were the only Australians. Similarly I use tribal names very cautiously, especially in the south. As Mike Powell’s article shows (see bibliography), these are mostly European inventions, not always sensibly related to 1788 life or land management. Where tribal names are entrenched I do use them; otherwise I use a more general term, such as ‘Tasmanians’. For a full list see under ‘Aboriginal groups’ in the index.

pick

Soft, green, short grass, high in nitrogen, preferred by all grass grazers.

predictable

Capable of being anticipated; certain assuming no adverse influence.

template

Plant communities deliberately associated, distributed, sometimes linked to natural features, and maintained for decades or centuries to prepare country for day-to-day working. Examples are a grassy clearing or plain beside water and ringed by open forest, an alternating grass–forest circuit or sequence designed to rotate where grazing animals fed, and a big open plain with little or no tree cover to deter animals but promote plants. To work well, templates for animals had to be kept suitably apart, but linked into a network ultimately universal (ch 8).

universal

The extent of the Dreaming; the limits of the imagined world; Australia including Tasmania; the Australian estate.

FOREWORD

Henry Reynolds

At the time of Federation there was an upsurge of interest in the Aborigines. Scientists like Baldwin Spencer and enthusiastic amateur ethnographers like FJ Gillen, RH Mathews and AW Howitt carried out research in remote parts of Australia and examined relevant written records which had been accumulating over the previous century. There was a sense of urgency about their work. Ascendant evolutionary theory suggested that the Aborigines were destined to be driven to imminent extinction by the iron laws of evolution. The widely observed decline of the indigenous population appeared to confirm evolution’s death sentence. The anthropological information sought by the scholars was endangered. It would soon disappear with the old tribesmen and women and be lost forever. And it was irreplaceable because it was assumed to embody evidence about the pre-historic origins of humankind, about language, religion, art, marriage and other social institutions. This gave these Australian studies international importance. Scientific journals in Europe and North America clamoured to publish their findings, and books on the Aborigines found readers among the intellectual elites, who used the raw ethnological data to weave sophisticated theories about human nature. But the scholars of this time had no interest in the actual Aboriginal communities living among the colonists in fringe camps or on sheep and cattle stations. They were seen as people who had lost both their racial purity and their pristine culture. They were also inclined to be irreverent and un-cooperative.

The twentieth century saw a slow process among settler Australians of re-assessment of Aboriginal society. Many currents came together. Evolutionary theory slowly lost its grip on Western intellectuals. Racial theories, increasingly challenged, were totally discredited by the human disasters in Europe. De-colonisation set up a tidal wave of change, and the adoption of human rights by the fledgling United Nations challenged the whole idea of a white Australia. By the 1920s it had become obvious that Aboriginal communities in settled Australia were growing, giving rise to anxiety about the so-called ‘half-caste’ problem. Political activists of varying political colours took up the Aboriginal cause. Scholarship slowly and unevenly responded to these swirling currents.

In the 1930s anthropologists began working in many parts of the country. They favoured tribal society in the more remote areas but they also worked with communities that had been in close contact with Europeans for many years. The emphasis was now on the way Aboriginal society functioned rather than a search for ancient roots. Linguists followed in the anthropologists’ tracks to record traditional languages. Appreciation of indigenous culture followed. Members of the Jindyworobak Movement of the late 1930s and 1940s sought to incorporate Aboriginal culture into their poetry, painting and music. The emergence of schools of traditional painting in Arnhem Land, the Central Desert and eventually in many regions of the country was one of the most extraordinary cultural developments in late twentieth-century Australia, and one which attracted international interest. From the 1960s there was a brilliant period of archaeology and in a few years the presumed date of human occupation was pushed back from 10,000 years to 40,000 and 50,000. Prehistorians celebrated the Aborigines as the discoverers and explorers of the continent. The 1970s saw historians belatedly recasting the national story and thereby ending what had been called the great Australian silence. Of even greater significance was the revolution in Australian jurisprudence carried through by the High Court in the Mabo judgment of 1992 and the Wik judgment of 1996.

Aboriginal land management was another matter opened up for reconsideration. The common view in the early years of the twentieth century was that, given the uniquely primitive nature of indigenous society, the Aboriginal nations had moulded their way of life to the country in which they lived. This view was fortified, and sentimentalised, by a generation of white Australians who learnt of the intimate relationship which Aboriginal people had with their homelands. It was a view favoured by the emerging environmental movement, which had found a society that lived in harmony with nature and trod lightly on the land. A radically different view of Aboriginal land management began to emerge in the 1970s and 1980s. The prehistorian Rhys Jones and the historian Sylvia Hallam both explored the way that Aborigines used fire to alter patterns of vegetation.

This pioneering work has been vindicated in Bill Gammage’s great book The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. It is the result of over ten years of reading in libraries and archives, of investigation of paintings and photographs, and travel across the continent. The amount of research is daunting. His bibliography contains over 1500 books, theses and articles. And this was only a selection of the items read as part of the project. It is the sort of research that will become increasingly rare as scholars are pressured to produce quick results from carefully directed research.

Bill manages to compress his vast amount of research into an entirely engaging narrative which has moments of memorable eloquence. His conclusions will come as a revelation to many readers. He establishes without question the scale of Aboriginal land management, the intelligence, skill and inherited knowledge which informed it. It dramatically changes the way we will in the future see Australian history. It is one of the half dozen or so works which in the last two generations have transformed the way settler Australians understand the world that existed before the European invasion. His achievement is not solely based on literary texts. Reading is only part of the endeavour. This other element is Bill’s profound understanding of the Australian environment, which is rare among historians. He is able in a unique way to see the landscape historically; to read it back to what it was like in the past. Anyone who has shared a journey across any part of Australia with Bill will return with intimations about the possibility of seeing the country in a totally new way.

One big question remains. Bill’s research is based on hundreds of observers who wrote about the Australian environment. He goes as far back as Abel Tasman in 1642 in his search for evidence. Much had accumulated by the middle of the nineteenth century and yet the synthesis had not been consummated. Why did it take so long to draw the obvious conclusions? The obsession with Aboriginal backwardness was just too useful to be cast aside. Bill’s evidence must be the final blow to the comforting colonial conceit that the Aborigines made no use of their land. But his message is not only one of deep regret for what was lost but also a call to his contemporaries to continue the task of ‘learning’ the continent. His final sentence is both challenge and exhortation: If we are to survive, let alone feel at home, we must begin to understand our country. If we succeed, one day we might become Australian.

The

BIGGEST

ESTATE

on EARTH

AUSTRALIA IN 1788

INTRODUCTION

The Australian estate

This book describes how the people of Australia managed their land in 1788. It tells how this was possible, what they did, and why. It argues that collectively they managed an Australian estate they thought of as single and universal (see Definitions).

The Australian estate was remarkable. No estate on earth was on so much earth. Including Tasmania, Australia occupies 7.7 million square kilometres, and straddles great diversity. Its southern neighbour is the Antarctic, its northern third is in the tropics. Cape Byron in the east is 4000 kilometres from Shark Bay in the west, and the land between includes Australia’s most productive farmland and its biggest deserts. Southeast Cape in the south is 3700 kilometres from Cape York in the north, yet both support rainforest. Moving inland from the coast, annual rainfall can decline by an inch a mile (15 mm/km), although rain rarely falls predictably anywhere. Over most of the continent highly erratic rainfall is what is predictable. Europeans have yet to get the hang of this. They know that seasons are not always seasonal, and in the north they recognise a Wet and a Dry, but in the south they mark the four seasons their ancestors brought from Europe. This convention recognises temperature but not rainfall, yet rain is central to managing the Australian estate.

The book rests on three facts about 1788.

1. Unlike the Britain of most early observers, about 70 per cent of Australia’s plants need or tolerate fire (ch 3). Knowing which plants welcome fire, and when and how much, was critical to managing land. Plants could then be burnt and not burnt in patterns, so that post-fire regeneration could situate and move grazing animals predictably by selectively locating the feed and shelter they prefer.

2. Grazing animals could be shepherded in this way because apart from humans they had no serious predators. Only in Australia was this so.

3. There was no wilderness. The Law—an ecological philosophy enforced by religious sanction—compelled people to care for all their country. People lived and died to ensure this (ch 4).

The Law prescribed that people leave the world as they found it. 1788 practice was therefore conservative, but this did not impose static means. On the contrary, an uncertain climate and nature’s restless cycles demanded myriad practices shaped and varied by local conditions. Management was active not passive, alert to season and circumstance, committed to a balance of life.

The chief ally was fire. Today almost everyone accepts that in 1788 people burnt random patches to hunt or lure game. In fact this was no haphazard mosaic making, but a planned, precise, fine-grained local caring. Random fire simply moves people’s guesses about game around the country. Effective burning, on the other hand, must be predictable. People needed to burn and not burn, and to plan and space fires appropriately (ch 7). Of course how a pattern was made varied according to terrain and climate: heath, rainforest and Spinifex each require different fire. Yet in each the several purposes of fire remained essentially the same. A plant needs fire to seed, an animal likes a forest edge, a man wants to make a clearing. Means were local, ends were universal. Successfully managing such diverse material was an impressive achievement; making from it a single estate was a breathtaking leap of imagination.

Edward Curr glimpsed this. Born in Hobart in 1820, pioneer squatter on the Murray, he knew people who kept their old customs and values, and he studied them and their country closely in the decades of their dispossession. After 42 years in Victoria he wrote, ‘it may perhaps be doubted whether any section of the human race has exercised a greater influence on the physical condition of any large portion of the globe than the wandering savages of Australia’.¹ He knew that linking ‘wandering savages’ to an unmatched impact on the land startlingly contradicted everything Europeans thought about ‘primitive’ people. He deliberately defied a European convention that wanderers barely touched the land, and were playthings of nature.

Some researchers still think this (appendix 1). They give ground grudgingly on whether Aborigines altered the land. They argue or assume that nature alone made the 1788 landscape, perhaps via lightning fires.² There is no evidence that lightning caused most bushfires in 1788, nor that it could shape plant communities so curiously and invariably as to exclude human fire impacts. Today lightning fire estimates vary from 0.01 per cent in western Tasmania to 30 per cent in Victoria, the latter an overestimate compared to 7–8 per cent for southern Australia and at most 18 per cent in the north. Only for western Queensland (80 per cent) does any researcher think lightning the major cause of fire.³ Today’s ‘relatively low frequency of lightning strikes in Australia’⁴ was even lower in 1788, because people lit so many fires then, leaving less fuel for lightning to ignite. If lightning fire distributed Australia’s plants, outside towns and farms the distribution pattern should be similar now and in 1788. It is not.

Other researchers pioneered a growing awareness that 1788 fire was important to plant distribution, and might explain it. Although early observers like Thomas Mitchell and Ludwig Leichhardt knew that Aborigines fired grass to attract game, not until the 1960s did researchers begin to sense system and purpose in Aboriginal burning. From different perspectives RC Ellis, Sylvia Hallam, Bill Jackson, Rhys Jones, Peter Latz, Duncan Merrilees, Eric Rolls, Ian Thomas and others showed how extensively 1788 fire changed the land.⁵

Where possible people worked with the country, emphasising or mitigating its character. Sometimes this was all they could do. Mountains, rocks, rivers and most swamps were there to stay. Yet even in these places people might change the country. They dammed rivers and swamps. They cut channels through watersheds (ch 10). They used fire to replace one plant community with another.

What plants and animals flourished where related to their management. As in Europe land was managed at a local level. Detailed local knowledge was crucial. Each family cared for its own ground, and knew not merely which species fire or no fire might affect, but which individual plant and animal, and their totem and Dreaming links. They knew every yard intimately, and knew well the ground of neighbours and clansmen, sharing larger scale management or assuming responsibility for nearby ground if circumstance required.

They first managed country for plants. They knew which grew where, and which they must tend or transplant. Then they managed for animals. Knowing which plants animals prefer let them burn to associate the sweetest feed, the best shelter, the safest scrub (ch 8). They established a circuit of such places, activating the next as the last was exhausted or its animals fled. In this way they could predict where animals would be. They travelled to known resources, and made them not merely sustainable, but abundant, convenient and predictable. These are loaded words, the opposite of what Europeans once presumed about hunter-gatherers.

A key difference between how farmers and how Aborigines managed land was the scale of 1788 enterprise. Clans could spread resources over large areas, thereby better providing for adverse seasons, and they had allies, sometimes hundreds of kilometres away, who could trade or give refuge. They were thus ruled less by nature’s whims, not more, than farmers. It is unwise to think of ‘normal seasons’ in Australia, but in seasons which suited farming, 1788 management made resources as predictable as farming, and in times of drought and flood made them more predictable. Mere sustainability was not enough. Abundance was normal.

This was a tremendous advantage. It made plants easier to concentrate, to burn, to let fallow, to make park-like, to share. It made life comfortable. Like landowning gentry, people generally had plenty to eat, few hours of work a day, and much time for religion and recreation. A few Europeans recognised this (ch 11), but for most it was beyond imagining. They thought the landscape natural and they preferred it so.

They did not see, but their own records show how carefully made, how unnatural, was Aboriginal Australia. It is time to look again.

Three rules directed 1788 management:

• Ensure that all life flourishes.

• Make plants and animals abundant, convenient and predictable.

• Think universal, act local.

These rules imposed a strict ecological discipline on every person. A few non-Aborigines have begun to think this worthwhile, but even on a district scale, let alone all Australia, none can do it.

How Aborigines did it is the story of this book.

1

Curious landscapes

In 1770 Lieutenant James Cook, HMS Endeavour, saw something remarkable along Australia’s east coast: the trees had ‘no under wood’. On 1 May he ‘made an excursion into the country which we found diversified with woods, lawns and marshes; the woods are free from underwood of every kind and the trees are at such a distance from one another that the whole country or at least a great part of it might be cultivated without being obliged to cut down a single tree’.¹ The land equally surprised Joseph Banks, gentleman on board. ‘The country tho in general well enough clothed’, he wrote, ‘appeared in some places bare. It resembled in my imagination the back of a lean Cow, covered in general with long hair, but nevertheless where her scraggy hip bones have stuck out further than they ought accidental rubs and knocks have entirely bared them of their share of covering.’ Hilltops, Banks was saying, were bare. Trees were on lower slopes, but ‘were not very large and stood separate from each other without the least under wood’.² Sydney Parkinson, Banks’ draughtsman, echoed his employer: ‘The country looked very pleasant and fertile; and the trees, quite free from under-wood, appeared like plantations in a gentleman’s park.’³

In the Whitsundays further north, Cook saw ‘land on both the Main and the Islands . . . diversified with woods and Lawns that looked green and pleasant’.⁴ There a century later naval commander GS Nares named Grassy Island, because it was grass-covered with a few trees on its summit. About half the island is tree-covered now. Nares saw other grassy Whitsunday islands, but except where cleared all are wooded today.⁵

On 23 August Cook summed up the east coast. It was ‘cloathed with woods, long grass, shrubs, plants &ca. The mountains or hills are chequered with woods and lawns. Some of the hills are wholly covered with flourishing trees; others but thinly, and the few that are on them are small and the spots of lawns or Savannahs are rocky and barren.’⁶ This was no shipside impression. Among other landings, Cook spent seven weeks at Cooktown (picture 13).

These remarks are curious. Untended east coast bush today has much under-wood and no bare hills, let alone woods chequered with lawns. Yet in the years to come Cook’s words were repeated again and again, and Europeans fresh-seeing the land made Parkinson’s comparison with a gentleman’s park more often than any other.

Across Australia newcomers saw grass where trees are now, and open forest free of undergrowth now dense scrub. South of Hobart, Abel Tasman saw land ‘pretty generally covered with trees, standing so far apart that they allow a passage everywhere . . . unhindered by dense shrubbery or underwood’.⁷ This is dense forest now: why not then? Of course in 1788 there were thick scrubs, impenetrable eucalypts, rainforest walls, but this sharpens the puzzle, for often they gave way abruptly to grass. In 1824 William Hovell reported moving suddenly from grass into tangles of undergrowth and fallen timber piled higher than his horses, almost impossible to walk through, let alone ride.⁸ Tasmanian Buttongrass, common in boggy country, also occurs where rainforest should be. How did it get there? Not how does it stay there now, but how did it get there in the first place, despite no change in soil, aspect or elevation from adjacent rainforest? White Grass likes open country, yet can be found under trees. For this to happen, once open country became treed. How? In 1788 Australia had more grass, more open forest, less undergrowth and less rainforest than made sense to Europeans. It was another country.

There is a tandem puzzle. Typically, grass grew on good soil and trees on poor (ch 7). In 1826 Robert Dawson described country behind Port Stephens (NSW) as

in general heavily timbered, and as usual, without underwood. After crossing a deep, and in some places a dry channel, which in rainy seasons would be called a river, the soil began to improve. The country gradually became less heavily timbered, and the views more extensive. This was in accordance with what I had been previously led to expect, and fully confirmed by my former observations, that the poorest soils contained more than treble the number of trees that are found in the best soil, being also much longer and taller. This, like most other things in this strange country, is, I believe, nearly the reverse of what we find in England.⁹

In South Australia Edward John Eyre, a most competent observer, wrote, ‘For the most part we passed through green valleys with rich soil and luxuriant pasturage. The hills adjoining the valley were grassy, and lightly wooded on the slopes facing the valley; towards the summits they became scrubby, and beyond, the scrub almost invariably made its appearance’,¹⁰ and Charles Sturt observed,

As regards the general appearance of the wooded portion of this province, I would remark, that excepting on the tops of the ranges where the stringy-bark grows; in the pine forests, and where there are belts of scrub on barren or sandy ground, its character is that of open forest without the slightest undergrowth save grass . . . In many places the trees are so sparingly, and I had almost said judiciously distributed as to resemble the park lands attached to a gentleman’s residence in England.¹¹

Near Gundagai (NSW) in the 1840s two tourists found ‘beautiful meadowland . . . bounded by sloping ranges of hills covered with grass, and thinly timbered. Generally speaking, all fertile lands in Australia appear to be characterized by these beautiful features.’¹² Generally speaking that was so in the 1840s, but not now. Why did the most fertile land grow the fewest trees?¹³

A few travellers puzzled at this. In 1831 William Govett saw summits behind Sydney ‘clothed with grass, which circumstance, considering the barrenness and excessive sterility which pervades all the connecting ridges, and that region of the mountains, is certainly very extraordinary . . . In general . . . the ranges are covered with short timber and scrub.’¹⁴ ‘The great peculiarity here’, RJ Sholl wrote northeast of Broome (WA), ‘as well as in the land to the north of the Glenelg, is the total absence of undergrowth bushes; between the widely separated thin and short trees there is nothing but grass and creepers. Let it be thin or thick, good or bad, tall or short, still it is grass.’¹⁵ At Omeo (Vic) about 1843 Henry Haygarth portrayed his perplexity vividly:

The gloomy forest had opened, and about two miles before, or rather beneath us—for the ground, thinly dotted with trees, sloped gently downwards—lay a plain about seven miles in breadth. Its centre was occupied by a lagoon . . . On either side of this the plain, for some distance, was as level as a bowling-green, until it was met by the forest, which shelved picturesquely down towards it, gradually decreasing in its vast masses until they ended in a single tree. In the vicinity of the forest the ground was varied by gentle undulations, which, as they intersected each other, formed innumerable grassy creeks and open flats, occasionally adorned with native honeysuckles and acacias . . . Two remarkable conical hills, perfectly free from timber, rose in the middle of the largest plain . . . The whole, as far as the eye could reach, was clothed with a thick coat of grass, rich and luxuriant, as if the drought, so destructive elsewhere, had never reached this favoured spot.

It was Omio [sic] plain. By what accident, or rather by what freak of nature, came it there? A mighty belt of forest, for the most part destitute of verdure, and forming as uninviting a region as could well be found, closed it on every side for fifty miles; but there, isolated in the midst of a wilderness of desolation, lay this beautiful place, so fair, so smiling.¹⁶

Omeo’s historian wrote,

When the first white men came to the Omeo Plains all the best country was treeless. On the lower foothills which bordered the plains, there were large gum trees, standing singly, and odd clumps of sally wood . . . northward and almost to the tablelands, about six miles away, the gum timber was dense, and known as The Forest,¹⁷

and Thomas Walker thought the valley ‘the prettiest piece of country I have seen since leaving the Murrimbidgee [sic], very thinly timbered, indeed in many parts clear, with here and there interspersed a few trees or a clump or a belt, the soil sound and good . . . the sward close . . . the whole being intersected by lagoons: it is quite like a gentleman’s park in England’.¹⁸

Other Gippsland travellers saw chains of plains,¹⁹ and in 1834 John Lhotsky confessed of similar chains between Gundaroo and Michelago (NSW):

It is . . . a most remarkable, but not very easily explicable fact, that they are altogether destitute of trees of any kind, and only on the secondary hills or banks, which divide their plications, are some gum-trees thinly scattered, whereas large timber covers the main ranges . . . it is difficult to understand, how it is, that there is not even a vestige of incipient sylvification in the plains and downs themselves.²⁰

Charles von Hugel, a botanist, stated, ‘A plain like the Goulburn Plain is certainly an interesting phenomenon . . . as in the case of all the plains mentioned earlier, the soil is good—why is it that no trees occur on it, seeing that they grow splendidly when planted? There is no easy answer to this question.’²¹ In the same district Govett observed in 1832,

The park-like forests of this County are relieved in many parts by plains, or portions of ground altogether destitute of timber. These plains vary in extent and form, some are hilly and undulating, while others appear a mere flat, and the generality of them possess a good soil. It appears as if the seed of the tree has never been, as it were, scattered upon them, for it cannot be disputed, that the trees which surround these plains would also vegetate upon them.²²

A century later TM Perry investigated these plains. He could find no soil distinctive to them or to the woodland around. Each could be ‘on identical soils’. He could not say why.²³ This was land where trees grow now.

Soil can regulate which plants grow where, yet Sturt saw trees vanish without any soil change, and puzzled at ‘the sudden manner in which several species are lost at one point, to re-appear at another more distant, without any visible cause for the break’.²⁴ In the Dorrigo (NSW) brush in 1894 Joseph Maiden reported ‘plains which simply consist of grass-land, entirely destitute of trees, or dotted about as in a gentleman’s park. Usually the edge of the scrub and of the plain are as sharply defined as it is possible for them to be, as though a Brobdingnagian with mighty sickle, had there finished his reaping.’²⁵ G Marks investigated in 1911, and found ‘open flats that never grew timber in their virgin state, yet they have similar soils to the timber areas that surrounded them, and apparently are identical in their chemical composition and mechanical nature’.²⁶ By then Leichhardt had discounted soils. At Calvert’s Plains on the Dawson (Qld) he noted,

It was interesting to observe how strictly the scrub kept to the sandstone and to the stiff loam lying upon it, whilst the mild black whinstone [basalt] soil was without trees, but covered with luxuriant herbs and grasses; and this fact struck me as remarkable, because, during my travels in the Bunya country of Moreton Bay, I found it to be exactly the reverse: the sandstone spurs of the range being there covered with an open well grassed forest, whilst a dense vine brush extended over the basaltic rock.

A month later he added, ‘It is remarkable that that part of the range which is composed of basalt, is a fine open forest, whereas the basaltic hills of the large valley are covered with a dense scrub.’²⁷ That stumped him.

In the South Australian mallee in 1839, stumps bewildered Eyre:

In some parts of the large plains we had crossed in the morning, I had observed traces of the remains of timber, of a larger growth than any now found in the same vicinity, and even in places where none at present exists. Can these plains of such very great extent, and now so open and exposed, have been once clothed with timber? and if so, by what cause, or process, have they been so completely denuded, as not to leave a single tree within a range of many miles? In my various wanderings in Australia, I have frequently met with very similar appearances; and somewhat analogous to these, are the singular little grassy openings, or plains, which are constantly met with in the midst of the densest Eucalyptus scrub . . . Forcing his way through dense, and apparently interminable scrub . . . the traveller suddenly emerges into an open plain, sprinkled over with a fine silky grass, varying from a few acres to many thousands in extent, but surrounded on all sides by the dreary scrub he has left. In these plains I have constantly traced the remains of decayed scrub—generally of a larger growth than that surrounding them—and occasionally appearing to have grown very densely together . . . The plains found interspersed among the dense scrubs may probably have been occasioned by fires, purposely or accidentally lighted by the natives in their wanderings, but I do not think the same explanation would apply to those richer plains where the timber has been of a large growth and the trees in all probability at some distance apart— here fires might burn down a few trees, but would not totally annihilate them over a whole district, extending for many miles in every direction.²⁸

Attempts today to explain these puzzles can be unsatisfying. Researchers write of soil boundaries, cracking clay, rain shadows, nutrient supply, frost and aspect. No doubt each applies somewhere, but none where trees grow now but not then. Other explanations—bushfire, salination, overgrazing—may sometimes be cogent, but rarely for sources so soon after newcomers came.

Even particular trees might be curiously placed. Surprisingly often early Europeans crossed rivers and creeks via ‘fallen’ trees. Records mention twelve in Tasmania, at least seven in Western Australia, four in Victoria, three in New South Wales and one in Queensland, including over rivers like the Murray, Lachlan, Goulburn, Gordon and Tasmania’s Emu, ‘the widest and deepest river we had seen since leaving Circular Head’.²⁹ It is hard to imagine a tree spanning those rivers now, or even a decent creek, yet in southwest Australia JC Bussell crossed several in one journey. Mary Gilmore said Aborigines dropped trees deliberately, by undermining their roots: she saw it done to cross Wollundry Lagoon at Wagga (NSW).³⁰

People may also have made straight tree lanes. Some led to initiation grounds. A ground near Mildura (Vic) was approached by a straight line of at least eight marked gums; another on the Macquarie by a ‘long straight avenue of trees, extended for about a mile, and these were carved on each side, with various devices’.³¹ On the Murray in 1844, a ‘natural avenue of gum-trees extends . . . two rows of noble trees growing at almost equal distances; the open grassy space between each row being at least 100 feet in width: so regular are the intervals between them, that it is almost difficult, at first sight, to persuade one’s self that they were not planted by the hand of man’.³² In Tasmania Henry Hellyer ‘ascended the most magnificent grass hill I have seen in this country, consisting of several level terraces, as if laid out by art, and crowned with a straight row of stately peppermint trees, beyond which there was not a tree for four miles along the grassy hills’.³³

Other curious plant stories have emerged since 1788: fire tolerant and fire sensitive plants side by side, plants needing one fire regime beside plants needing another, newcomers driving a carriage or painting a view through country where trees make this impossible now. Clear of settlement, there may be more trees today than in 1788.

Bill Jackson calculated that 47 per cent of Tasmania should have been rainforest in 1788, but wasn’t. It was eucalypt forest, scrub, heath or grass, sometimes with burnt rainforest logs beneath. Jackson instanced sites where other plants had displaced rainforest thousands of years ago, and remained ever since. He noted that Tasmania had much less rainforest than New Zealand’s south island, a comparable climate, and concluded that deliberate burning best explained the difference.³⁴ ‘The present distribution of floristic units in western Tasmania’, Rhys Jones agreed, ‘can be explained only in terms of both a high fire regime over a long period during the past, and the lifting of that pressure during the past hundred and fifty years.’³⁵

One aspect puzzled Jackson. ‘The boundaries between vegetation types at present seem remarkably stable . . . ’, he wrote, so it was ‘difficult to understand how such extensive areas of disclimax [unnatural] vegetation could arise in even [34,000 years—a 1999 estimate of how long people had been in Tasmania].’³⁶ If other plant communities had moved so little since they displaced rainforest, Jackson was saying, how did they displace so much, even in so long? He was thinking of random fire. Community boundaries would indeed be unstable if Tasmanians had burnt randomly, but they did not. They burnt with purpose, as the stable boundaries show. In northern Tasmania RC Ellis found that on the same soil the ‘boundaries between rainforest, eucalypt forest and grassland were sharp and relatively stable’. Tasmanians selectively burnt rainforest back, then patrolled its edges.³⁷

Some boundaries were moved. In Tasmania much rainforest has a curious feature: giant eucalypts overtop it. Hellyer described this south of Emu Bay:

This is a horrid place [to] be in, neither Sun nor Moon to be seen, no part of the sky, being completely darkened by dripping Evergreens consisting of Myrtle, Sassafras, Ferntrees, immensely tall White Gum and Stringy-bark trees from 200 to 300 feet high and heaps of those which have fallen lying rotting one over the other from 10 to 20 feet high.³⁸

Edward Curr, father of Victoria’s Edward Curr, echoed Hellyer:

enormous Stringy Bark Trees many of them three hundred feet high and thirty feet in circumference near the roots exclude the rays of the Sun and in the gloom which their shade creates those trees flourish which affect darkness and humidity . . . sassafras, dogwood, pepper trees, musk trees . . . in some situations blackwood of the best quality . . . fungi, mosses, lichens, ferns.³⁹

Others noted the phenomenon,⁴⁰ and it can still be seen (pictures 46–8). In Tasmania’s Mt Field National Park, opened in 1916 on land reportedly never logged, gullies and lower slopes support giant Swamp Gums, many scarred by fire. Under them is rainforest like Myrtle, Sassafras and Tree Fern, but no eucalypts. This is so too elsewhere in Tasmania: in the Styx, the Tarkine and the Blue Tier; and along the mainland’s east coast, for example in the Bunya Mountains (Qld) (picture 40) and the McPherson Range (Qld/NSW). On Cape York Christie Palmerston saw many examples: in the upper Daintree he cut

through one patch of jungle . . . which has splendid green grass all along the top, but the sides are covered with dense jungle. Kept to this spur to the eastward for about four miles, and cut my road through four patches of dense jungle . . . The timber on the open ridges was principally gum, oak, bloodwood, and honeysuckle, and there was splendid soil on all the mountains.⁴¹

All this is climax (natural) rainforest country. Eucalypt seedlings can’t grow in rainforest: there is no light. How did those giant eucalypts get there? Clearly, when they were young there was no rainforest. Without fire rainforest has returned, so fire once kept it back. No stray marauder can do that. It needs determined burning when conditions are right, and in rainforest that is not often. Eucalypts topping rainforest indicate land people once went to great trouble, working against the country, to clear and keep clear.⁴² Ancient eucalypts also stand above dense dry scrub with no young eucalypts. Such places have unnatural fire histories.⁴³

Other tree or scrub distributions also signal this. Kurrajongs like open land, which they got in 1788 because the tap root survives fire and the tree re-sprouts from base buds, but on reserves today, fire regenerators like wattle and casuarina are choking the ancient stands, and no seedlings survive. In semi-arid country two fires every five years are needed to clear Hopbush, but it became a major pasture menace after 1788.⁴⁴ Fire made Tasmania’s dry Buttongrass plains, yet beside them may stand pines which fire kills, some 2000 years old.⁴⁵ In Arnhem Land Blue Cypress needs mild fires every 2–8 years. Fires more frequent or intense kill or damage the stand; fires less frequent let it choke with saplings. Lightning or casual burning could neither commence nor maintain such