The Biggest Estate on Earth Read online

  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.