Bold Claims

Great to see Bill Gammage's The Biggest Estate on Earth get extra attention last month, winning the Victorian Premier's Literature Prize for non-fiction. I felt as if I'd been stood on my head when I flicked through it. Gammage overturns the accepted wisdom of Australian environmental science that ecology, rainfall, slope and aspect are the major factors affecting the distribution of Australian plant communities. He argues that the mosaic of grassland, dense brush and rainforest encountered by early Europeans was the result of traditional Aboriginal land management practices. The dense forests championed by conservationists sprang up as Aboriginal groups were killed and dispersed during white occupation. The 1788 templates, as Gammage describes the mosaic of habitats, were applied across the continent and shifted across the centuries. Eucalypt branches were placed in grassland to reseed forest, invading rainforest margins were burnt back.

His bold claims are supported by a wealth of compelling evidence. Gammage has me looking with fresh eyes at explorer's journals, colonial landscape paintings, marsupial lawns, the branching patterns of eucalypts along the Channel Highway, and the chocolate lilies in my garden. The oddly disjointed descriptions of terrain in early travellers' accounts become explicable and forgiveable. Leichhardt on the Condamine River in Queensland in 1846, for example: “...these rich flats, which would delight the eye of cattle breeders, are limited toward the ranges by thick bricklow scrub. This scrub covers the hills to the southward, between the creek and a long range, and is interrupted by plains, almost entirely grown over by vervain...” (p.2). Gammage persuasively explains such abrupt transitions between vegetation types as the result of controlled burning, forming kangaroo traps, grazing grounds and yam plains.

Chocolate lilies thrive after fire, the tubers were once a staple food (Salleh, 2005). This is not a photo from my garden, where the lilies are being suffocated by Yorkshire fog-grass. Photo by dracophylla, displayed under a Creative Commons licence.

I was reminded of the bushfire in A Little Bush Maid, the first novel in the classic Billabong series. A swaggie is whipped from the squatter's homestead after asking for meat with his tucker, he sets the long autumn grass alight as he leaves. The heroine Norah saves the sheep; the swaggie gets three years in Melbourne Gaol. “...Three days after there came a heavy fall of rain...in no time the paddock was green again, and the fire only did it good in the long run” (Bruce, 1996, p.70-71). The swaggie isn't identified as indigenous, but I'm tempted to see him as an Aboriginal man cleaning up country.  

So The Biggest Estate is an exciting read, but does it stand up to scientific scrutiny? I expected to find some reviews challenging this cross-disciplinary work (Gammage is a historian), but the mainstream press has been mostly uncritical. Perhaps environmental scientists, engrossed in their detailed local studies, feel no need (or hear no request from arts editors) to publicly address such sweeping claims from the humanities camp? Only Blay (2012) and the academics over at theconversation.edu.au have come to grips with his argument. Gammage's assertions should prompt a nation-wide debate. They have implications for the significance assessment and management of state forests and national parks. He is now calling for more prescribed burning in forest reserves (Rintoul 2012).

The Biggest Estate on Earth also won the 2012 Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History. You can read the first chapter at http://arts.gov.au/funding/awards/pmla/2012/shortlists (plus the first chapters of 29 short-listed Australian poetry, history and fiction books).

References

Blay, J. (2012). Ours is a land shaped by licking flames. Canberra Times, 24 Mar. Retrieved from Newsbank database.

Bruce, M. G. (1996). A little bush maid. Pymble, N.S.W: Angus & Robertson.

Dracophylla (2012). Arthropodium strictum. [image online] Available at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/40325561@N04/4156653165 [Accessed: 4 Nov].

Gammage, B. (2011). The biggest estate on earth: How Aborigines made Australia. Crows Nest, N.S.W: Allen & Unwin.

Leichhardt, L. (1846), Journal of Dr. Ludwig Leichhardt's overland expedition to Port Essington, in the years 1844-45, revised by the explorer, and published with his sanction, 1846. Retrieved from http://acms.sl.nsw.gov.au/album/albumView.aspx?acmsID=430784&itemID=823670 [Accessed: 4 Nov 2012].

Rintoul, S. (2012). Burn-off debate relit as fire season hits. The Australian, [online] 20 Oct. Retrieved from: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/burn-off-debate-relit-as-fire-season-hits/story-e6frg6nf-1226499649424 [Accessed: 4 Nov].

Salleh, A. (2005). Aboriginal fire-farming has deep roots › News in Science (ABC Science). [online] Retrieved from: http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2005/06/22/1398157.htm [Accessed: 4 Nov 2012].