The Pure State of Nature

Sacred cows, destructive myths and the environment

David Horton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000248142
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

'Aborigines did not cause the extinction of the megafauna . . . and it is unlikely that they have caused the extinction of any element of the fauna and flora.'

'If you want to practise control burning in order to protect houses or farms, then do it in the same way as you would use a bulldozer to clear a firebreak, but don't pretend that you are doing anything but damage to the environment.'

'If you commercialise an environmental resource you do so to make money. Don't pretend that it also benefits the environment.'

Spanning fifty thousand years and an entire continent, The Pure State of Nature presents a passionate account of the Australian environment. The myths that abound in popular and scientific writing, the 'theories' and fancies about the place of humans in the ecology of this vast landmass, are subjected to scrutiny. In particular, the author demolishes the widely accepted orthodoxy about the use of fire by Aborigines and their supposed part in the extinction of the Australian megafauna.

From the ruins of those myths The Pure State of Nature offers lessons for the new millennium. In turns provocative, humorous, impassioned and gentle, this is a bold book of ideas about the past and present, a book about how we can shape the future.

To The Pure State of Nature Dr David Horton brings many years' experience as scientist, farmer and archaeologist. Among his publications are Recovering the Tracks and The Encyclopaedia of Aboriginal Australia. He now writes and consults from his stud sheep farm in New South Wales.

1
'Paved with good intentions': Theories on Aborigines and the environment

In all our stations there is a uniformity of culture only modified by the availability of different materials for manufacture . . . It is to be feared that excavation would be in vain, as everything points to the conclusion that they were an unchanging people living in an unchanging environment.

—ROBERT PULLEINE¹

The brief story I am going to quote is the most horrifying single paragraph I have read about the Australian environment. Horrifying for what it tells us about attitudes in the bush, to the bush, and for its description of just a single small episode of the kind of casual destruction that has so badly damaged this country in 210 years. Horrifying also for its vision for the future, as economic rationalism, having irreparably damaged employment, health, education, the arts and many other areas of Australian society, turns its attention to the environment. My keyboard melts as I transcribe these words:

Five years ago, Top End farmer Bill Moon bulldozed a square kilometre of eucalypt forest to plant more rice . . . Amongthe bigger eucalypts knocked over were about thirty nesting hollows of red-tailed black cockatoos. At the time, Moon wasn’t overly concerned about the habitat of the shrieking black birds with the flashing red and yellow tail feathers. However the 30 nesting hollows knocked down at Mount Ringwood proved to be one of the most populous nesting areas ever recorded for the red-tailed black cockatoo, and now Moon has some regrets about his actions. Red-tailed blacks, it seems, may eventually bring him far more return than the rice ever did.²

Imagine this kind of procedure repeated thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of times every year over most of the continent for 210 years, and wonder no more at the state of the Australian environment. Like other ‘settler countries’, Australia is a nation that pays homage to its settlers, seeing them as triumphing over great odds, enduring great hardship with great strength of character, forging Australian national characteristics. If the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, Gallipoli and the Kokoda Track were created on a hundred thousand bush blocks.

But a country that sees triumph over the environment, the conquest of Nature, as defining its national character, is a country in whose future the environment becomes more and more degraded and destroyed, until the settler ethos makes a country that is unfit for settlement. Instead of seeing the ancestors as heroes, the settlers should be tried retrospectively, in a kind of Environmental War Crimes Tribunal, for crimes against the environment.

Mount Ringwood is a microcosm for the uncomfortable history of European conquest, not just of the Australian continent but of the Australian environment. It raises many of the themes that are dealt with in this book: the destruction of trees, farming practices, attitudes to wildlife, attitudes to the Australian environment. Indeed it raises indirectly the question of attitudes to Australia itself. There is a very old stream of thought among some scientists, intellectuals, the media, and the public generally, that Australia is a place of the second-rate. It includes a contempt for the indigenous people and their culture, for the plants and animals, and for the landscape, and incorporates a contempt for locally produced art, literature, films etc. in comparison with those of America and Europe—the ‘cultural cringe’.

Farmers would probably not see themselves as thinking of Australia as second-rate. They are likely to be of the ‘my country right or wrong’, ‘love it or leave it’, ‘greatest country on earth’, ‘keep this our flag forever’ nationalist mould. But there is a curious disjunction between the ‘nation’ and the ‘environment’— people who see the one very clearly, and with ardent affection, tend not to see the other at all. When examined more closely, what such people tend to revere is the successful transplant of British ideas, economy, agriculture, plants and animals into Australia. Farmers revere great Merinos and Herefords, they don’t revere kangaroos or possums or cockatoos. Indeed indigenous animals are likely to be regarded as vermin, and the trees and shrubs referred to as scrub, good only for clearing. Indigenous people, having failed to invent the wheel, the plough, barbed wire and the gun, are also held in contempt, and attitudes have emerged again after years of being partly hidden (at least from mainstream media) before the rise of Hanson and the Wik debate gave them a focus.

Finally, Mount Ringwood shows the emergence of a new force in environmental matters, ‘economic rationalism’, which could do as much damage as any of the destruction wrought by the application of British farming practices, and British attitudes, to a land that deserved better.

One aim of this book is to show the way in which past and present and future combine with history and prehistory in forming current politics and philosophy. Once an esoteric study, archaeology is a powerful tool when used or misused to promote the political agenda of various groups. This is not a new phenomenon. Nazi Germany used an invented history to romanticise the Nazi party and provide propaganda about Germany’s destiny; others have done something similar. Australia has its own myths about the past—some harmless, some not so harmless. Recently, ideas about the past have been used to promote particular environmental views. This is a theme I return to several times. At a time when every month (recently, for example, the frightening tornadoes and floods in Central America and the USA) brings evidence of the ecological disaster facing the world, such ideas must be carefully examined and challenged on every point. We have enough problems without basing environmental programs on mistaken ideas about prehistory.

This book is mostly about prehistory, then, about countering some mistaken notions, which have acquired the status of orthodoxy, about the physical impact of the Aborigines on this continent. It is a plea both for understanding the original Australians and for preserving what remains of the Australian environment.

Mark Twain said of the people of India, ‘It is a curious people. With them all life seems to be sacred except human life’. It could be said of Australians, ‘It is a suicidal people. With them no life is sacred except human life’. We don’t have to have either of these imbalances.

I live in the country, on a block partly cleared, probably last century, by intrepid pioneers. In the part that was cleared I can see the effects; in the part uncleared I see what once was; in the recovery of the land I see the potential. My small piece of land is a microcosm for the continent, like Mount Ringwood, and I will return to it again and again. In this book I aim to observe locally and think globally.

As I write this I look from my window to the east. Above the fog, I watch the sun rise over a pair of high, rounded hills. The first rays shine through distant branches, an irregular fringe of angular forms and dark-green foliage. Anyone sitting on this hill waiting for the sunrise to bring warmth to the morning would have seen the same view at any time in the last 50 000 years.

The rising sun begins to move the fog; the solid greyness begins to shift and flow. Then it starts to thin, and dimly seen shapes of trees can be seen closer at hand. This Australian landscape viewed close up is quite different to that of the distant hills. Here is a park, with a few large box and stringybark dotted across low rolling hills. As the mist thins more, other shapes emerge—in the middle distance young Hereford cattle, and closer to the house, Wiltshire Horn sheep, both animals and names resonant with their British origins. Occasionally appearing among them are what in this context seem quite alien shapes, shapes that change as the animals move, from four-legged sheep to bipedal beings mistakeable for humans. Bounding away they become identifiable as grey kangaroos, their strength and agility turning what to the sheep and cattle is a grassland divided into rectangles by barriers into a much older open landscape with no impediment to movement.

Still the sun rises, putting light directly onto the pasture, and at once the difference between a distant landscape dominated by botany, and a near landscape dominated by zoology, becomes apparent. Not some quirk of soil or aspect or rainfall, the animals have grass to eat in this place because this land was cleared. We know this because scattered through the grass, like tombstones, are the bases of trees. On most properties the process was completedlongago, and the evidence removed in a tidying-up operation where stumps were pulled and burnt, and a smooth greensward soon looked as if it had been that way forever.

Here, though, it is like a burgled house, drawers open and contents spilt, giving clear evidence of what has happened to the land. Several thousand trees were cut down, ringbarked or poisoned in a few weeks a century or more ago. It is possible that in those few weeks more trees were cut down on these few hundred acres than were cut down on the whole Australian continent before 1788.

The last hundred years is the only period in the last 50 000 when it would have been possible to sit on a bare hill in this place. In the last fifty years, the opportunities to sit on hills covered in trees have become fewer and fewer; in another fifty years they are likely to have gone.

There are other differences that I and my alter ego of 300 years ago would see as we looked around. At the bottom of the hill, ground is now bare that is unlikely ever to have been bare before. It is bare because of the light dusting of salt, an indicator of the upward movement of salty groundwater. I imagine a story: Long long ago the land was covered by sea. The snake searched and searched and couldn’t find any dry land where he could rest. So he dived down and down and hit the bottom of the sea. He opened his mouth and began to drink the salt water. He drank and drank until the level of the sea fell so far that the seabed was dry. Can I stop now? he asked the koala who had walked out onto the new dry land. No no, said the koala, the land is too salty for anything to grow, and you and I will be hungry. So the snake kept drinking. He reached further and further down into the soil. He reached down so far that he turned into a tree, and his tongue became the roots and his tail became the branches, and other good plants grew around his body, which was now the trunk. Thank you, said the koala as he climbed the tree and began to eat the leaves, but make sure you stay there so the sea never comes back again. And from that day on the Aboriginal people, who ate the other plants and hunted the animals who lived in the forest, never chopped down trees, for fear the sea would return.

With the baring of the ground comes erosion, at times into massive gullies. An erosion gully is something that my alter ego may never have seen, or seen only rarely, as a noteworthy and temporary feature of the landscape, after an unusual combination of circumstances such as drought followed by a major fire, followed by days of rain followed by drought.

Finally, not only had a land dominated by plants become a land dominated by animals, but the proportions of those animals had changed. My friend would comment on the abundance of kangaroos and parrots and birds of open space like magpies and pipits (the pipits, looking like an Australian sparrow, feed and play all round the house). He would notice the few small birds, and the virtual absence of small wallabies and possums and other small marsupials. He would probably say, noticing the lack of understorey, and the absence of hollow logs—ah, their homes are gone.

Here we sit, side by side, separated by 300 years of history and 50 000 years of differing world views. Neither of us can claim to be a conservationist; both of us want to see the land healed. How did we come to this damaged landscape, this uncertain future?

Aboriginal society and culture and religion combine to ensure that Aboriginal society and culture and religion stay the same for all time. They also combine to ensure that Aboriginal use of the environment results in that environment staying exactly as it is for all time—to ‘defeat’ history, in Stanner’s words, by becoming ‘a-historical in mood, outlook and life’. When I was studying farming I was taught that at the end of every year I should be able to look back and know that I had effected improvements, made changes, constructed objects—there should never be a year with no progress.

This is the abysmal difference in outlook that has had such tragic consequences in this land.

There are many misconceptions about the relationship between Aborigines and the environment on the one hand, and the subsequent occupation and agricultural use of the country on the other. It was a misconception that began early (the wise hand of Providence removing the megafauna to make way for cattle and sheep) and has continued (firestick farming clearing tracks and land for farmers).

For many years it was both politically correct, and anthropologically sound, to argue against the proposition that Aborigines had made no impact on the Australian environment. Politically correct because it supported the proposition, still heard today in the native title ‘debate’, that if you don’t use it you lose it—if you owned a whole continent and you weren’t using it productively, you deserved to have it taken away from you by someone who would. (Interestingly, the same proposition is often heard today from the hard Right ‘develop at all costs’ group, the anti-environment ‘knock down all the trees’ brigade, the religious ‘every sperm is precious’ anti-population control mob, and the anti-immigration ‘if we don’t rapidly build up to 100 million people the Chinese will come and take this continent away’ nasties.)

There were gradual shifts in the attempts to rationalise the fact that a small group of British people had taken a whole continent away from a very large number of Aboriginal people. The first archaeological work, an excavation within a year of landing, was an attempt to see whether Aborigines had any belief in an afterlife, and hence whether they were human or not. For many years physical anthropologists have contributed to an evolutionary belief that Aborigines were somewhere down some scale. For many years, too, archaeologists contributed to a belief that Aborigines had been on the continent only a short time, and therefore, having only just unpacked their bags, as it were, had no more right to it than the British. (Similar propositions were put in southern Africa, leading to absurdities like the depiction of the ruins of Great Zimbabwe as being recently built by slavers. In Australia there has been a comparable line of thought: from the moment that some of the art of the north and north-west was first seen it was portrayed as being too sophisticated for Aborigines, and was clearly the remains of a lost civilisation, or visitors from other continents or even outer space.)

When the great length of time of occupation was gradually unravelled and recognised, it was logically clear that occupation of the place for thousands of years (eventually growing to 50 000, probably the right figure) must give some right of ownership. This had to be countered, and it was first countered by trivialising the length of time—essentially the argument was, to paraphrase Phillip Adams’s immortal words (‘we haven’t had thirty years of television, we have had one year of television thirty times’), that it wasn’t so much 50 000 years, but one year 50 000 times. They were an ‘unchanging people in an unchanging land’ (although the user of this phrase didn’t mean it in the way it has been misused), starting in the stone age and ending in it, starting with primitive rock art and finishing with primitive rock art—couldn’t even invent the wheel, as one recent vested interest expressed it, after the Mabo case suggested that length of ownership did indeed bring some rights with it. Finally, they hadn’t even had the nous to wreck the environment.

The proposition also had academic respectability. It was hard to escape the evidence that Aborigines still used stone tools and that they were hunter-gatherers. In terms of both technology and economy they were, on the face of it, equivalent to early developmental stages in Europe. The lack of local development of anything considered essential in a civilised society—the wheel, writing, houses, clothing, gunpowder, cat-o’-nine-tails—confirmed the view that, unlike the case in Europe, here development of society had been arrested at the Palaeolithic stage. The Aborigines were to the anthropologist, it was famously pointed out, what the platypus was to the biologist—a means of studying living fossils.

It was all a happy conjunction of science and politics and commonsense. Aborigines hadn’t had land taken from them—they hadn’t owned it (not having used it)in the first place. No, settlers had simply arrived and taken up land, a home not only among the gum trees and the kangaroos but, so many stage props, the Aborigines. The beauty of it was that, in another well-known fact, the Aborigines, like other primitive races, would simply melt away. The mechanism was ‘unknown’, but when up against civilisation, they just couldn’t compete. It was a good example of practical Darwinism in action.

It took a brave man to stand up against all this. Orthodoxy in science, particularly when it has economic and legal consequences, is hard to argue against. Norman Tindale was a brave man, and one with a grand vision. There were three points where the orthodoxy could be attacked: you needed a mechanism to powerfully affect the environment (since it was clear, or reasonably so, that Aborigines hadn’t been clearing or fencing or making roads or dams or earthworks or monuments)—fire; you needed a clear example of environmental damage—extinctions; and you needed new ways of looking at the Aboriginal economy in order to suggest that it wasn’t just parasitic in nature but actually quite like farming if you squinted a bit.

Tindale put forward all these propositions. Aborigines, he argued, had caused massive change by the use of fire:

Man, setting fire to large areas of his territory . . . probably has had a significant hand in the moulding of the present configuration of parts of Australia. Indeed much of the grassland of Australia could have been brought into being as a result of his exploitation. Some of the post-climax rainforests may have been destroyed in favour of invading sclerophyll, as the effects of the firestick were added to the effects of changing climate in Early Recent time . . . Perhaps it is correct to assume tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 'Paved with good intentions': Theories on Aborigines and the environment
• 2 'An unchanging people in an unchanging land': Archaeology and the past
• 3 Ά slow strangulation of the mind?': Eating fish is wrong
• 4 'A people so inclined': To farm or not to farm
• 5 Opened up a landscape': Firestick farming and the control burners
• 6 'The extinction of such pachyderms': The great megafauna debate
• 7 'Most enlightened conservationists
• 8 Convict's dilemma
• 9 Ghosts
• 10 Theses nailed to the door
• Notes
• Index