Livestock, Land Cover, and Environmental History: The Tablelands of New South Wales, Australia, 1820–1920

Abstract

For southeastern Australia, arrival of the First Fleet in 1788 raises similar issues in environmental history as the 1492 landing of Columbus in the Americas. But Anglo-Australian settlement is younger and better documented, both in terms of scientific proxy data and historical sources, which include data on stocking rates that generally were light. Environmental concerns were voiced early, and a lively debate continues both among professionals and the lay public, with Australian geographers playing a major academic and applied role. This article addresses environmental degradation often attributed to early pastoralism (and implicit clearance) in the Tablelands of New South Wales. Methods include: (1) comparison of well-reported travel itineraries of 1817–1833 with modern land cover and stream channels; (2) critical reviews of high-resolution pollen profiles and the issues of Aboriginal vs. Anglo-Australian fire ecology; and (3) identification of soil erosion and gullying both before and after Anglo-Australian intrusion. The results indicate that (a) land cover of the Tablelands is little changed since prior to Contact, although some species are less common, while invasive genera of legumes have modified the ground cover; (b) the charcoal trace in pollen profiles prior to Contact supports an ecological impact of regular Aboriginal burning and rare, catastrophic fires; and (c) most stream channels were already entrenched (“gullied”) well before 1840, with repeated cut-and-fill cycles during the late Holocene, but before Contact. Land impairment has not been a major problem on the Tablelands, although the last two centuries have experienced cumulative and complex environmental change. This unexpected empirical picture suggests that, until high-technology intervention, increasing periodicity/magnitude of extreme drought/precipitation events had been the overriding trend in interior New South Wales, perhaps reinforced by burning. There is no support for an apocalyptic model of colonial environmental history.

Key Words:

• Australia
• pastoral degradation
• vegetation change
• fire ecology
• gullying
• climatic perturbations.

Acknowledgements

We are particularly grateful to Bob Haworth, Chris Cunningham, and Iain Davidson (University of New England, Armidale) for information, feedback, constructive criticism, and hospitality. Robert Wasson (Australian National University) shared his experience on past and present environmental issues. A young librarian at the Bathurst Public Library introduced us to the topic of Australian landscape painting, and anonymous murals off the beaten track in Gunnedah and Wilcannia put us in touch with Aboriginal images of their world. The interlibrary service of the University of Texas Library obtained rare books, some from Australia, with Margaret Kaluzny and Sarah Harris assisting in the search. The Mitchell Library (Sydney) and State Records of New South Wales (Kingswood) provided microfilms. Maureen Kelley gave advice on the graphic preparations. This research was supported in part by the endowment of the Raymond C. Dickson Centennial Professorship of Liberal Arts.

Notes

1. Although construction of the environmental debate in the postcolonial anglophone world has common threads (Lowenthal 1997; Dunlap 1999), we would attribute a greater role to the background and perceptiveness of the initial intellectual and political leadership that came to the different colonies. In Australia, the environmental role of its Aboriginal inhabitants has also played a critical role in (re)defining that debate (Head 2000).

2. An extended project in Central Mexico uses physical and biotic information included in land-grant documents to reconstruct the environment on the eve of first pastoral settlement (Butzer and Butzer 1993, 1997). Complementary field and archival work show that the environment changed little during the next two or three centuries, although disturbance was already apparent near indigenous settlements at the time of European contact. Spanish settlers in Mexico practiced traditional, transhumant pastoralism, an activity long tested ecologically in the Mediterranean world (Butzer and Butzer 1995; Butzer 1988, 1996).

3. We use “Anglo-Australian” instead of “Euro-Australian,” given that the Australian territories of the nineteenth century were almost exclusively anglophone, despite the derivation of the colonists from different parts of the British Isles.

4. The version of Cunningham published by Lee is accurate and mainly complete, as verified from microfilms of the originals, found in State Records New South Wales, Kingswood (in SZ 7–15, reels 46 and 47, and SZ 20, reel 2744). Complementary references are given as SR, adding particulars.

5. See also the 1815 painting by John Lewin, reproduced in Benson and Redpath (1997, 284).

6. For modern residual woodlands on Figures 2 and 4b, see the rendition of medium or dense vegetation in Australia 1:100,000 Topographic Survey, Series R651, sheets Dubbo (8633, 1982); Wellington (8632, 1982); Euchareena (8732, 1976); Mudgee (8832, 1977); Molong (8631, 1982); Orange (8731, 1977); Bathurst (8831, 1977); Cowra (8630, 1982); Blayney (8730, 1981); and Oberon (8830, 1982). On the 1:50,000 maps, the demarcation of woodland is identical, but for the incomplete 1:25,000 set, medium-dense woodland is significantly expanded in the form of “islands” within “scattered” vegetation, i.e., open woodlands with 10–30 percent canopy.

7. What Cunningham means by “brush” is apparent from the associations he uses: brush and undershrub, or dwarf timber/diminutive trees and brushy, i.e., low trees with a relatively dense understory. Scrub appears to mean low trees in rocky habitats. Several tracts of scrubby woodland were noted in the Central Tablelands by Cunningham in 1817, at least some of which lack an edaphic explanation, as did the “diminutive” trees of the Copperhannia bushland. Some such instances may represent secondary scrub following intense pre-Contact burns. It also is suggestive that the pockets of rich floras noted in the early 1800s were found in topographically secluded areas less likely to have been swept by fire.

8. For modern residual woodland and forest shown on Figures 5 and 6b, see Australia 1:100,000 Topographic Survey, Series R 651, sheets Boggabri (8936, 1969); Manilla (9036, 1969); Tambar Springs (8835, 1970); Curlewis (8935, 1969); Tamworth (9035, 1975); Coolah (8834, 1973); Blackville (8934, 1970); and Murrurundi (9034, 1970). For geological coverage, see New South Wales 1:250,000 Geological Survey sheets Narrabri (SH 55–12, 1971), Gilgandra (SH 55–16, 1968), Manilla (SH 56–9, 1973), and Tamworth (SH 56–13, 1971).

9. In the monsoonal climates of northern Australia, the least desirable time for “controlled” burning is late in the dry season (Southern hemisphere spring); in southeastern Australia, however, fuel moisture content is lowest in late summer and autumn. The traditional Aboriginal burning peak early in the dry season curtailed the destructive spread of late fires by the lack of continuity of fuel (Braithwaite 1991).

10. An example of the latter was reported from the Blue Mountains in October 1839, after the Aboriginal inhabitants had already been displaced. “The trees, huge masses of charcoal to all appearance, had no branches till very near the summit, and those bore only a few scattered tufts of rusty leaves” (Meredith 1846, 70). But Aboriginal fires around Sydney in the early 1790s had a similar impact: “two thirds of trees in the wood were very much scorched by fire, some were burnt quite black to the top” (S. Clark and McLoughlin 1986, 103). European settlement probably did not significantly change fire regimes in the Blue Mountains (C. Cunningham 1984). For example, an account of February 1824 from the Bathurst district seems to imply continued burning [by Aborigines?] to clear pastures: “It is by burning … that the forests' undergrowth is cleared to convert them into pastures, and we often saw the flames rising on different points of the surrounding … country” (French journal of René Lesson, published by Havard and Havard 1938, 284–85). The best contemporary painting is that of John Lycett (see Hoorn 1993), showing Aborigines using fire to hunt kangaroos, c. 1820. The fire is burning into the wind in a tract of close woodland.

11. Ideally, this discussion should include the question of changing ground cover across some two centuries (e.g., Norton 1972), but the travel reports on the complex associations of grasses (see Wheeler, Jacobs, and Norton 1982; Kahn and Heard 1997) at the time of Contact are spotty or their taxonomy confusing. Similarly, palynology cannot distinguish the many different kinds of grasses. Residual modern distributions suggest that Themeda australis (T. triandra, or kangaroo grass), Poa poiformis (blue tussock grass), and Stipa aristiglumis (plains grass) once were dominants in the southern parts of the Tablelands; as a result of overgrazing, it is thought that these were replaced by two species of Danthonia (wallaby grass); continuing grazing pressures led to the displacement of these perennials by mainly nonnative annuals and legumes (Medicago and Trifolium), and, ultimately, with invasion by weeds such as Rumex and Echium (Plumb 1982, 8; Mott and Groves 1994). Kangaroo grass is fire sensitive whereas Danthonia is not (Mott and Groves, 1994, but, ironically, the unaltered pastures had a low carrying capacity, whereas the intrusive legumes increased productivity (Plumb 1982). Since Themeda is a C4 grass and Danthonia has a C3 photosynthetic pathway, carbon isotopes of successive layers of humus in deep soil profiles should help determine whether the Themeda association was or was not once dominant.

12. The accumulating body of experimental data underscores that grazing on native or sown grass is among the least destructive forms of Anglo-Australian land use. The greatest destruction of all is set in train by ground-cover disturbance in the wake of logging activities (Neil and Fogarty 1991; Saynor et al. 1994; Loughran and Elliott 1996; Erskine and Saynor 1996; also R. Clark 1986).

13. A map reproduced in Commonwealth of Australia (1996, 6–28) purports to show very high gully densities in the Central Tablelands. We are puzzled by this depiction, which, at least in some sectors, seems to confuse gully density with drainage density, suggesting air photo or satellite interpretation without ground truthing. Perhaps the most spectacular gully system in southeastern Australia, at Bungonia, near Goulburn, was already seen and commented on as “ramified” by Allan Cunningham 27 April 1824 (SR: SZ 9, reel 46, original p. 123).

14. After Dorothea Mackellar's evocative poem My Country, published 1908 (see Mackellar 1990, 9). Despite a stifling, upper-class home environment, Mackellar traveled regularly to her family's rural estates.

15. The great majority of the palynological and geomorphologic studies related to environmental history are by geographers, often working in university units that are becoming multidisciplinary and that proclaim their goals under labels such as “resource management and environmental studies,”“human and environmental studies,” or simply “environment.” The Australian National University counterpart now offers a course in organizational sociology. Historical geographers have also placed strong emphasis on environmental themes. Today, almost every issue of Australia's two geography journals includes an article or two on different facets of ecological/environmental history.