'Wilderness' in Australia
From EnvironmentWiki
--Nichole Hoskin 12:59, 27 February 2009 (EST)
Tim Flannery, 'Beautiful Lies: Population and Environment in Australia', Quarterly Essay 9 (2003), pp 39-40
"It is worth examining each of the goals of the early conservation movement separately, as each has had a significant effect on the world we live in today. Foremost among them was the battle to save Australia’s threatened “sacred” places. Such campaigns have been splendidly successful in preserving various geographic locations from deleterious development, the stand-out victories here being Frazer Island and the Franklin and Gordon Rivers. Over time, however, the program widened into a struggle to preserve at least one representative sample of each of Australia’s environmental types. Typically, the goal is to “save”, in the form of a national park or reserve, 10 per cent of each type of environment. This is fine as far as it goes, but as a strategy to conserve biodiversity it has been markedly less successful, and the reasons for this failure of practical conservation go back to the original sin of terra nullius."
"If we look around our national parks today, what we see in the great majority of cases are marsupial ghost-towns, which preserve only a tiny fraction of the fauna that was there in abundance two centuries ago. A classic example is Royal National Park south of Sydney. It’s the nation’s oldest national park, yet over the last few decades it has lost its kangaroos, its koalas, its platypus and greater gliders. Clearly, it is a fallacy to believe that proclaiming more such reserves will do very much to preserve Australian wildlife."
"Even though I knew this in my heart, none of it dampened my euphoria when, as a young environmentalist, I heard that another bit of Australia had been “saved” in a national park. Weirdly like a young British imperialist at the height of empire admiring the expanse of pink on the globe, I’d examine maps of Australia and inwardly cheer at the proliferating green areas. It was only when I gave away the falsehood of terra nullius (and the accompanying belief that the land was “ours” to carve up according to our inclinations) that I began to think differently. As you may imagine, the wilderness movement has faced similar difficulties, and even in strict wildernesses the plight of wildlife is just as dire. The hard truth is that the philosophy on which these movements were based was flawed, and there was no magical cure when European interference with the land was done away with. In fact, in many instances, things got worse."
"This dispiriting failure was one of the strangest manifestations of terra nullius. The environmentalists for all their good intentions singularly failed to appreciate that the land had been managed – indeed carefully shaped – by 47,000 years of Aboriginal occupation. Unless you’ve had the good fortune to have spent some time with hunter-gatherers, it’s difficult to comprehend the depth of the impact they have on the environment. It’s also difficult for anyone to comprehend the meaning of 47,000 years. To take the first point, it is important to realise the unique impact human inhabitation makes. A collection of large, intelligent omnivores can consume an astonishingly wide variety of food. Aboriginal Australians gave paramount importance to two things – hunting and fire. As hunters, the Aborigines were the primary carnivore on the continent, taking the lion’s share of animal protein. Through the use of fire they were also the top herbivore, with their fire consuming more vegetation than any herbivorous species, perhaps more than all the vertebrate herbivores put together."
"The black hunters culled the wildlife of Australia and preserved what was viable. So extensive and effective was Aboriginal hunting that the large marsupials were rare at the time of European contact. It was a redletter day when the explorer Sir Thomas Mitchell saw a kangaroo, and in the 1840s the naturalist John Gould felt that both red kangaroos and koalas were so rare that they were doomed to extinction. It is also astonishing to read explorers’ journals and discover how often they killed a kangaroo or a seal only to find a broken-off spear tip in the creature’s body."
Australian Aboriginal views of wilderness
“The popular definition of "wilderness" excludes all human interaction within the allegedly pristine areas, even though they are and have been inhabited and used by indigenous people for thousands of years. Like the legal fiction of terra nullius which imagined us out of existence until the High Court decision in the Mabo case, popular culture imagines us out of existence. The modern proponents of this wilderness cult dichotomise Aborigines into two- extremes, the Noble Savage in harmony with the environment and the modern Aborigine who poses the threat of extinction to rare and endangered species by virtue of wearing shoes, driving a Toyota and hunting with guns. The first High Court finding on the characteristics of an Aboriginal person was in the Franklin Dam case in which environmentalists and archaeologists were pitted against Tasmanian Aboriginal people who did not fit the caricature of the noble savage who was imagined to have inhabited the caves of the so-called Tasmanian wilderness. That finding in the High Court decision on the Franklin Dam Case revealed acutely for the first time that the Australian use of the term "wilderness" was a mystification of genocide. Where Aboriginal people had been brought to the brink of annihilation, their former territories were recast as "wilderness".”[1]
“The issue which gives immense urgency to our concerns about the future of our ecosystems is the egocentric quality of standard European and American-derived concepts of wilderness. They all involve the peculiar notion that if one cannot see traces or signs of one’s own culture in the land, then the land must be ‘natural’ or empty of culture. In the context of Australian settlement by Europeans, it does not require a great leap of imagination to realise that the concept of terra nullius (land that was not owned) depended on precisely this egocentric view of landscape. Not seeing the signs of ownership and property to which they were accustomed, many settlers assumed that there was no ownership and property, and that the landscapes were natural.”[2]
“The egocentric view of landscape, wherein one either sees oneself or one sees nothing at all, constitutes a kind of blindness; it closes off the evidence of what really is there.”[3]
References
1. Marcia Langton, ‘What do we mean by ‘wilderness’? Wilderness and Terra Nullius in Australian Art’, The Sydney Papers (1996) 8(1), p 20.
2. Deborah Bird Rose, Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness, Australian Heritage Commission, 2001, p 17.
3. Deborah Bird Rose, Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness, Australian Heritage Commission, 2001, p 17.
