Country is central to everything Aboriginal: it is a continuum, without beginning or ending. In this worldview, everything is living – people, animals, plants, rocks, earth, water, stars, air and all else.
So begins a new book by Bill Gammage and Bruce Pascoe entitled Country: Future Fire, Future Farming.
The authors are popular – lauded by academia and often on the national broadcaster – yet their core message in this new book is subversive, along with much of the content.
They state outright that the terrible infernos that burnt so much of south-eastern Australia two summers ago cannot be blamed on climate change. That such fires could be a thing of the past, if only forests were properly and actively managed (page 163).
It is a fact that for Australian Aborigines wilderness is not a place of fond nostalgia – as it is for many armchair conservationists – but rather a land without custodians.
Aboriginal culture was one of continuous manipulation of the landscape, recognising that plant and animal species have preferred habitats that can be created through careful management. To maintain diversity of plant and animal species there is a need to ensure a mosaic of different habitat types arranged in such a way that fire can always be contained.
In the new book Gammage and Pascoe very clearly state – what one of my other heroes Viv Forbes has been telling us for years – that responding to environmental degradation through the planting of more trees is misguided (page 80).
If we are to restore a balance appropriate to the plants and animals that existed pre-European settlement then we need more, and better managed, grasslands. To quote from the new book:
Grass, not trees, was central to healthy country in 1788. Grassland carried many useful plants, and most animals with most meat. It was a firebreak, it made seeing and travelling easier, and it confined forests, making forest resources more predictable. Almost always it took the best soil, and probably there was more grass then than now.
Of growing concern to me is that the grasslands of western Queensland, already degraded by two centuries of mostly mismanagement, are likely to be destroyed with the new goat industry. Yes goats!
If only there was support for a kangaroo industry. But no, the elites – Hugh Jackman guided by Terri Irwin oppose the harvest of native Australian wildlife – so now we have goats.
Just last year the Queensland government contributed $4 million towards the expansion of the local abattoir, not for cattle or kangaroos, but for sheep and goats. The plan is to process 900,000 a year.
A culture that better understood the connectedness of everything – that made less of a distinction between the animate and inanimate – might arguably recognise that goats are fundamentally incompatible with a healthy and diverse landscape in western Queensland.
Instead we have the tax-payer funded expansion of an abattoir for goats as a ‘much needed financial boost for western Queensland graziers during drought’.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
You are talking about the capture of feral goats, tens of thousands of them. I owned an outback property and goats are the great survivors and breeders. I mustered thousands of them, and sent them off to abattoirs. They are not and easy animal to muster and drive your sheep dogs crazy attempting to herd them.
The goats are just one of many hard hoofed animals that are not compatible with sound land management. Why select goats and ignore other problem feral creatures, as in thousands of donkeys, brumbies, pigs, water buffalo etc?
Another point is the assumption that aborigines managed the land by burning. This is a fallacy as can be seen in northern Australia today. The grasslands and woodlands are put to fire to make travel easier and flush out animals. To suggest this is done as a deliberate form of land management is a fallacy. The side benefits are an accident.
You have lived there Jennifer, so must have witnessed the burning and understood the reason for it. If grasses grow to high, it makes hunting and gathering difficult. In eastern Australia, the forest fires were a way to get food, particularly koalas which they favoured as prey. A burned or dead animal meant food for very little effort.
This is just another figment of Pascoe’s imagination.
Thanks Jennifer, Hume and Hovell traveling in 1824 reported numerous fires in North East Victoria. Other early accounts describe a grassy landscape.
East Africa is the home of hard hooved beasts. I was interested to learn of a pushback against blue gums there. They draw down ground water and do all sorts of heinous things.
Quoting from Hamlet “..though I most powerfully and potently believe, [it to be true] yet I hold it not honesty to have it thus set down;”
Your extracts do offer information which explains modern fire intensity but there are two flaws. First the Aboriginal people relied heavily on fire for their daily existence, they had no other source of warmth, night defence or completing their tool making. So they consistently gathered firewood, they also burned individual trees. The other flaw is in the history of the authors: Pascoe fudges quotations (just as BOM fudges temperature readings) and Gammage in crafting his writing conflates quotations or sources. Both write an interesting and at times arresting narratives but the end result contains too much myth.
As to my comments in part one, I suggest you read Sutton and Walsh’s
Reply to Pascoe’s claims. I found your article emotional rather than logical, as if Pascoe was an authority on all things aboriginal. He is not! He is , however, a reasonable storyteller, but as an amateur historian, he fails miserably.
Kris,
I’m interested in improved land management that requires the mainstream to understand and report how things really are.
Pascoe is moving us in this direction.
Now, what exactly did he get wrong in his book ‘Dark Emu’. If you could provide an example with page number.
Hi Jen,
This is in 3 parts and quite recent.
Here are the 3 links.
https://richardsonpost.com/alain-james/22819/who-were-australias-first-peoples-part-1/
https://richardsonpost.com/alain-james/22861/who-were-australias-first-peoples-part-2/
https://richardsonpost.com/alain-james/22974/who-were-australias-first-peoples-part-3/
Further to this, regarding the Ainu people, they have some genetic tie to some of the earlier NZ’ers, the Moriori. Recent studies into Sars have found that the first theoretical crossover to humans was in Northern Japan, (from badgers), after migration to North America and before Asian races were dominant there.
There is also mounting evidence of some historical reset, about 200 years ago, with a smudging of all our history. But that is mainly another story, although questions do arise even here in Australia.
Dunno if Rex Gilroy is still going, but he did ask some questions about stuff and made unexplained discoveries.
Jennifer,
I have read Dark Emu, and followed up with Bitter Harvest by Peter O’Brien – have you read O’Brien’s critique too ?
That Pascoe has tried to claim aboriginal heritage is not unusual for those who wish to give gravitas and cachet to their publications and utterances concerning Australia’s original human inhabitants.
Either that or something along the lines of “I grew up with aborigines – I have a friend(s) who is/are aboriginal” etc.
This is a constant refrain from those who wish to establish their aboriginal “credentials” before they launch into whatever argument they wish to start.
In your case you quickly reminisced for our edification, that you walked to school beside an aboriginal lad with big feet and actually swam in the same billabong as aboriginal kids … together !
If this gives your following comments credence, then my “credentials” must give my comments the status of Holy Writ as they are extensive, life long, existing and familial in nature.
I never spontaneously offer up these “credentials” – I prefer my offerings to be considered on merit however I will give way a bit and say that your billabong sounds a lot more classy than my childhood swimming adventures with aboriginal kids in cattle dams in the extensive resting paddocks at Murarrie near the old meat works where us kids, of all skin colours, ran wild way back then in the 50s and 60s.
So to Pascoe – he is an artful and experienced fictional writer, not an anthropologist, archaeologist or even a trained historian.
His literary cunning starts straight away upon opening the book.
The reader notes immediately an impressive bibliography of 295 titles to give the impression of a literary work of great gravitas.
As O’Brien notes, nearly two thirds of this list are not actually cited in explanatory notes in the text – he calls them the silicone implants of the academic world.
And of the 264 notes, 82 are collectively from Gerritsen, (22), Gammage (15), Sturt (15), Mitchell (30) with Mitchell and Sturt being the only major primary sources.
To be fair Pascoe gives homage to Rupert Gerritsen and Gerritsen’s brother Rolf remarked that “ninety per cent of Bruce’s work is taken from my brother’s research.”
That aboriginal people harvested seeds, ground them into a paste and baked this on stones beside a fire is unquestionable and practiced by many other racial groups all around the world – calling this food “bread” is a bit of a stretch in my view.
I was raised believing that Australia’s first people were tough, resilient expert hunters and gatherers who lived by harvesting the natural provender of their lands with little impact because of their nomadic nature within the boundaries recognised by clans and tribes.
Large permanent towns of 1000 people with organised agriculture, aquaculture and animal husbandry are not remembered in song and dance anywhere that I can find and I have asked elders but only know two who chortled when I asked them about farming.
Basically they said, why would our ancestors have done that ?
We knew where the food was and at what seasonal time so we went and camped, sometimes with other friendly tribes clans and harvested that food, did some trading danced and generally hung out together.
A classic example is the well documented Bunya Mountains, bunya nut harvest
And the question that Pascoe boosters never answer when I bring it up is that of human waste.
1000 people living in close proximity in a small area near a water supply can only reside there for a limited time before flies and insects and the smell become unbearable.
This rather unpalatable fact is not part of Pascoe’s hypothesis.
Aboriginal people have recorded that they knew when they were walking close to another aboriginal group by the smell of human faeces in the air.
I have just ordered the highly credentialed Sutton and Walshe book so am looking forward to learning some more about pre-colonial aboriginal life.
Our indigenous cousins, whether they have been here for ten thousand or sixty thousand years, having “out-competed” their predecessors, UTTERLY altering vast swathes of the Australian landscape in the process.
In just over two hundred years, much of it has changed dramatically from what it looked like when the First Fleet staggered ashore.
Where explorers like Mitchell found endless plains of waving grasslands, there is now a fair swag of untidy scrubland, for a start.
The cyclic burning off, over millennia, favoured grasses and the sort of game animals that flourished in them. The entire point of their burning of the grasslands was to chase the current protein providers towards an array of clubs and spears AND coincidemntaly. to leave a nice layer of ash to assist the regrowth of the grass. Thus, when that bunch of nomads returned in five or six years, the flourishing grass would have fattened up a whole new bunch of edibles. The locals were a nomadic culture wedded, not to slash and burn agriculture, but to burn and bash hunting and barbecuing.
Eucalypts, the unspoken villains of the relatively recent Californian fires, are FIRE CLIMAX species. Most of them have seed pods so tough that they require a brisk warm-over from a low intensity fire to crack them open so the seeds can start germinating. When they are allowed to be so successful that they form vast forests, they become firebombs, with racing crown fires roaring through the oil-rich canopy. If that is coupled with a huge ground level fuel load from leaf and bark litter and hardy undergrowth, the soil itself is baked to sterile dust by the heat. Subsequent wind and rain carries away more of the thin, desperately valuable top-soil, and the cycle continues.
When these intense fires occur in the eucalyptus forests abutting actual rain-forests or even wet sclerophyll ones, the “cuddly” rain-forests get severe peripheral damage. The catch is that the “cuddly” species are MUCH slower at recolonizing their turf and thus the eucalyptus species advance a bit more. See Victoriastan for several prime examples. At least here in Queensland, pre-emptive “controlled burns’ are still an active element of bushfire “management. How long our Labor government keeps that up is open to conjecture.
It is all actually fairly straightforward, but there is precious little taxpayers’ money to be “granted” were that to be publicly acknowledged.
So, the nomadic indigenous folks “bio-engineerd a favourable environment for themselves.
A couple of questions:
Why did the Tasmaian refugees (being from a MUCH earlier migration when the tide was a LONG way out). suddenly give up the consumption of shellfish, their MAJOR source of protein? Did a tribal notable cop a bad oyster one day?
Who were the Lake Mungo people in the succession of “arrivals?
The great Inland Sea?
Absolutely existed, but a bit before recorded history. Hi thee to Winton region and spend a day at the dinosaur museum / research facility.
Perched on top of a rocky “jump-up”, several hundred feet above the vast plain, you will find a fossilized record known as the dinosaur stampede. .
It basically took almost no excavation to uncover it. However: a couple of questions.
What was the nature of the “overburden”?
What pressure and heat is requited to turn alluvial silt into stone?
Imagine a bunch of small, tasty (turkey-sized) critters running across a mudbank. The interpretation is that they were being pursued by a much larger carnivore that also left its prints. Fair enough.
However, what was to stop the next rain or river rise from erasing those foot prints? This applies to all “petrified” footprints everywhere.
Was the big predator merely pursuing the small “snacks” or were they all running from some other disturbance; (hypersonic rocks falling out of the sky spring to mind).
Another lifetime’s worth of reading and research awaits!!
“I’m interested in improved land management that requires the mainstream to understand and report how things really are.”
Pascoe is experimenting (at public expense) with growing some native vegetation in an area that not only has no evidence of Aboriginal Farming but does have evidence of a population oriented toward the fruits of the sea.
He has no formal qualifications in Agriculture or Land Management He is certainly not pointing the mainstream in the right directions.
Please do not risk your reputation as a serious scientist on a cover-up.
It is fanciful in the extreme to consider that the dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid.
Much more likely, they were the victims of an extensive orbital Dry Cycle and resulting famine.
Watching this from a distant perspective. Wondering about the frontier between “hunter gatherer” and “farmer”. Wondering about identity and power and the abuse of both. Wondering how certain topics, rooted in interpretations of subtle data can become “the abyss speaking back”.
With respect and care,
Thanks Hunter.
I draw parallels between the national outrage here in Australia against Novak Djokovic and conservative outrage against Bruce Pascoe.
Both have somehow tapped into a deep prejudice and tribalism. They are both very unhealthy.
For me, the Djokovic debacle was an incredible example of how well Australian government has applied the fear based anti-science tactics used by far too many governments under covid. For Pascoe, the question seems to be the power of a compelling narrative vs. data and definition. Not having the experience of living in Australia and not having read anything in depth about pre-European Autralian culture and practice, I believe saying more would be foolish.
That said, one thing I o know is Jennifer’s integrity and dedication to being informed by data. So I will always support Jennifer in her explorations and research done guided by those two pillars.