Jackie French in her 2013 history of Australia ‘Let the Land Speak’ shows that the Australian land was a veritable larder, one which those with the knowledge could live very well with minimal effort. She goes on to show how the desecration of this larder by white invaders was undertaken through arrogance, and an inability to see what was there. This desecration continues today with the guilt assuaged by denying it was ever there. Today’s extract recounts in part French’s visit to her ancestors farm in the southern tablelands of NSW. They took this land up in the 1840’s.
Peter (Ffrench), knew what a proper farm should be like. He recreated his hunk of Australian landscape and within two decades it looked much like the Glenelly of Ireland (his native home), at least in a wet year. The trees were ringbarked and burnt or cut down. The under storey of thorn bush, hop bush, wild cherry and tens or even hundreds of other species of natives were burnt, too. His sheep and cattle, tended by ex-convict shepherds and his tribe of sons, soon exterminated the native ground covers, orchids, dichondra, murrnong and hundreds of other plants as well as the native grasses
I (Jackie French) first saw the land near the old homestead in 1983. It looked like Ireland: grey rain from a grey sky. The erosion gully ran swift with clear water, disguising the clay bank that would have glared pale and bright in dry weather. The mist hung over green rye grass and clover. The cattle were fat and wet, looking at us with that resentful gaze of domesticated animals who know you have come from a dry ute and have coats to keep off the rain. The only trees on the property were old pines, half rotted and perhaps even dating back (well into the 19th Century). There was no gum tree to be seen except on the far-off hills.
Peter Ffrench and his descendants had done a good job of recreating his Glenelly, but they stole the land’s health and productivity to do it. They thought they were heroes, not villains, taming the wilderness and bringing forth grain and fruit were there was none.
The truth was that civilisation was already here, nor was the land a wilderness but a carefully created sustainable living larder. Don’t underestimate the courage, determination, and endurance of these early settlers and their families. But their inability to see the land as it was, and determination to recreate it into British parkland, would lead to the 1840’s and 1890’s depressions, and add to the misery of the 1930’s Great Depresssion and the recessions of the 1990’s and the later global financial crisis. They also turned a generous landscape – one where every two or three steps would give you something to eat – into a simplified semidesert.
Almost every form of standard Australian agriculture is an example of profound misunderstanding of the land, from plough and land clearing to adding superphosphate or growing orchards in neat rows. (See, for example, Ian Anderson ‘Australia’s growing disaster’, New Scientist, Issue 1998, July 1995) These were compounded by stocking with animals unsuited to the soil, water resources and native vegetation, from domestic stock like sheep, goats, pigs, deer and cattle, to wild rabbits, cats, starlings, blackbirds, pigeons and cane toads. These were all introduced because of a rigid mindset. . . There was no understanding of the burden of salt carried by this ancient land . . . so that clearing and irrigation could create a desert in less than a hundred years.