Just as the Norse settlers of Iceland and Greenland brought over the cultural values of their Norwegian homeland (Chapters 6-8), so too did the British settlers of Australia carry British cultural values. Just as was the case in Iceland and Greenland, in Australia as well some of those imported cultural values proved inappropriate to the Australian environment, and some of those inappropriate values continue to have legacies today. Five sets of cultural values were particularly important: those involving sheep, rabbits and foxes, native Australian vegetation, land values, and British identity.
In the 18th century Britain produced little wool itself but instead imported it from Spain and Saxony. Those continental sources of wool were cut off during the Napoleonic Wars, raging during the first decades of British settlement in Australia. Britain’s King George III was particularly interested in this problem, and with his support the British succeeded in smuggling merino sheep from Spain into Britain and then sending some to Australia to become the founders of Australia’s wool flock. Australia evolved into Britain’s main source of wool. Conversely, wool was Australia’s main export from about 1820 to 1950, because its low bulk and high value overcame the tyranny-of-distance problem preventing bulkier potential Australian exports from competing in overseas markets.
Today, a significant fraction of all food-producing land in Australia is still used for sheep. Sheep farming is ingrained into Australia’s cultural identity, and rural voters whose livelihood depends on sheep are disproportionately influential in Australian politics. But the appropriateness of Australian land for sheep is deceptive: while it initially supported lush grass, or could be cleared to support lush grass, its soil productivity was (as already mentioned) very low, so the sheep farmers were in effect mining the land’s fertility. Many sheep properties had to be quickly abandoned; Australia’s existing sheep industry is a money-losing proposition (to be discussed below); and its legacy is ruinous land degradation through overgrazing (Plate 29).
In recent years there have been suggestions that, instead of raising sheep, Australia should be raising kangaroos, which (unlike sheep) are native Australian species that are adapted to Australian plants and climates. It is claimed that the soft paws of kangaroos are less damaging to soil than are the hard hooves of sheep. Kangaroo meat is lean, healthy, and (in my opinion) absolutely delicious. In addition to their meat, kangaroos yield valuable hides. All of those points are cited as arguments to support replacing sheep herding with kangaroo ranching.
However, that proposal faces real obstacles, both biological and cultural ones. Unlike sheep, kangaroos are not herd animals that will docilely obey one shepherd and a dog, or that can be rounded up and marched obediently up ramps into trucks for shipment to the slaughterhouse. Instead, would-be kangaroo ranchers have to hire hunters to chase down and shoot their kangaroos one by one. Further strikes against kangaroos are their mobility and fence-jumping prowess: if you invest in promoting growth of a kangaroo population on your property, and if your kangaroos perceive some inducement to move (such as rain falling somewhere else), your valuable crop of kangaroos may end up 30 miles away on somebody else’s property. While kangaroo meat is accepted in Germany and some is exported there, sales of kangaroo meat face cultural obstacles elsewhere. Australians think of kangaroos as vermin holding little appeal for displacing good old British mutton and beef from the dinner plate. Many Australian animal welfare advocates oppose kangaroo harvesting, overlooking the facts that living conditions and slaughter methods are much crueler for domestic sheep and cattle than for wild kangaroos. The U.S. explicitly forbids the importation of kangaroo meat because we find the beasts cute, and because a congress-man’s wife heard that kangaroos are endangered. Some kangaroo species are indeed endangered, but ironically the species actually harvested for meat are abundant pest animals in Australia. The Australian government strictly regulates their harvest and sets a quota.
Whereas introduced sheep have undoubtedly been of great economic benefit (as well as harm) to Australia, introduced rabbits and foxes have been unmitigated disasters. British colonists found Australia’s environment, plants, and animals alien and wanted to be surrounded by familiar European plants and animals. Hence they attempted to introduce many European bird species, only two of which, the House Sparrow and Starling, became widespread, while others (the Blackbird, Song Thrush, Tree Sparrow, Goldfinch, and Greenfinch) became established only locally. At least, those introduced bird species have not done much harm, while Australia’s rabbits in plague numbers cause enormous economic damage and land degradation by consuming about half of the pasture vegetation that would otherwise have been available to sheep and cattle (Plate 30). Along with habitat changes through sheep grazing and suppression of Aboriginal land burning, the combination of introduced rabbits and introduced foxes has been a major cause of the extinctions or population crashes of most species of small native Australian mammals: foxes prey on them, and rabbits compete with native herbivorous mammals for food.
European rabbits and foxes were introduced to Australia almost simultaneously. It is unclear whether foxes were introduced first to permit traditional British fox hunting, then rabbits introduced later to provide additional food for the foxes, or whether rabbits were introduced first for hunting or to make the countryside look more like Britain and then foxes introduced later to control the rabbits. In any case, both have been such expensive disasters that it now seems incredible that they were introduced for such trivial reasons. Even more incredible are the efforts to which Australians went to establish rabbits: the first four attempts failed (because the rabbits released were tame white rabbits that died), and not until wild Spanish rabbits were used for the fifth attempt did success follow.
Ever since those rabbits and foxes did become established and Australians realized the consequences, they have been trying to eliminate or reduce their populations. The war against foxes involves poisoning or trapping them. One method in the war against rabbits, memorable to all non-Australians who saw the recent film Rabbit Proof Fence, is to divide up the landscape by long fences and attempt to eliminate rabbits from one side of the fence. Farmer Bill McIntosh told me how he makes a map of his property to mark the locations of every one of its thousands of rabbit burrows, which he destroys individually with a bulldozer. He then returns to a burrow later, and if it shows any fresh sign of rabbit activity, he drops dynamite down the burrow to kill the rabbits and then seals up the burrow. In this laborious way he has destroyed 3,000 rabbit burrows. Such expensive measures led Australians several decades ago to place great hopes in introducing a rabbit disease called myxomatosis, which initially did reduce the population by over 90% until rabbits became resistant and rebounded. Current efforts to control rabbits are using another microbe called the calicivirus.
Just as British colonists preferred their familiar rabbits and blackbirds and felt uncomfortable amidst Australia’s strange-looking kangaroos and friarbirds, they also felt uncomfortable among Australia’s eucalyptus and acacia trees, so different in appearance, color, and leaves from British woodland trees. Settlers cleared the land of vegetation partly because they didn’t like its appearance, but also for agriculture. Until about 20 years ago, the Australian government not only subsidized land clearance but actually required it of lease holders. (Much agricultural land in Australia is not owned outright by farmers, as in the U.S., but is owned by the government and leased to farmers.) Leaseholders were given tax deductions for agricultural machinery and labor involved in land clearance, were assigned quotas of land to clear as a condition of retaining their lease, and forfeited the lease if they did not fulfill those quotas. Farmers and businesses were able to make a profit just by buying or leasing land covered with native vegetation and unsuitable for sustained agriculture, clearing that vegetation, planting one or two wheat crops that exhausted the soil, and then abandoning the property. Today, when Australian plant communities are recognized as unique and endangered, and when land clearance is regarded as one of the
two major causes of land degradation by salinization, it is sad to recall that the government until recently paid and required farmers to destroy native vegetation. The ecological economist Mike Young, whose job for the Australian government now includes the task of figuring out how much land has been rendered worthless by land clearance, told me of his childhood memories of clearing land with his father on their family farm. Mike and his father would each drive a tractor, the two tractors advancing in parallel and connected by a chain, with the chain dragging over the ground to remove native vegetation and replace it with crops, in return for which his father received a big tax deduction. Without that deduction provided by the government as an incentive, much of the land would never have been cleared.
As settlers arrived in Australia and began buying or leasing land from each other or from the government, land prices were set according to values prevailing back home in England, and justified there by the returns that could be obtained from England’s productive soils. In Australia that has meant that land is “overcapitalized”: that is, it sells or leases for more than can be justified by the financial returns from agricultural use of the land. When a farmer then buys or leases land and takes out a mortgage, the need to pay the interest on that high mortgage resulting from land overcapitalization pressures the farmer to try to extract more profit from the land than it could sustainably yield. That practice, termed “flogging the land,” has meant stocking too many sheep per acre, or planting too much land in wheat. Land overcapitalization resulting from British cultural values (monetary values and belief systems) has been a major contributor to the Australian practice of overstocking, which has led to overgrazing, soil erosion, and farmer bankruptcies and abandonments.
More generally, high valuation on land has translated into Australians’ embracing rural agricultural values justified by their British background but not justified by Australia’s low agricultural productivity. Those rural values continue to pose an obstacle to solving one of modern Australia’s built-in political problems: the often disproportionate influence of rural voters. In the Australian mystique even more than in Europe and the U.S., rural people are considered honest, and city-dwellers are considered dishonest. If a farmer goes bankrupt, it’s assumed to be the misfortune of a virtuous person overcome by forces beyond his control (such as a drought), while a city-dweller who goes bankrupt is assumed to have brought it on himself through dishonesty. This rural hagiography and disproportionately strong rural vote ignore the already-mentioned reality that Australia is the most highly urbanized nation. They have contributed to the government’s long-continued perverse support for measures mining rather than sustaining the environment, such as land clearance and indirect subsidies of uneconomic rural areas.
Until 50 years ago, emigration to Australia was overwhelmingly from Britain and Ireland. Many Australians today still feel strongly connected to their British heritage and would indignantly reject any suggestion that they treasure it inordinately. Yet that heritage has led Australians to do things that they consider admirable but that would strike a dispassionate outsider as inappropriate and not necessarily in Australia’s best interest. In both World War I and World War II Australia declared war upon Germany as soon as Britain and Germany declared war on each other, though Australia’s own interests were never affected in World War I (except for giving Australians an excuse to conquer Germany’s New Guinea colony) and did not become affected in World War II until the outbreak of war with Japan, more than two years after the outbreak of war between Britain and Germany. The major national holiday of Australia (and also of New Zealand) is Anzac Day, April 25, commemorating a disastrous slaughter of Australian and New Zealand troops on Turkey’s remote Gallipoli Peninsula on that date in 1915, as a result of incompetent British leadership of those troops who were joining British forces in an unsuccessful attempt to attack Turkey. The bloodbath at Gallipoli became for Australians a symbol of their country’s “coming of age,” supporting its British motherland, and assuming its place among nations as a united federation rather than as half-a-dozen colonies with separate governor-generals. For Americans of my generation, the closest parallel to Gallipoli’s meaning to Australians is the meaning to us of the disastrous Japanese attack of December 7, 1941, on our Pearl Harbor base, which overnight unified Americans and pulled us out of our foreign policy based on isolation. Yet people other than Australians cannot escape the irony of Australia’s national holiday being associated with the Gallipoli Peninsula, situated one-third of the way around the world and on the opposite side of the equator: no other geographic location could be more irrelevant to Australia’s interests.
Those emotional ties to Britain continue today. When I first visited Australia in 1964, having lived previously in Britain for four years, I found Australia more British than modern Britain itself in its architecture and attitudes. Until 1973, the Australian government still submitted to Britain each year a list of Australians to be knighted, and those honors were considered the highest possible ones for an Australian. Britain still appoints an Australian-nominated governor general for Australia, with the power to fire the Australian prime minister, and the governor general actually did so in 1975. Until the early 1970s, Australia maintained a “White Australia policy” and virtually banned immigration from its Asian neighbors, a policy that understandably angered them. Only within the last 25 years has Australia belatedly become engaged with its Asian neighbors, come to recognize its place as being in Asia, accepted Asian immigrants, and cultivated Asian trade partners. Britain has now fallen to a ranking in eighth place among Australia’s export markets, behind Japan, China, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan.
That discussion of Australia’s self-image as a British country or as an Asian country raises an issue that has recurred throughout this book: the importance of friends and enemies to a society’s stability. What countries has Australia perceived as its friends, its trade partners, and its enemies, and what has been the influence of those perceptions? Let’s start with trade and then proceed to immigration.
For over a century until 1950, agricultural products, especially wool, were Australia’s main exports, followed by minerals. Today Australia is still the world’s largest wool producer, but Australian production and overseas demand are both decreasing because of increasing competition from synthetic fibers to fill wool’s former uses. Australia’s number of sheep peaked in 1970 at 180 million (representing an average of 14 sheep for every Australian then) and has been declining steadily ever since. Almost all of Australia’s wool production is exported, especially to China and Hong Kong. Other important agricultural exports include wheat (sold especially to Russia, China, and India), specialty durum wheat, wine, and chemical-free beef. At present, Australia produces more food than it consumes and is a net food exporter, but Australia’s domestic food consumption is increasing as its population grows. If that trend continues, Australia could become a net importer rather than exporter of food.
Wool and other agricultural products now rank only in third place among Australia’s earners of foreign exchange, behind tourism (number two) and minerals (number one). The minerals highest in export value are coal, gold, iron, and aluminum in that sequence. Australia is the world’s leading exporter of coal. It has the world’s largest reserves of uranium, lead, silver, zinc, titanium, and tantalum and is among the world’s top six countries in its reserves of coal, iron, aluminum, copper, nickel, and diamonds. Especially its reserves of coal and iron are huge and not expected to run out in the foreseeable future. While Australia’s largest export customers for its minerals used to be Britain and other European countries, Asian countries now import nearly five times more minerals from Australia than do European countries. The top three customers are presently Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan in that order: for instance, Japan buys nearly half of Australia’s exported coal, iron, and aluminum.
In short, over the last half century Australia’s exports have shifted from predominantly agricultural products to miner
als, while its trade partners have shifted from Europe to Asia. The U.S. remains Australia’s largest source of imports and (after Japan) its second largest export customer.
Those shifts in trade patterns have been accompanied by shifts in immigration. With an area similar to that of the U.S., Australia has a much smaller population (currently about 20 million), for the obvious good reason that the Australian environment is far less productive and can support far fewer people. Nevertheless, in the 1950s many Australians, including government leaders, looked fearfully at Australia’s much more populous Asian neighbors, especially Indonesia with its 200 million people. Australians were also strongly influenced by their World War II experience of being menaced and bombed by populous but more distant Japan. Many Australians concluded that their country suffered from a dangerous problem of being greatly underpopulated compared to those Asian neighbors, and that it would become a tempting target for Indonesian expansion unless it quickly filled all that empty space. Hence the 1950s and 1960s brought a crash program to attract immigrants as a matter of public policy.
That program involved abandoning the country’s former White Australia Policy, under which (as one of the first acts of the Australian Commonwealth formed in 1901) immigration was not only virtually restricted to people of European origin but even predominantly to people from Britain and Ireland. In the words of the official government yearbook, there was concern that “non-Anglo-Celtic background people would not be able to adjust.” The perceived population shortage led the government first to accept, and then actively to recruit, immigrants from other European countries—especially Italy, Greece, and Germany, then the Netherlands and the former Yugoslavia. Not until the 1970s did the desire to attract more immigrants than could be recruited from Europe, combined with growing recognition of Australia’s Pacific rather than just British identity, induce the government to remove legal obstacles to Asian immigration. While Britain, Ireland, and New Zealand are still Australia’s major sources of immigrants, one-quarter of all immigrants now come from Asian countries, with Vietnam, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and (currently) China variously predominating in recent years. Immigration reached its all-time peak in the late 1980s, with the result that nearly one-quarter of all Australians today are immigrants born overseas, as compared to only 12% of Americans and 3% of Dutch.
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