by Bill Gammage
In 1859 William Morton stated of the Mackenzie northwest of Rockhampton (Qld), ‘All the open country does not consist of plains, but of thinly timbered and well grassed long narrow strips, running parallel to the river. Behind are patches or belts of scrub. Further back the land generally rises.’87 On Hooker Creek (NT) Augustus Gregory observed, ‘The plain traversed this morning was well grassed . . . [and] extended three to six miles on each side of the track, and was bounded by low wooded country’, and next day, ‘on the right bank . . . wide grassy plains extended from three to five miles back towards a low wooded ridge, but on the left bank the scrubby country came close to the creek’.88
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The template was flexible but simple to maintain. What fire to use and when varied across Australia (ch 6), but the purpose was the same, to associate water, grass and forest, providing habitats and making the clean, beautiful landscapes dear to Aboriginal feeling.
34. Joseph Lycett (c1775–1828), View on the
Wingeecarrabee River, NSW, c1821
PIC U466, NLA [from Lycett 1825]. Compare pictures 35–6, 39, 42–3, 50–1, 55–8.
I thank Peter and Bunty Wright and Bruce Berry of Bowral for
their help and generosity in attempting to locate this site.
Lycett copied this view, probably from Evans—about 1823 he copied a view of Bathurst’s Falls from Oxley’s Journal, where it is credited to Taylor after an Evans drawing.89 Like this view, it shows details common in colonial landscapes and unlikely to be systematically invented, such as sharp tree–grass edges. The grassland here may be recent, for it carries tall trees without low branches as though recently freed from forest.
Most cliff country along the Wingecarribee is now forest, and ground and air efforts to locate Lycett’s site with certainty failed. It may be Macarthur’s Crossing downstream from Berrima, used in Lycett’s time, and the only ford now marked on the lower river.90 There a track drops relatively gently to a riverside basin and the crossing, then climbs steep cliffs beyond. It is much too dense to photograph.
Lycett shows grass–forest edges, even on the narrow flat. This is the precise, fine-scale burning common in colonial art: for example in pictures 35, 51 and 54–5 and in Lycett’s View on Lake Patterson, N.S.Wales (c1820). In a perceptive passage, Leichhardt described this pattern in central Queensland:
The natives seemed to have burned the grass systematically along every watercourse, and round every water-hole, in order to have them surrounded with young grass as soon as the rain sets in. These burnings were not connected with camping places, where the fire is liable to spread from the fire-places, and would clear the neighbouring ground. Long strips of lately burnt grass were frequently observed extending for many miles along the creeks. The banks of small isolated water-holes in the forest, were equally attended to, although water had not been in either for a considerable time. It is no doubt connected with a systematic management of their runs, to attract game to particular spots, in the same way that stockholders burn parts of theirs in proper seasons.91
Others describing this district reported little dense forest once they cleared the notorious Bargo Brush. Downstream, surveyor James Meehan noted land ‘scrubby’ in parts, but generally ‘all thinly wooded good Forest’ or ‘all very thinly wooded Forest, good Swathe of Grass’.92 Upstream, Macquarie hailed the ‘grounds’ at Bong Bong as ‘extremely pretty, gentle hills and dales with an extensive rich valley . . . having a very park-like appearance, being very thinly wooded’.93 Oxley was with Macquarie: his 1822 map, admittedly broad-scale, declares all the land back to Mittagong ‘Good grazing Country’.94
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Grass and open forest then is thick bush now. Lycett’s open flats and cliff tops have gone, yet few eucalypts are more than 100–200 years old until well back from the cliffs, even though red clay continues. A landscape once carefully maintained has been let run wild.
35. Anon, Captain Stirling’s exploring party 50 miles
up the Swan River, WA, March 1827
PIC T2471, NLA. Compare pictures 34, 36, 39, 42–3, 50–1, 55–8.
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Other versions of this painting replace the sailor at right with kangaroos, and slightly change trees, uniforms or swans. Versions are variously attributed to James Stirling (1791–1865), expedition artist Frederick Garling (1806–73), Frederick Clause (1791–1852) or his friend WJ Huggins (1781–1845). This may be Clause’s copy of a Garling sketch. The site is sometimes identified as Claisebrook in East Perth, but that is not ‘50 miles up’. From across the river here Garling’s Encampment at the head of the river, 70 miles up (1827?) recognisably depicts this same topography at Stirling’s highest-up camp on 13 or 14 March.95 A 1929 plaque at All Saints Anglican Church, upper Swan, is near the site.
The peaks are invented, the ground at right is steeper, the pond is Ellen Brook, running into the Swan beyond, both now shallow. Stirling described the site as ‘a Fresh Water Lagoon and a bieutiful [sic] running brook watering several hundred Acres of natural Meadow, covered even at this Season of the Year with rich green herbaceous grass’. The meadow was not natural, as Stirling implied later that day, ‘The Evening was employed by us making a Garden on the Tongue of Land, which intervenes between the River and the Creek; we found there . . . rich soil of great depth; the ground had been cleared by fire a few weeks before and was ready to receive Seed.’96
Gardens were already nearby. In 1843 surveyor PLS Chauncey mapped three cultivated yam patches on the Swan at Ellen Brook, each in a ‘dog-wood thicket’. Sylvia Hallam noted that on land ‘maintained by burning as “open level country thinly wooded with red gums” these “thickets” with their yam vines stand out as areas deliberately protected from fire’.97 The painting shows similar fine-scale burning. Grass corridors separate water from trees and undergrowth (thickets?). The grass and two healthy Grass Trees suggest burning about every three years; the scrub less often. Trees and weeds smother the site now. It needs a good clean-up fire.
Backhouse called the upper Swan ‘poor, and covered with open [eucalypt] forest . . . low scrub of Acacia, Grass-trees, &c. Several species of Banksia and Acacia also form low trees. Along the borders of the Swan, there are narrow alluvial flats, of good land.’98 The low acacia may have grown following dispossession.
36. John Abbott (1803–75), Mount Lindesay, from a
sketch taken by A Cunningham, Esqr, Qld, 1829?
PX*D5/34, Mitchell Library, SLNS W. Compare pictures 13, 18, 42–3, 50, 56–8.
This is not Mt Lindesay but nearby Mt Barney, near the Queensland–New South Wales border. Patrick Logan, Allan Cunningham and others explored it in August 1828. Abbott was not with them, but he and Cunningham worked for the New South Wales Survey Office. Cunningham’s original is a field book sketch, which shows correctly that the land is not quite as flat as Abbott depicts, and that the trees at left were fewer and, significantly, in lines along rises.99 Abbott dated his copy 6 May—possibly 1829.
The view is from a camp on the Logan northeast of Mt Barney, with East Peak at left and Logan Ridge at centre. Cunningham climbed the mount partway on 3 August 1828, probably drawing his sketch while resting next day. He described this scene as a ‘thinly-timbered flat, recently burnt by the natives, and stretching nearly two miles to the base of the first range of forest hills’.100 Those hills are dense eucalypt forest with rainforest patches now, so they too were being burnt in 1788, converting rainforest to eucalypts. At right are forest–woodland edges; at left tree lines. Today this is mostly farmland.
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Cunningham mapped similar templates throughout the Moreton Bay district. North of the Bremer he noted ‘Level Country covered in part with dense brushes’, and further west, ‘Extensive tracts of level country, alternately Plain and Forest’.101 Charles Fraser, who also climbed partway up Mt Barney on 3 August, wrote from its flank, ‘A magnificent district extends to the southward, exhibiting many wide and partially cleared plains, stretching as far as the eye can
behold.’102 Clearly much country was arranged as here, with plains judiciously spaced and, in Fraser’s telling phrase, ‘partially cleared’.
Further north Fraser generally noted open country, sometimes with scrubby hills or forest belts. Following a grassy valley east of Boonah on 9 August, ‘we found ourselves completely surrounded by dense Forests of Araucaria [Bunya Pine], the only outlet being the immediate bank of the Stream’. The outlet was made. Later they met ‘an extensive and exceedingly fertile Valley abounding in the most extensive Ponds’.103 This is climax (natural) rainforest country.
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37. Milkshake Hills Forest Reserve, northwest
Tasmania, 13 February 2002
BG. Compare pictures 35–6, 39, 57–8.
Buttongrass ‘occurs where heath, scrub or forest has been repeatedly burnt, or on poor peaty, acid soils where the water table is high’.104 There is no high water table here; this Buttongrass was burnt through unknown centuries, most recently late in 2001. Fire made sharp grass–tree edges and left clumps in grassland, duplicating patterns familiar in colonial art. With correct fire, maintaining such a landscape is not difficult. Making it is, for this is climax rainforest country, the plant antipodes of Buttongrass.
A different fire regime made the forest. White eucalypt trunks rise from young rainforest, and though checked by fire, young eucalypts advance. At right the ground drops to a valley dominated by giant eucalypts, notably Messmate. Under them, Myrtle, Sassafras and other rainforest plants are advancing upslope almost to the edge, and on the valley floor are tree ferns in wet forest. Eucalypts advance onto grass; rainforest advances under eucalypts. Similar patterns are at Lawson Plains nearby, and at places like Mt Field, the Styx, the Weld and Blue Tier. Controlled fire and no fire are beacons of history.
PICTURES 38–42: 1788 FIRE PATTERNS— PATCHES AND MOSAICS
38. Eugen von Guerard (1811–1901), A view of the Snowy Bluff
on the Wonnangatta River, Gippsland Alps, Victoria, 1864
WCAA c~ Helen Carroll-Fairhall. Compare pictures 36–7, 41, 44–9, 53, 56.
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Snowy Bluff is near the Wonnangatta–Moroka confluence. In December 1860 Alfred Howitt was exploring this district, and took von Guerard along.105
At centre and right von Guerard shows three sloping clearings split by tree-filled gullies. They face northeast to catch the sun and bring animals to feed and warm. On them patch-burns located animals, and let hunters drive them uphill or headlong into a gully. Two clearings also carry lone trees spared by frequent grass fires, even when young. Perhaps rocks or backburning protected them. Other mountains had clearings ‘certainly very extraordinary’, as Govett put it in 1831 (ch 1). Von Guerard’s Govett’s Leap, Blue Mountains (1872–3) shows one above the falls; another is in Earle’s view of Wentworth Falls (NSW), Waterfall in Australia (c1830), which was treed by 1889.106
39. Steve Parish, Deadman’s Bay, Tasmania, from the southwest, c2001
A Steve Parish Souvenir of Tasmania, Brisbane c2001, 31. © Steve Parish Publishing,
reproduced c~ Steve Parish and Kate Lovett. Compare pictures 13, 43–9, 51, 54–5, 57–8.
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This is near Australia’s southern tip. Purrar Point is at right front, Prion Bay at right rear, Precipitous Bluff on the skyline.
Some doubt that Tasmanians lived in the southwest,107 but fire-promoted Buttongrass covers more than 45 per cent of it, reflecting persistent burning on a scale which lightning strikes cannot explain.108 Sedgeland ‘boasts more edible food than rainforest which probably would have occupied a lot of this area if the resident Aborigines had not persisted in their firings’.109 There are recent artefact scatters along this coast including here, while at Louisa Bay 6 kilometres west and on the Maatsuyker Islands offshore there is evidence of continuous occupation over the last 3000 years.110 In March 1772 Marion Dufresne saw numerous fires in the region and judged the coast ‘densely populated’,111 a year later Tobias Furneaux’ crew saw food scraps at Louisa Bay,112 and off the Maatsuykers Bass and Flinders
could not account for the vestiges of fires that appeared upon the two inner large islands; the innermost in particular, which lay at some distance from the nearest point of the main, was burnt in patches upon different parts of it. It must have been effected either by lightning, or by the hand of man; but it was so much unlike the usual effects of the former, that, with all its difficulties, they chose to attribute it to the latter cause. A great smoke that arose at the back of one of the bights showed the main to be inhabited.113
Near here in 1815 James Kelly met ‘a large number of natives’.114
Water, plain, forest, patch and ridge are associated, with no fire in rainforest but 3–20 year cool fires to promote grass and eucalypts. Inland is Messmate, near the coast Smithton Peppermint. They rim Buttongrass sometimes on wet ground but sometimes not, and at some edges smothered by invading forest.115 Controlled fire once stopped this invasion. The dark ridges are rainforest ‘probably not . . . burnt for several hundred years’, yet broken up by grass, especially on ridges and beaches. Rainforest is advancing. If fires like the big 1933 fire recur, it will slow. If not, eucalypts will capture grass, then rainforest the eucalypts, creating a common and memorable landscape: young rainforest topped by old eucalypts (ch 1). The scene is typical of the south and southwest coasts. Even in country now called wilderness, managing hands were there.
Of Precipitous Bluff a botanist wrote,
The vegetation on the western slope . . . forms a series of altitudinal zones. A great range of species and plant associations, of the wetter forest types, exist in a remarkably compact and undamaged state—there is a complete absence of any intrusion by fire on these slopes for a period of 300–500 years . . . [Nowhere else is there] such a complete set of rainforest vegetation zones adapted to the different altitudes.116
40. A Mt Mowbullan bald, Bunya Mountains, Qld, 19 October 2003
BG. Compare pictures 21, 38, 41–2, 44–54, 56–8.
Mowbullan means ‘bald head’;117 the head is rainforest now. People cleared forest from a few acres to small plains along water, crests or slopes to camp, lure or hunt. In Tasmania and the southeast most clearings on slopes face north to east; in warmer zones, where they are called balds, south to west. ‘Everywhere’, Stephen Simpson wrote near here in 1843, ‘even on the summit of the mountain, the abundance of grass and the fine timber . . . give the country a pleasing aspect’, and on the Mary he noted, ‘the country gradually opens out into some beautiful flats of the richest description, nearly clear of timber’.118
This bald faces south to the winter sun. Reversing 1788, Forest Red Gum fills its base and rainforest crowds upslope. A few Bunya Pines break the skyline or the grassline. Balds are common in bunya country because the great bunya festivals, held when the pines cropped heavily every three years, brought thousands of people to feast. Their hosts had to feed them on more than nuts. Balds increased and varied plant and animal food. Elders chose which bunyas and balds to reserve for feasts, and each was named. Simpson went through
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a bunya scrub, called Howah . . . [to] a beautiful plain, called Dungale . . . well watered by a fine creek and waterholes. On the borders of the plain fine ridges of open forest land, and behind them scrubs in almost every direction; in fact, this plain seems to be in the very heart of the Bunya country.
He crossed many ‘high grassy ridges’ to reach ‘an extensive flat, called Toon by the natives, which, during [Jack] Davis’s 14 years’ residence with them, was assigned to him. It appears, in fact, that everywhere to the northward the aborigines lay claim to particular tracts of land, allotting certain portions of it to the individual families composing the tribes.’119 Early governments knew how important bunyas were: ‘To secure the natives in their enjoyment of their triennial banquet, the colonial government has prohibited the felling of the tree; and stations are not allowed to be planted, nor stock run, in the bunya-bunya country.’120 This did no
t last: for years bullocks rested here. The foreground whipstick eucalypts show how recently they left.
In 1937 DA Herbert puzzled over balds. Soil or rainfall could not explain them, for some had lone trees ‘or sometimes groves’, mostly young. ‘On the lower slopes’, Herbert saw, ‘the eucalypts are not aged trees . . . They would thus appear to represent a returned forest rather than a primaeval one.’ He concluded that fire made balds: ‘great areas in coastal Queensland, formerly savannah, have, following protection from fire, become re-clothed with trees . . . [In] Brisbane, One Tree Hill, which is now heavily forested, was open savannah. That the balds have had trees in the past is shown by the fact that roots can be dug up.’121
In 1995 Rod Fensham and Russell Fairfax surveyed 61 bunya balds and assessed 73 others from air photos. Where Herbert had invariably found ‘open grassland . . . on the slopes and tops of bald hills backed by a solid wall of rain forest’,122 Fensham and Fairfax found that by 1991 eucalypts and other trees occupied about 26 per cent of what were balds in 1951. They concluded that balds could not be explained by anything but 1788 fire.123
Most ecologists accept this here, but perversely declare balds natural elsewhere.124 Natural fire could not have made and maintained clearings from Tasmania to Cape York which are now reverting to trees. It is not easy to burn rainforest to make grass, or to keep back eucalypts and other fire friendly species while protecting fire sensitive bunyas. To do all these at once evidences expert botanists and fire managers over many generations.