by Tim Low
At Gungahlin I asked Peter why he doesn’t use kangaroos. ‘Cattle will graze down very tall grasses,’ he said, ‘whereas kangaroos prefer short stuff.’ Kangaroos also hit cars, which matters when you sit on the northern edge of Canberra. Fires take out thick grass but they also cause strife on nearby roads, trigger asthma attacks, and threaten the endangered striped legless lizard, one of the reserve’s rarities. The cattle aren’t eating enough, however, so Peter is trialling sheep in one paddock.
Sheep are all the go at Terrick Terrick, a new national park in northern Victoria. Head ranger Mark Tscharke amazed me by saying they run 800 sheep on their 1300 hectares of grassland. Eight hundred sheep in a national park! Numbers rise much higher in the lambing season. ‘Sheep have been grazed there for a hundred years,’ Mark said, ‘so we’re going with that management. We’re basically keeping the status quo until we know more about the system.’ Mark doesn’t pretend that sheep keep the reserve in its original state. Major Mitchell saw saltbushes and wattles when he explored around here. They vanished when pioneers brought in sheep. ‘They overgrazed to buggery,’ Mark told me. ‘Obviously there have been quite dramatic changes brought about by grazing. What we’ve lost we don’t know.’ But what remains includes twenty-four rare and threatened plant species and a bounty of rare animals. Terrick Terrick is now part of a vast ‘derived’ grassland of immense conservation value – despite its artificial origin.
I asked Mark why kangaroos weren’t used instead of sheep. The park has roos, Mark said, but they shun the grassland, preferring to feed near the shelter of trees. Expensive fencing would be needed to keep them in place. And they might devour endangered plants that sheep don’t eat. No-one trusts kangaroos! A new reserve nearby carries cattle instead of sheep. Mark is keen to know if cows produce a different kind of grassland.
Sheep will also stay in a new national park (formerly Oolambeyan station) created in southern New South Wales for an endangered bird, the plains-wanderer. ‘The plains-wanderer requires habitat that has to be grazed,’ said Terry Korn of the National Parks and Wildlife Service. ‘Consequently this will be a national park that will have sheep grazing in it.’
Sometimes mowing works better than grazing. In Canberra threatened-species officer Sarah Sharp showed me St Mark’s Grassland, a tiny remnant wedged between Kings Avenue, Barton, and Lake Burley Griffin. It’s too small and urban for cows or fire. It survived because the Anglican Church planned to build a cathedral here but never raised the funds. The church now tends the grass under Sarah’s watchful eye. Where the sward was thick I could see little else, but where a mower had passed through we saw billybuttons, yam daisies and delicate herbs. Five orchids grow here alongside endangered button wrinkleworts. By keeping it tidy over the years the church had preserved this site. ‘We mow as high as we can,’ Sarah said. ‘You actually produce an awful lot of litter on the ground. It creates a beneficial weed bed, so we rake the litter by hand and remove it with a trailer.’ Sarah wants mowing done twice a year.
Mowing is also the go at Majura Grasslands near Canberra airport, where cows could threaten air safety. Plans to land Queen Elizabeth’s jumbo here in 2000 were aborted because the turning jet would have damaged the grasslands, which support endangered earless dragons. The Queen went by RAAF Falcon instead, leaving her plane in Sydney. The ACT takes its grass seriously.
Managing grassland is like mastering a tightrope. You want not too many cows, sheep or roos, and not too few. ‘Conservation management is like stepping the knife edge,’ said Peter Mills, ‘and conservation with grazing is like the sharpest edge you’d ever want to step across.’ Sheep will stay in Epping Forest because Jamie Kirkpatrick’s exclusion plot vindicated the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ approach. Sheep are part of the ecology now. It’s a trade-off for our times. For Australia’s temperate grasslands there is no return to the past. Cloven hoofs and piles of dung are here to stay. The past may not have been as natural as we imagine, anyway. We don’t know to what extent Australia’s first people created these habitats. Aboriginal fires may have helped kangaroo grass thrive and displace less aggressive grasses, just as spear grass replaced kangaroo grass on Queensland farms. We know for sure that some grasslands, including the ‘balds’ in Queensland’s Bunya Mountains, are human-created.
Grasslands can certainly be ruined by mismanagement. In Simpsons Gap National Park, near Alice Springs, botanist Peter Latz showed me an alluvial flat invaded by African buffel grass (Cenchrus ciliaris). A ranger transferred from the Top End, where parks are burned each year, decided the place needed a burn. His mistake helped the fire-adapted buffel oust a diverse suite of native grasses, daisies and sedges. Management always demands utmost care and consideration. There’s no place for overconfidence. And conservation grazing is not an excuse to let farmers into national parks. The fact remains that cows and sheep have done irrevocable harm to Australia. Sheep pitched velvety peppercress into the category of an endangered species, and cows, by devouring native grass seeds, have imperilled many birds. Examples like these are endless.
Conservation is intervention. You can’t save nature by letting it alone; management is a must. Often this means curbing something native. But people puzzle over the cows ripping into Canberra’s reserves. ‘We don’t get complaints,’ Sarah Sharp told me. ‘We do get surprise.’ Sweet pittosporum culls around Sydney also provoke reaction. ‘Because it’s a native plant, people have problems with the idea of controlling it,’ said Samantha Olsen of Lane Cove National Park. ‘In national parks all native plants are meant to be protected.’
But it’s when a native animal needs controlling that complaints really fly. Kangaroo culls arouse controversy, and koala culls remain politically unacceptable. Yet many animals are already killed for conservation. I’ve mentioned kangaroos, wallabies, bellbirds (at Yellingbo), yellow-throated miners (in the mallee), currawongs (on Cabbage Tree Island), Australian ravens (on the same island), corellas (on Kangaroo Island), owls (on Lord Howe Island), silver gulls (at Lake Eyre), rosellas (on Norfolk Island), and crown-of-thorns starfish. Without culls, Gould’s petrel, and perhaps the helmeted honeyeater, would not exist. There is also illegal culling of koalas by farmers defending trees. Culling is the harsh reality of conservation management, but public awareness and acceptance lag well behind.
Killing has always been central to the Australian way of life. The first Australians were masterful hunters. The pioneers ate wallabies, possums, parrots, pigeons, honeyeaters, and even echidnas and dugongs. Colonial youths shot so many birds that bird-protection societies feared the collapse of civilisation if pest-controlling species were depleted. Hundreds of thousands of animals were, and still are, killed in defence of crops and pastures, on a scale much greater than most of us realise. The foods we eat come stained with the blood of flying-foxes, parrots and honeyeaters. No vegetarian should think their food is produced without animals dying.
Killing in national parks sounds contradictory because parks are looked upon as sanctuaries. ‘Sanctuary’, meaning ‘place of refuge’, was a name applied to early nature reserves. Colonial Australians knew that to achieve national goals millions of animals would be destroyed, and their moral response was to set aside small areas – sanctuaries – where animals could live without persecution. National parks today play a slightly different role. The present goal is preservation of whole ecosystems, not sanctuary for certain mammals and birds. Rangers don’t want national parks so crowded with animals that vegetation dies. That’s why they will contemplate culling koalas and kangaroos when most people find the idea repugnant.
I don’t like the idea of sanctuaries. Animals shouldn’t be treated kindly or cruelly according to lines on maps. It can’t be right to kill thousands of flying-foxes in an orchard (or a botanic garden) but wrong to kill a starving koala in a national park. (Nor can it be right to treat animals kindly or cruelly according to their status as ‘native’ or ‘introduced’. Keeping wombats in pens is deemed wrong, yet hens c
an be crowded together in cruel battery farms.) Some killing of wildlife is unavoidable, for all sorts of reasons; let’s accept that. But we shouldn’t tie our moral code to land tenures. Nature isn’t bound to national parks – it’s all around us.
It disturbs me that so much wildlife is killed in defence of food. In New South Wales, for example, farmers legally killed 240 000 flying-foxes in the years 1986–1992. The number shot illegally is estimated at 100 000 a year, Australia-wide. In Victoria the government paid for the killing of 120 600 corellas and galahs in 2000. Farmers in 193 Victorian parishes have an open season on wombats: they can kill when they please to protect fences and pastures. In Western Australia farmers were entitled to kill 1900 emus in 1999–2000, and Victorian fish farmers were allowed to cull 730 cormorants in 1996. In central Queensland alone the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service issued permits in one year for the culling of wallabies, flying-foxes, cockatoos, galahs, lorikeets, rosellas, red-winged parrots, noisy miners, friarbirds, figbirds, blue-faced honeyeaters, bowerbirds, cuckoos, orioles, currawongs, crows and ducks. The numbers of some of these birds killed were possibly minuscule. On the other hand, many farmers don’t know about permits – and nor did one Queensland wildlife ranger whose office was supposed to issue them. Farmers often don’t bother about permits, or they disregard cull limits.
In 2000 a lychee farmer near Cardwell in north Queensland was found operating 6.4 kilometres of electric grid without any permit. He electrocuted an estimated 18000 spectacled flying-foxes that summer. (The total Australian population is estimated at 150000.) After the farmer was reported for violating the Nature Conservation Act, a national parks officer came and issued him a permit to kill 500 bats. (This officer later came under investigation for his actions.) In an ensuing federal court action brought by conservationist Carol Booth, Justice Branson concluded that this farmer could extinguish half the spectacled flying-fox population in under five years, reducing World Heritage values in nearby Wet Tropics rainforests. She ordered the grid be closed. This grid was not the only one operating in Queensland, illegal or otherwise, although the Queensland government no longer permits their operation.
Culling on farms gets overlooked as a threatening process, the assumption being that animals prefer their ‘natural’ foods, only hitting crops when wild foods grow scarce. Some statistics support this, showing greater crop damage in drier years, but other evidence implies a real shift towards farms. ‘Five years ago, pest control authorities in South Australia were expressing few concerns about the rainbow lorikeet’, noted David Lamont and Allan Burbidge in 1996. ‘Now, the bird is considered to be as big a pest in that state as the starling.’ The lorikeets strip fruit in orchards. Grey-headed and spectacled flying-foxes are now up for listing as threatened species, and shooting and electrocution on farms are probably the main threatening processes. Orchards may be vast traps that lure bats to their deaths. Why bother seeking little berries in forests when unimaginable bounties grow nearby?
All the numbers and comments floating around in government reports suggest that rather more animals are killed on farms than anyone guesses. Birds even die to produce the wine we drink. Mortality on farms is obviously the main cause of death for some species in some areas. In an internal 1999 report (obtained under Freedom of Information), Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service officer Patrina Birt found that QPWS ‘poorly fulfils’ its role as the permitting authority. There was no basis for assuming that legal culls (quite apart from illegal ones) were ecologically sustainable.
I don’t say all this as an attack on farmers. I can’t blame them wanting to save their crops, even though I know they sometimes kill from bad motives. The Birt report had this to say: ‘The majority of growers also admit that it is anger and frustration that motivates them to shoot the animals on their crops. One grower who uses electric grids to control the wildlife on his crops admitted that he also shot the animals even though he did not have to because he was angry.’ The real problem for Australia is wildlife invading the agricultural landscape – or reclaiming the land it occupied before Europeans took over. I expect there will be a lot more animals on farms in future, and many more conflicts. Some of the fundamentals of farming may need rethinking. Nets may become standard devices for excluding animals from fruit crops. Many farmers have reached this conclusion. We may then need to grow sacrifice crops for deprived wildlife. I’ve seen them in southern California, where farmers are paid to grow greens for migrating snow geese.
Meanwhile, in Victoria and South Australia, massive koala culls look inevitable. The only short-term alternative – sterilisation – has been found wanting. Sharon Mascall, writing in The Age (August 2000) told of koalas in eastern Victoria being left after this procedure with ‘bloody weeping wounds’ that developed maggot infestations and proved fatal in 15 per cent of cases. ‘Sterilisation and translocation is clearly not working,’ declared Peter Myroniuk, president of Victoria’s Wildlife Care Network. ‘Much as it is unpalatable for an organisation such as ours to say it, even shooting koalas would be an alternative to subjecting them to such a prolonged stressful death.’ South Australian Koala Management Taskforce head Hugh Possingham, with Kangaroo Island in mind, was equally damning: ‘Sterilisation hasn’t worked – the sensible thing to do would be to cull a large number of the population.’ Leading greenie Michelle Grady agreed: ‘The Conservation Council totally supported the position of the taskforce – we recognised koalas on Kangaroo Island as being completely unsustainable and a threat to native vegetation.’ The Victorian government’s Peter Menkhorst talks of improved methods of sterilisation coming soon. (There are also plans to develop contraceptive foods for kangaroos.) But as Michelle said to me, ‘A koala with or without the right equipment can still eat.’ Tree growing is touted as the real solution, but it’s now far too late to offer any hope. In the future I expect there will be a little less killing on farms and rather more killing in national parks. In Africa it’s a fact of life that vast numbers of large animals are killed in some national parks to save vegetation.
Wildlife management will grow more difficult as we confront new issues. Grazing and culling for conservation are troubling enough, but there are other concerns to consider. With more and more rare species taking refuge in strange places, management proscriptions will grow stranger. Writing about Hobart’s Domain – that important woodland reserve – Jamie Kirkpatrick proposed ‘continued mowing of substantial areas’ and ‘some replacement planting of exotic trees that are particularly useful for rare native species’. He noted that ‘as long as topsoil is rapidly replaced, the burial of pipes and cables is not a problem for biodiversity conservation on the Domain, and, in fact, can be the opposite’. Pipes for biodiversity – there’s a new one. His rare plants grow mainly beside roads, within lawns and below conifers. In another report, cited earlier, Jamie recommended sowing velvety peppercress under roadside trees and around cemeteries and country houses. Jamie, author of A Continent Transformed (1994), could be taken for a crank, but he’s really an inspiring university botanist and committed conservationist.
In another example of creative thinking, Owen Foley checked the route of a new cable Telstra was laying on the Darling Downs. Telstra’s plan – eminently sensible – was to bury the new line right by the old in the same bulldozed ground. But two rare plants, native hops (Dodonaea macrossanii) and a wattle (Acacia chinchillensis), had claimed the upturned earth, and neither grew in nearby bushland. To save these plants and extend their habitat, Owen had the cable repositioned to disturb more soil.
That’s what conservation management will be like in future – laced with irony. Old mines will be saved for bats, and pine plantations kept for endangered cockatoos. Experts will argue about the ecological value of weeds. There will be less clarity of purpose (do we recreate the past, preserve the present, or usher in the future?) and more potential for misguided actions. Intervention, after all, is more difficult than a hands-off approach. Expect to see plenty of blunders mad
e, as reserves are burned when they should not be, and cows are let in for the wrong reasons. Conservation is intervention, and intervention isn’t easy.
‘Certain people always say we should go back to nature. I notice they never say we should go forward to nature. It seems to me they are more concerned that we should go back, than about nature.’
Adolph Gottlieb, co-founder of abstract impressionism movement, 1947
A giant spotted gum towers over the median strip outside my home. Somehow it survived the fires of Aborigines, the axes of convicts, and the land scrambles of postwar housing booms. I can gaze into its crown and be reminded of a time when barefoot hunters roamed my ridge in search of possum prey.
Australia’s oldest cities grew up around old-growth giants. An Aboriginal canoe tree stands beside the Melbourne Cricket Ground in full view of inner-city office blocks. This aged river red gum is scarred where able hands tore away a skin sheet centuries ago. Today sports fans roar where once the sound of stone biting wood could be heard. Other Dreamtime trees grace the Royal Botanic Gardens (near the Observatory) and Royal Park.
Inner Sydney’s oldest citizen is surely the massive forest red gum (Eucalyptus tereticornis) in the botanic gardens near Lion Gate Lodge. She’s a stand-out example of Sydney’s original architecture, with no plaque to tell her story and no rail to guard her dignity. Australians can’t see the past for the trees. Other venerable Sydney trees include the swamp oaks near the Maiden Shelter, thought to be suckers from old pre-settlement trees.