by Tim Flannery
So abundant was the buffalo that even after its extermination its humble remains formed a valuable resource. The bones scattering the prairie were exploited on a grand scale during the economically disastrous closing years of the nineteenth century, when an industry grew up around collecting and grinding them for fertiliser or for use in refining sugar. What is even more remarkable is that ancient Indian bison kill-sites were also mined for their bones, and the volume recovered was sometimes stupendous. The Highwood site in the Missouri Valley, for example, yielded well over 6000 tonnes of fertiliser and bonemeal derived from buffalo remains. The skeleton of a bison typically comprises ten per cent of its total body weight. If we allow a modest average weight of 300 kilograms for calves, cows and bulls killed at the site, then no less than 20,000 creatures met their death at the Highwood jump over some thousands of years.
The Frost Fertiliser Company of Montana,‘“The Pioneer” producer of buffalo compost’, advertised a product made from bones, which was not only used for fertiliser but was fed directly to cattle! A typical site exploited by the company, known as the Taft Hill Jump in Montana, produced 150 tonnes of bison carcass and bonemeal, which was pulverised and shipped to the west coast. The site though was far from exhausted, for workers stopped only when the bone-to-soil ratio made their work too tedious. Although clearly less than 10,000 years old, the age of the deposits exploited by such companies is uncertain. Some contained whole mummified or frozen buffalo, an invaluable scientific resource that was ground up and used as manure.20
In terms of kilograms of matter belonging to one species, the great bison herds of the American prairie formed the greatest aggregation of living things ever recorded. Not Africa, nor Asia, nor even the seals and penguins of the Antarctic, could offer a sight to equal the sheer biomass of these vast herds. The passenger pigeon, likewise, was a wonder of the world. What would it mean to people today to be able to stand in awe, watching the great herds and vast flocks that thronged the continent just over a century ago? Were they still here, North America would rival Africa as a safari destination—a continent of marvels and wonders.
The North American species that fared worst in the late nineteenth century—the passenger pigeon, the buffalo and Eskimo curlew—were those that congregated in vast flocks or herds in order to overwhelm predators. This appears to be a unique aspect of the North American extinctions, for other places that have suffered extinctions, such as Australia and the oceanic islands, lost the rarer, larger or more solitary species, rather than those that congregated en masse.
The herding behaviour of the bison, and possibly the passenger pigeon, first arose as an adaptation to avoid the human predator, and this strategy protected these species for at least 13,000 years. During the nineteenth century, however, the European Americans were developing a new economy. It was an economy based on systems of mass production and mass exploitation that needed enormous resources to operate. The key decade was 1880–90, for only then did European machinery become sophisticated enough to destroy the great herding and flocking species. Their enormous numbers provided an ideal teething rusk for an economic machine that would soon produce cars in the millions and hamburgers in the billions.
During the course of the nineteenth century, North America’s great herds of hoofed animals declined from an estimated 60 million to just one or two million head. People came to replace ungulates in nearly equal proportion, for over the same period the immigrant population of the US rose from five million to 75 million.21 Today, the chicken has likewise replaced the passenger pigeon as America’s most populous bird. Within a century of the demise of the bison the continent’s waterways, soils and fisheries would be consumed by the machinery of this astonishing new economy, as would species and resources that lay well beyond the bounds of the nations of North America.
The Day, the Land, and the People
2002
TWO HUNDRED AND fourteen years and one day ago, a rowboat tentatively made its way through the entrance of the harbour that lies outside these doors. It was the first European vessel ever to glide upon Cadi, as Sydney Harbour was then called, and it carried Governor Phillip, who was seeking a place to settle the 1000-odd people of Australia’s First Fleet.
This is the 214th anniversary of the day Phillip discovered the pretty cove called Werrong with its run of good, clean water. He must have been delighted by the smooth-trunked angophoras that seemed to spring straight from the sandstone around it, their limbs turning bright salmon pink as they shed the last of the old year’s bark. And the water was full of bream. One of Phillip’s rowers, an American named Jacob Nagle, hooked a beauty while the governor was ashore examining the cove he would rename Sydney for a dithering and now-forgotten home secretary.
Phillip’s party left the following morning, and for one last time—just a few days—the Cadigaleans had Cadi all to themselves. As they woke next morning to warm themselves by the fire, they faced, as always, the incomparable harbour that gave them their life and their name; and watched its ruffled waters, musing, perhaps, that the rowboat’s visit had been a bad dream.
Doubtless they enjoyed those last few lazy summer days travelling to their favourite spots to fish. The women would take to their canoes with fishing line in hand, a fire smouldering amidships and perhaps a baby on their shoulders; while the men strolled to a sheltered cove, its surface like a mirror. There they would chew mussels, spitting into the water and spearing the fish that came to the burley. Or maybe they’d just pluck a feed of oysters from the rocks, or gather great handfuls of flowers to make a sweet drink from the nectar.
Some Cadigaleans were lucky enough to have their own private island in the harbour. These had been handed down from parent to child since time immemorial. Perhaps they’d invite friends over to enjoy a meal at this special spot; then the sounds of the corroboree would carry through the balmy night air. If conditions were right, the young men would travel to the beaches near the Heads to ride their short bark canoes through the waves, managing them with small hand paddles in feats of amazing sporting prowess.
The anniversary we’re celebrating today marks the day that ruined the neighbourhood for the Cadigaleans. Within eighteen months of Phillip’s return, half of them were dead from smallpox. Within a century their 10,000 years of freehold around the harbour would be denied, then forgotten. Only the bream remembered. Those crafty fish make no distinction between black and white, but treat all of us two-legged landgoers with the same suspicion.
Perhaps because we all sense in our hearts the tragedy of this, our national day carries shadows that neither ebb nor lighten with the years. We can’t celebrate Australia Day unreservedly, nor can we expect Aboriginal people to celebrate it, unless we somehow come to terms with that terrible history. For a long time we denied it; until that furious outbreak recently when we screamed at each other that the black armband view, or the white blindfold one, was the more correct version of our past. Then, just over a year ago, 100,000 Australians took to the Harbour Bridge and strode across the waters of Cadi, the sky above emblazoned with a heartfelt ‘sorry’ to the Cadigals and other Indigenous peoples of this land.
It marked, perhaps, a new beginning—one that I’d like, if I can, to carry forward today.
Australia Day is also a day for relaxing and celebrating the good life—a great Aussie holiday—and a time also to think about our origins; what it means to be Australian, and where our nation is going. Perhaps it’s an Australian characteristic that until now we’ve been long on the leisure and short on the thinking, which is unfortunate, because it has left us with shallow roots in this continent. Our history and our ecology reveal just how superficial those roots are, for they show that most of us still live as people from somewhere else, who just happen to inhabit—sometimes unsustainably, ignorantly and destructively—this marvellous continent.
Let’s look at history first. Growing up with Irish ancestry in Victoria, I’ve always had a soft spot for Ned Kelly, with his intolerance o
f injustice and independent spirit. But the more I think about him, the less I see him as distinctively ‘Australian’. At heart he was an Irishman struggling with his Old World oppressors in a drama transplanted to the antipodes, the khaki backdrop of the Australian bush making little difference. The Man from Snowy River can hardly be regarded as uniquely Australian either. Seated astride American megafauna (a horse) that had been introduced to the continent just a century before, chasing other introduced megafauna, he is a figure of a much larger history—the global cattle frontier. Exchange his Akubra for a ten-gallon hat and he becomes a cowboy. Give him chaps and maté and he is transformed into an Argentinian vaquero. Even most written histories of the Australian nation read like the story of a European people who just happen—almost incidentally—to stride an Australian stage. And perhaps that is, until now, precisely what we have been.
I don’t mean to suggest that the European aspects of our history are irrelevant or should be disposed of—only that they reflect us as a people who have not yet developed deep, sustaining roots in the land. Yet Australia—the land, its climate and creatures and plants—is the only thing that we all share in common. It is at once our inheritance, our sustenance, and the only force ubiquitous and powerful enough to craft a truly Australian people. It ought to define us as a people like no other.
And our land is so very different from any other. The Europeans who migrated to North America found a land not so very different from the one they had left behind, but those who came to Australia sometimes felt that they had arrived on another planet. The environmental forces that have, over the millennia, shaped that very distinctive Australia—from kangaroos to gum trees and Aboriginal cultures—are currently working on us, shaping our culture. So it is worthwhile knowing a little about the forces that make Australia so different.
For 45 million years Australia has wandered in isolation across the Southern Ocean, carrying with it an ark full of ancient life forms. Over this immense period the other continents have experienced violent change—profound swings of climate that saw them transformed from tropical paradises into bare rock sheathed in miles of ice. Their nature has been irrevocably altered by multiple invasions of plants and animals, their ecological stability denied. Australia, however, has remained almost unique in its stability. Its biodiversity increased in relative peace and isolation over the eons, until today we rank eighth on the planet in the richness of our natural wonders. And because of that stability many species became very specialised, confined perhaps to just a few square kilometres, making them vulnerable to future changes.
It also seems that the evolution of life here was driven partly by a different imperative—towards cooperation for survival rather than competition. Many Australian birds, from kookaburras to blue wrens, breed cooperatively, and many species exist in symbiosis with others. This trend towards cooperation is also evident in the country’s human cultures (a theme to which I will return). As a result of these trends, Australian life forms have become woven into a web of interdependence, which means that a small disturbance in one part has repercussions for the whole.
Despite its relative stability, this ancient Australia was no paradise. Its soils were by far the poorest and most fragile of any continent, its rainfall the most variable, and its rivers the most ephemeral. It was a harsh land for any creature that demanded much from it, and as a result energy efficiency is the hallmark of Australia’s plants, animals and human cultures.
Our European heritage left us appallingly equipped to survive long-term in this country. It left many colonial Australians unable to see the subtle beauty and biological richness of the land, and what they could not understand they strove to destroy as alien and useless. For most of the last two centuries we have believed that we could remake the continent in the image of Europe—turn the rivers inland and force the truculent soils to yield. We knowingly introduced pests—from starlings to foxes and rabbits— in our efforts to transform this vast Austral realm into a second England. Much of this terrible history reads as a rush towards ‘development’, which was then, and often still is, just a soft word for the destruction of Australia’s resource base.
That arrogant colonial vision left a fearful legacy, for it actually made people feel virtuous while they dealt the land the most terrible blows. Already one of every ten of Australia’s unique mammals is extinct, and almost everywhere—even in our national parks—biodiversity is declining. Australia’s soils are still being mined—salination will destroy the majority of Western Australia’s wheat belt in our lifetime if nothing is done—while our rivers are in great peril and sustainable fisheries everywhere have collapsed. We are reaping the bitter harvest of all of this today. The last fifty years have been marked by a return of Australians to the cities, partly because the resource base they relied on had been destroyed by earlier generations.
Yet despite all this, there are signs that things are changing for the better. Today, as the Australian environment subtly teaches those who listen to it, Australians are undergoing a radical reassessment of their relationship with the land, particularly when it comes to the basics like food, water and fire. After 200 years of destruction, revolutionary changes are taking place in the countryside as farmers and graziers strive to make primary production sustainable in Australia’s unique conditions. Leading the way are people like the Bell family, who run cattle sustainably in the ultra-dry Lake Eyre Basin, or the many involved in the development of sustainable aquaculture. These people are my national heroes. Unlike Ned Kelly or the Man from Snowy River they’re not acting out European dramas on an Australian stage but are instead throwing out old, inappropriate European-based practices and inventing distinctively Australian futures to create sustainability in this land.
I have no doubt that today many farmers are very far ahead of the majority of Australians in most aspects of environmental thinking. What’s needed now is a shift in consumption patterns by city-dwellers to provide a market for sustainably produced products. As the ‘buy Australian’ campaigns and the advertising of many products as ‘environmentally friendly’ shows, there is a great desire among Australians to preserve their environment. Yet damage still continues, in part because urban-dwellers need to become better informed about what sustainability really means, and how they need to change their patterns of consumption to achieve it.
The way we use water is also slowly changing in response to Australia’s unique environment. Because of our continent’s great rainfall variability, Sydneysiders need eight to ten times the water storage of the inhabitants of New York or London. The economic and environmental costs of this are stupendous, and they are forcing us into new ways of thinking about water as plans for more dams are shelved and water is re-priced. This shift has the power to alter our urban landscapes—for the beloved Europe-green lawn, English rose and London plane tree are all thirsty drinkers.
Nothing seems to rouse the ire of some Australians so much as disparaging roses, lawns, plane trees and the like. Yet I really do think that they are a blot on the landscape. I used to joke that I’d shout beer all round at my local pub the day someone brought me a plane tree leaf that an insect had actually taken a bite out of. As far as Australian wildlife goes, plane trees are so useless that they might as well be made of concrete. Australia is home to 25,000 species of plants, as opposed to Europe’s 6000 or 7000. Surely among that lot we can find suitable species that will provide shade, and food for butterflies and native birds as well? And there is another reason I dislike many introduced plants. If gardens are a type of window on the mind, in our public spaces I see a passion for the European environment that indicates that we are still, at heart, uncomfortable in our own land. If we can see no beauty in Australian natives, but instead need to be cosseted in pockets of European greenery, can we really count ourselves as having a truly sustainable future adapted to Australian conditions?
Fire is the issue of the moment. Who could imagine, having seen the heartrending destruction in Canberra o
ver the last few weeks, that we are even beginning to understand how to manage fire in Australia? The losses in biodiversity and human infrastructure we suffered are part of a repeated pattern that shouts to us that our fire prevention practices are inappropriate.
It’s worth recalling the searing summer of 1789, when Sydney was just a year old. Then the wind blew so hot from the north-west that birds and flying foxes dropped, dying, from the sky. Watkin Tench wrote that standing among the rough tents of Sydney was like being at the mouth of an oven—yet the journals of the First Fleeters mention no fire. When it came to fire management, the Aboriginal people of the Sydney region had things right, for they maintained biodiversity while reducing the risk of wildfire. While we do not know in detail how they managed things, we can surmise that they managed the land with an eye to fire all year round—not just in crises.
Three human lifetimes—about 214 years—is simply not long enough for a people to become truly adapted to Australia’s unique conditions, for the process of learning, of co-evolving with the land, is slow and uncertain. Yet it has begun, and the transformation must be completed, for if we continue to live as strangers in this land—failing to understand it or live by its ecological dictums—we will forfeit our long-term future here by destroying the ability of Australia to support us.
An environmental view of culture is not what most people think of when defining themselves as Australian. Instead, things like meat pies, Holdens and Aussie Rules (or League) loom large. Holding such things dear makes some people feel more Australian than others—the citizen eating a souvlaki, or wearing a turban, or following the soccer, for instance. Yet such definitions tend to divide Australians from one another rather than unite us. I like my meat pie as much as anyone, though it’s silly to define your identity around it. I look forward to the day when we forget about whether it’s a pie or a souvlaki that’s being eaten, and ask instead what the meat is—whether it’s sustainably harvested kangaroo, or beef from a polluting feedlot.