Read an extract from Country: Future Fire, Future Farming

What do you need to know to prosper as a people for at least 65,000 years? The First Knowledges series provides a deeper understanding of the expertise and ingenuity of Indigenous Australians. of understanding the natural world: one ancient, the other modern. The third book, Country: Future Fire, Future Farming by Bill Gammage and Bruce Pascoe, focuses on land and fire management.

Today, you can read two pieces — one each from Bill and Bruce — from Country: Future Fire, Future Farming. Read on!

Bruce Pascoe

Cultivating Country

by Bruce Pascoe

If we are going to return forests to a condition in which we can live more safely, that is, the condition of the old Aboriginal forest, we should learn about the nutritional qualities of that forest. Permaculturalists are asking us to consider the merits of refining the monocultures of European-style industrial farming. More diversity encourages chemically positive interactions between plants, and the use of fewer chemical fertilisers leads to healthier soils.

Australian soils are relatively low in nutrients as a result of being so old compared to most soils in the world. They need fertiliser to grow exotic plants but need nothing to grow ours. They are perfect as they are. Our plants have had millions of years to adapt to low soil fertility. We need to use this fact to our advantage rather than try to change history by adding chemical fertilisers. Grow Australian plants in Australia, that’s pocket science.

Using the bush as a source of food has many benefits. There are challenges in harvesting these diverse plants in a woodland setting, but the production inputs are nil, so there is an economic logic in examining a new farming model. The biggest problem for Australia is to acknowledge the intellectual property Aboriginal people have in these plants. Demand for the produce is guaranteed. Restaurants and wholefood stores are clamouring for the food, but very few have any idea how to include Aboriginal people in the benefits of foods that have been domesticated by Aboriginal people.

A plant becomes domesticated after it has been harvested continuously over many years. The plant begins to adapt to human interaction. The Australian food plants we see today have a commercial and cultural connection to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Australia’s superficial knowledge of Aboriginal history, and in particular agricultural history, means that it is rare for us to consider the debt owed to tens of thousands of years of land management. The biodiversity Europeans encountered on entry into the country was created by the management of Aboriginal people. We need to look at our country differently, acknowledge the wealth of Aboriginal plant, environment and economic skills, and adopt different techniques, even if they call into question the methods imported from Europe.

Thinking differently about land use will neither destroy the environment nor flummox our souls. Treating the land with more thought for her dignity will not undermine our commerce. Greater care of the resource is likely to improve it. There is a 120,000-year history of agriculture and horticulture in the country, and to ignore such a vast body of knowledge would seem churlish at best and economic madness at worst.

The challenge for Australia is to go beyond a warm and fuzzy enthusiasm for eating Aboriginal foods. We must move towards a stern insistence that land and social justice be extended to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people before we accept the commercial and environmental advantages these foods offer. Growing more perennial food plants is going to be wonderful for our land, and for meeting our carbon emission reduction targets, but to accept these gifts without recompense to the people who domesticated them is just another dispossession. You can’t eat our food if you can’t swallow our history.

At Yumburra, Black Duck Foods grows the traditional perennial foods of the region and employs Aboriginal people in the agriculture. The aim is to demonstrate to other Aboriginal communities that we can grow the foods, find a market for them and give employment to our own people. We have already developed a recipe to make a pesto using our warrigal greens and a preserved samphire, plants that we simply pick from our paddocks and swamp verges. Our grains are being converted into flour so that we can bake a variety of breads, and these have been received enthusiastically by some of the top chefs in Australia. When we bought the farm the river flats were stark, but once the cattle were removed a whole host of useful vegetables returned. There are pasture weeds as well, but with judicious use of fire we are managing to control those.

Many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander plants have commercial and culinary potential. The plants here are those with which I have direct experience, but a similar array of useful plants could be compiled for any Australian region.

Bill Gammage (Photo by Loui Seselja).

Carnage

by Bill Gammage

What was Australia like in 1788? Much we would recognise, for much is found nowhere else. But a visit back to 1788 would be full of surprises, commonest where newcomers have crowded most densely, but visible everywhere. Australia has always surprised newcomers….

They saw abundance: well-spaced mobs of grazing animals, skies flocked with birds, waters black with fish. Long after 1788 the clear waters of both Sydney Harbour and many inland rivers let people see the bottom, and great shoals of fish ‘floating like birds in mid-air’, as Thomas Mitchell put it on the Darling. In the Kimberley men wrote of country abounding ‘in every description of game’ – fish, birds, animals and reptiles – and in 1921 an upper Darling and Paroo pioneer recalled with admiration:

‘the condition of the country, the growth of the trees and bushes, such as sheoaks, pines, and acacias and a score of other kinds of trees that bushfires always destroy were, when the white man arrived, flourishing in the perfection of beauty and health … Encounter Bay [SA] and the neighbourhood was a striking example of the care exercised by the original inhabitants to preserve the plant life, and incidentally animal life. The country was clothed with beauty to the very margin of the sea. The numerous ti-tree swamps were a very aviary of bird life. Much of all this is gone now by the white man’s destroying hand in the march of civilisation … I think it may be stated to the credit of the Australian savage that such [management] was the case over most of the continent when the white man assumed possession.‘

Newcomers wrought carnage on such abundance. At least seventy species have gone extinct since 1788 – most estimates think more. At least 120 are critically endangered. This reflects a staggering level of ignorance and incompetence.

Inland birds like galahs, crested pigeons and little corellas have spread,4 but especially on offshore islands other birds have become extinct, while ground dwellers from emus and cassowaries to mallee fowl, curlews and quail, and birds like eagles, black swans, wrens and some cockatoos and parrots have shrunk their range, some into refuges. In the terrible Gippsland fires of 6 February 1851, two children were saved from the flames by hiding under the bodies of birds that dropped from the sky. Nowhere are there enough birds even to imagine that now.

Reptiles have declined: over twenty species are critically endangered. As well as habitat loss, newcomers wage war on snakes, and settlement and random fire have reduced some lizards, skinks and frogs to pockets. Two insect species, plus almost certainly others we don’t know of, have gone extinct, and insects in general are fewer – including on car windscreens.
Animals have gone, many from arid areas where fire and no fire underlay their food cycle. Eastern grey kangaroos and possibly possums have increased, but thylacines and several smaller marsupials are extinct, while koalas (though not common in 1788), platypus, and smaller animals like dunnarts, bilbies, greater gliders, bandicoots, quolls and mala (rufous hare-wallaby) are in the queue for extinction. In the last 200 years a third of the world’s mammals made extinct have been Australian. Sometimes we didn’t even notice their going until too late. In central deserts mala were once abundant and a staple, but shifting people off country let fuel build up, causing hot fires that destroyed plant cover and exposed mala to cats and foxes. In its home range it went extinct about 1991 but is now being reintroduced from breeding sanctuaries.

These are losses we can count. Changes to the land, slow, subtle, often irreversible, are harder to see, but literally basic. Topsoil has compacted under vehicles and hoofed animals, or blown or washed away. Stream banks display exposed tree roots crouched claw-like over the water, and dryland carries roots rising stick-like up to 2 metres above the ground or fallen into deep erosion gullies. What once sheltered them has gone.

Subsoil has changed. Salt lies under much of Australia, but it has surfaced menacingly since 1788. Land not salt then is saline now. Water cutting deeper lifts salt. Salt kills plants. Along south-east inland rivers, giant river red gums healthy sixty years ago are dead. Off water too, soil has salinated. Topsoil erosion, deep ploughing, clearing native perennial grasses can cause this. Even planting trees can cause it: since fresh water sits above salt water, trees that drink it let salt water rise. The more and bigger the trees the more fresh water they drink, and the more readily salt rises to kill them.

Water has gone. Even fast coastal streams generally ran slower in 1788. Native grasses slowed flows off feeder slopes, and streams choked with debris. Slow streams run shallow. Big rivers like the Murray and the Darling had frequent fords along them, while on the lower Murrumbidgee what were once distributary creeks are now tributaries: they have reversed flow, because since 1788 the river has cut below them.

Shallow streams flood readily. In hill country near Gundagai in 1834, George Bennett remarked on the Murrumbidgee’s many ‘swamps about its banks, overflown during floods, and even now [a dry time] absorbing a large quantity of water’. Wide-spreading water was common. In a dry continent it would seem obvious to keep water in the landscape, yet newcomers cut channels and drain swamps enthusiastically, letting them imagine that today’s dry stream margins were always there. In paddocks black soil or reeds marking former swamps lie near the farm dams that replaced them. Governments drain on a bigger scale, such as behind South Australia’s Coorong, so more land is dry than in 1788, meaning fewer summer-saving wetlands and fewer refuges from drought and fire.

Today newcomers often respond to environmental degradation by planting trees, or promising to. National Tree Day assumes that tree cover has declined since 1788. In some places that’s true, but overall there are probably more trees now, differently distributed. Fewer trees on farmland, endangering woodland habitats, are outbalanced by denser forests, trees capturing grass, rainforest advancing, parks and reserves filling in untended. It is common now to see dense swathes of young eucalypts growing straight up, often with hardly a grandmother tree in sight. They are dense because the seedlings were freed from fire, and they grow straight because in dense forest they must race for light. In the open those same eucalypts spread wide, and even on forest edges they push branches out to the light. Generations ago they weren’t there at all – grass was. Look around: whipstick is probably our most common forest. A National Grass Day would make more sense.

Forest often grows a dense scrub understorey, a fire fuse, ready to lift flame into the canopy. Much, not all, forest was open in 1788. Horses and drays could pass unimpeded, and early travellers, notably in western Tasmania, wrote casually of walking distances in times and places Olympic marathoners could not match now. Today we are so used to a scrubby understorey that we think it was always there.

Grass, not trees, was central to healthy country in 1788. Grassland carried many useful plants, and most animals with most meat. It was a firebreak, it made seeing and travelling easier, and it confined forest, making forest resources more predictable. Almost always it took the best soil, and probably there was more grass then than now.

But less native grass. Spinifex has spread, cane grass and blady grass may be much the same, but native fodder perennials that once dominated, especially in the south – kangaroo, wallaby, spear, poa, millet – are sparser. Dormant in winter and ripening in late summer, their tan heads blanketed the land, shielding it from drought and providing feed in the season feed is now hardest to find. Today’s introduced crops and weeds tend to be green in winter and dead white in late summer. The upset of our native perennials changed the colour of Australia. It is hard to say whether a traveller from 1788 would notice first this colour change, or the scrub understorey.

Herbs, tubers, lilies and orchids lived in the spaces Australia’s tussock perennials provided, or in forest or swamp shelter. They flourish after fire: for example the first spring after the 1983 and 2003 fires saw a flush of flowers that newcomers had not thought possible. In later years they declined as shrub cover increased, much of their habitat smothered or let decay.

—Country: Future Fire, Future Farming by Bill Gammage & Bruce Pascoe (Thames & Hudson Australia) is out now.

Country

Future Fire, Future Farming

by Bill Gammage & Bruce Pascoe

For millennia, Indigenous Australians harvested this continent in ways that can offer contemporary environmental and economic solutions.

Bill Gammage and Bruce Pascoe demonstrate how Aboriginal people cultivated the land through manipulation of water flows, vegetation and firestick practice. Not solely hunters and gatherers, the First Australians also farmed and stored food. They employed complex seasonal fire programs that protected Country and animals alike. In doing so, they avoided the killer fires that we fear today...

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