Livestock,Land Cover, and Environmental History: The Tablelandsof New SouthWales, Australia, 1820-1920 KarlW Butzer*and David M. Helgren** *DepartmentofGeography and the Environment, University ofTexas at Austin **DepartmentofGeography, SanJose State University Forsoutheastern Australia, arrival of the First Fleet in 1788raises similar issues in environmental history as the 1492landing of Columbus in the Americas. But Anglo-Australian settlement isyounger and better documented, bothin termsof scientific proxy data and historical sources, which include data on stockingrates that generally werelight. Environmental concerns were voiced early, and a livelydebate continues both among professionals andthe lay public, with Australian geographers playing a major academic and applied role. This article addresses environmentaldegradation often attributed to earlypastoralism (and implicit clearance) in theTablelands of NewSouth Wales. Methods include: (1) comparisonofwell-reported travel itineraries of1817-1833 with mod- ernland cover and streamchannels; (2) criticalreviews of high-resolutionpollen profiles and theissues of Aboriginalvs. Anglo-Australian fireecology; and (3) identificationofsoil erosion and gullying both before and afterAnglo-Australian intrusion. The results indicate that (a) landcover of the Tablelands islittle changed since priorto Contact,although some species are less common, while invasive genera of legumes have modified the groundcover; (b) thecharcoal trace in pollen profiles prior to Contact supports an ecologicalimpact of regular Aboriginalburning and rare,catastrophic fires; and (c) moststream channels were already entrenched ("gullied")well before 1840, with repeated cut-and-fill cycles during the late Holocene, but before Contact. Landimpairment has notbeen a majorproblem on theTablelands, although the last two centuries have ex- periencedcumulative and complex environmental change. This unexpected empirical picture suggests that, until high-technologyintervention, increasing periodicity/magnitude of extreme drought/precipitation events had beenthe overriding trend in interior New South Wales, perhaps reinforced byburning. There is no support for an apocalypticmodel of colonial environmental history. Key Words: Australia, pastoral degradation, vegetation change, fireecology, gullying, climatic perturbations. The EnvironmentalDialectic in Australia capabilities,rangelands, wildlife, and forestrywere in place wellbefore Earth Day 1970 and have addressed has beenthe focus of environmental conservationas muchas appliedtechnology. Last but not Australiadebate since a scanttwenty years after the ar- least,there is an ongoingnegotiation about environ- rivalof the First Fleet in 1788.This multivocal mentalunderstanding between the Aboriginalpeoples discoursehas had manyforms, involving the agentsof and thenewer Australians. government,the educatedpublic, and academia.The But environmentalsensitivity was only one facet impressionobtains that this engagement was deeper and amongcontested priorities, centered on the economics morepersistent than it was in otherBritish colonies, of labor,survival, and wealthaccumulation, as early perhapsbecause so manyof the early officials were drawn settlersstrove to createnew homes in Australia'sunfa- froma meritocracyemerging from the Napoleonic wars, miliarenvironment. One segmentof that vigorous, naval and militaryin the mainpart, and skilledin en- continuingdialectic is revealedin thefirst-person liter- gineeringand the sciences.The reportsof various atureof the early "explorers," who charted that physical commissionsaddressing the consequences and causesof and bioticenvironment. Mainly levelheaded and com- recurrentdrought catastrophes were articulate and per- petent,their attitudes toward nature and to the indig- ceptive.A similarbent for applied research is evident enous inhabitantswere, in the contextof the time, amongthe large number of professionals today working relativelybenign, despite their colonial goals of settle- on environmentaland ecologicalissues, commonly ment expansionand economicdevelopment. Their withingovernment agencies that serve intermediary writingsprovide a uniquedocumentation of Australian roles.In fact,federal and state agencies dealing with land environmentsat the time of Aboriginal-European Annalsof the Association ofAmerican Geographers, 95(1), 2005, pp. 80-111 C 2005by Association ofAmerican Geographers Initialsubmission, July 2003; revised submission, May 2004; final acceptance, June 2004 Publishedby Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148,and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, U.K. This content downloaded from 128.62.59.252 on Fri, 13 Mar 2015 20:58:21 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Livestock,Land Cover, and Environmental History 81 Contact.They also cast a mainlyfavorable light on the changesince the timeof initialEuropean settlement? effortsof countlesscivil servants, who, across two cen- Here thebest modeling approaches are no substitutefor turies,attempted to steerthe fitful growth of the colony historicalinvestigation, and eventhen, apparent change in a rationalmanner, with at leasta latentconcern for maybe difficultto interpret. what todaywould be called sustainableeconomic ex- Aboriginalland use had significantimpact, and bio- ploitation.'1 logicalresponse during the transitionto and experi- Althoughnot synchronizedwith the transatlantic mental changes of European land managementis confrontationof 1492, the much more recent encounter incompletelyunderstood. Countless spells of cata- of Europeanswith Australia deserves greater compara- strophicdrought have intermittently favored erosion and tive attention.Within Australia today, there are a bioticdegradation. Such climaticperturbations, which numberof competing environmental narratives (Mercer nowamplify human impacts on theenvironment, origi- 2000; Powell2000), of which the most voluble are voices nallykept Australian ecosystems in flux,that is, in a thatview Anglo-Australians, past or present, as reckless metastablerather than stable equilibrium,linked to destroyersof the land (e.g., fromdifferent positions, high,rather than low, resiliency. That posestheoretical Bolton1981; M. Williams,McCarthy, and Pickup1995; and practicalproblems in regardto the"original" condi- MacKenzie1997; White1997; Horton2000; but com- tionof the environment (e.g., Hopkins, How, and Saunders pare Reynoldsand Smith2002). To outsideinvestiga- 1990; Taylor1990; Smithand Pickup 1993; Walker tors,such as theauthors, it comesas a surprisethat the 1993; Ludwigand Tongway1997), such as the use Australianenvironment beyond the arid interior should of classicsuccessional models, the separationof short- be on thebrink of desertification. term variabilityfrom longer-termor "irreversible" One majorcollection of paperson the Australian change,the isolationof anthropicand climaticinputs ecosystemsbegins with a politician'sintroduction as- priorto theindustrial-scale environmental impacts after sertingthat 65 percentof the originaltree cover has 1940, or the unresolveddifferences or similaritiesbe- been removedsince 1788, and thatup to 75 percentof tweenAboriginal and Europeanfire ecology. The notion therainforest has been cleared(Saunders, Hopkins and ofsome "pristine datum" may therefore be illusory. How 1990,v). However,against the "natural"bench- In Australia,the conceptof "land degradation"is markof AUSLIG (1997a), Graetz,Wilson, and Camp- increasinglyaccepted as changein terrestrialecosystems bell (1995) offervery different figures, based on digitally that reducesor destroysthe capacityof land forsus- processedsatellite imagery: only 9 percentof the origi- tainablehuman use (Christie1993, 314). This includes nallyclosed forest has been lost and 35 percentof all bothphysical and biological resources and, implicitly but otherkinds of forestsand woodlandscleared, with an less comfortably,biological and economicsustainability. additional21 percentthinned. These glaringdiscrep- But physicaland biologicalcriteria for disturbance or anciesillustrate the chasm between advocacy and more deteriorationset differentthresholds since, at the scale pragmaticreasoning. The "facts"themselves are differ- ofland cover, vegetation change is potentiallyreversible, entlyconstructed. whereasdestroyed soils are essentiallynonrenewable. Even measuresof currentrainforest loss are incon- But bothkinds of changeare interconnected:soil ero- sistentfrom year to year, or state to state,with expansion sion thatleads to hydrologicaldisequilibrium, with gul- in one and retractionin another,simply as a resultof lyingor alluviation,implies biotic impairment, even in changingdefinitions (Young 1996, 23-24). A second defaultof firmcriteria to discernbiotic degradation or problemin measurementcomes from identifying a pos- definebiotic disequilibrium. At thisscale, soil erosion siblyisolated incidence of land degradation,such as (evenwithout major soil destruction)is a sensitiveand gullyingor salt encrustation,and then generalizingit to visibleindicator of an ecosystemin troubleto a degree an entirespatial samplingunit; when the aggregatere- that agronomistsand various applied scientistswill be sultsare assembledon a smallnational map, it may give concerned. This basic concept of land impairmentun- the impressionthat half of the cultivatedland of Aus- derlies the article,given that there is no generallyac- traliais degraded (Young 1996, 36). cepted definitionof degradation. We are, however, Beyond these questions