Creators Destroyers? The Burning Questions of Human Impact in Ancient Aboriginal Australia or
» PETER HISCOCK
INTRODUCTION: QUESTIONS OF HOW AND WHY
The Fall of Humanity depicted in the Book of Genesis portrays traumas associated with the transition from foraging to farming. That T transformation of human social and economic life is depicted negatively, and is associated with both suffering and shame. While in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve had an abundance of fruits to pick, but after the Fall they and their descendants had to sweat and labour to farm the land for a living. The transformation from a life of ease to one of labour was accompanied by momentous cultural shifts, such as the transformation from peace to murder as Cain slaughtered Abel, a shift requiring the development of elaborate social processes to regulate conflict. This Old Testament narrative illustrates, actually epitomises, long-standing imagery of hunter-gatherers conjured by agriculturalists. Biblical visions of lost Edens emerge in many modern Western stories about the distant past and about the lives of foragers. (above) The story of the Fall provides one fundamental Bush fire at Captain element in the conceptual background of Creek, Central current debates about human impacts on Queensland, Australia. the environment. It is a narrative explored in visions about the nature of life and wilderness SOURCE: 80 TRADING 24 (OWN WORK) [CC- at earlier times: either before the coming of BY-SA-3.0 (HTTP:// CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/ humans or before the coming of agriculturalists LICENSES/BY-SA/3.0)], VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS to the Australian landscape.
40 Humanities Australia Here I examine recent arguments by historians and natural scientists, as well as archaeologists, who have discussed the transformation of nature after hunter-gatherers and/or agriculturalists arrived in Australia. I focus on human use of fire and its articulation to society and belief. For reasons of time I will not deal with the ongoing debate on extinction of megafaunal taxa and whether it was a consequence of human over-predation. The propositions that have been advanced range from an argument that Aboriginal people created an Eden-like estate to the view that they destroyed the delicately balanced natural ecosystem they found in Australia. Intriguingly, both arguments adopt the narrative arc of Genesis; they both assert that Australia was once a bountiful, diverse and desirable place before the intrusion of humans. The arguments differ in their assigning of culpability for the Fall. The first reading, that Aboriginal Australia remained an Edenic place until the coming of Europeans, depicts foragers living harmoniously within the limits of their environment, most likely recognising its in a few that they are undoubtedly recovery character and enhancing it, until the intrusion narratives played out in purportedly historical of agriculturalists destroyed the balance and interpretations. I will illustrate this shortly. created the Fall. The second reading, that A related issue is the constraints on the arrival of humans in Australia led to the historical interpretations created by imposing extinction of megafauna and subsequent vivid images from the historical record upon impacts on small fauna and flora, implies that the distant past. As an archaeologist I explore Adam and Eve’s self-interest meant they would the immense span of time in which humans inevitably violate the rule of the Garden, and have occupied Australia and the rapidity and that humans are inherently destroyers of their frequency of social and economic changes that own environments. took place during that period. Recognition of (above) These biblical parallels might seem substantial change in the cultures that lived Fig. 1. Peter Brown’s incidental and accidental except that almost across Australia underpins my conclusions, evocative artistic depiction of a man twenty years ago Carolyn Merchant, then especially those that have proved challenging. from the terminal professor of environmental history, philosophy Conclusions such as my argument that, Pleistocene period, and ethics at the University of California obviously, Aboriginal people did not colonise based on Coobool Creek skeletons. Berkeley, argued robustly that much Western Australia. We know that Australia was COURTESY PETER BROWN history about the colonisation of the New colonised by populations of modern humans World can be coherently read as ‘recovery descended from Africans who had migrated (opposite) 1 narratives’. That is, as stories of decline out-of-Africa, moved across South Asia and The Expulsion Of from a golden age that finish with hope of eventually crossed the water barriers separating Adam and Eve from Eden. Fresco by redemption in the form of some return to the the Pleistocene continent of Australia (Sahul) Masaccio. 1426-27, original Edenic state or at least a reorientation from the Pleistocene continent located in Cappella Brancacci, of current environmental relationships to Southeast Asia. These humans were the distant Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence. create some simulacra of that state. This ancestors of Aboriginal people; but as far as we SOURCE: WIKIMEDIA narrative arc occurs in some prominent recent know they would not have been recognisably COMMONS, PUBLIC Australian publications; indeed it is so explicit Aboriginal, physically or culturally. Their DOMAIN (PD-ART).
Humanities Australia 41 descendants became Aboriginal as they evolved, time around 3000 to 4000 years ago. Possibly adapting to the continent they inhabited. When these diffused in parallel with the Pama- confronted with scientific interpretations Nyungan spread, but that is not yet established. of the African origins of humans Aboriginal In roughly the same period some specific people sometimes object, insisting they came implement forms such as microlithic backed from Australia. In many ways they are right. artefacts began being produced in vast numbers While their immensely distant ancestors came for a comparatively short time. Around the from Africa, people who were physically and coastal plains of southern Australia, where they culturally Aboriginal evolved here. were used as craft tools to work skin, bone and This evolution of Aboriginal life may not wood, they proliferated between about 3500 to technically have been continuous, in the sense 2000 years ago.4 They were manufactured and that change happened at a constant rate, but used in great numbers for about 500 to 1000 the indications in the archaeological record years in each region, and then the technology suggest changes occurred repeatedly and was, gradually, entirely abandoned. sometimes frequently throughout the last In Northern Australia Paul Taçon and 50,000 years. The resolution on cultural change his colleagues have shown that the imagery is far higher in recent millennia as a result of used in the nineteenth century to represent the better preservation and easier discovery the Rainbow Serpent, a significant figure in of archaeological materials. So I will simply post-contact cosmology, could be traced in the give examples from the last ten millennia, the sequence of rock art in Arnhem Land. Versions final fifth of the time people have been in this of the image first appear in the Yam phase, continent.2 which might be something like 4000 to 6000 At the start of this period in the south-east years ago, and the images began to look like some populations were still deforming the those used historically probably in the last skulls of their infants so that adults of their two or three thousand years.5 Rock art from group were visibly distinct and distinguishable earlier time periods depicts the world in very from members of other groups (fig. 1). This form different ways, with images of half-animal/half- of public signalling vanished around 9000 years human beings roaming the world with humans, ago and was never again used in Australia.3 sometimes attacking them. This seems an Although linguists have struggled to archaeological signal of a fundamental change define the date precisely, they argue that the in world view, including a significant change in Pama-Nyungan language family spread from religious expression. somewhere near the Gulf of Carpentaria In the last 1000 to 3000 years there are across the southern 70 percent of Australia, notable economic reorganisations in a number perhaps between 5000 and 10,000 years ago. of regions. For instance, the intensified The precise direction and mode of dispersal earth mound building in Victorian wetlands is still being investigated, but it is reasonable probably represents not only greater emphasis to consider the impact of this major language on exploitation of wetland resources but also replacement on the way people named and increased sedentism. Meanwhile across almost thought of their world. I would expect that the entire northern coastline, the system of mythologies, cosmologies and ontologies were intensive exploitation of rich mollusc beds by substantially reworked, not simply maintained moderately large sedentary groups, leading and accurately translated. The alternative to the creation of large mounds of shell, possibility is that there may have been collapsed as mangroves colonised previously dispersals of people, invasions/replacements open beaches. The point of my two examples perhaps, creating cultural disconformities. is to emphasise regional differentiation: as one Substantial shifts in technology occur in settlement system becomes sedentary another this time period. Ground-edge axes, which becomes more residentially mobile and diffuse. had been used in northern Australia for tens Some researchers argue that the last few of millennia, began being used across much of thousand years is a period of substantial central and south-eastern Australia for the first population increase, with associated growth
42 Humanities Australia in the identity and territorial boundedness the nineteenth century was the formation of groups, eventually leading to some of the and expansion of cults, displayed through patterns seen historically. Certainly, occupation ceremonies that were the culmination and in desert landscapes studied by Peter Veth,6 focus of social gatherings, often accompanied Mike Smith,7 myself 8 and others produced by stories or mythologies and associated higher amplitude signals that are consistent with initiations and the sanctioning of and with more people or more occupation or orchestration of social actions by ‘clever significantly different modes of occupation in men’. This religious process of frequent cultic recent millennia. changes, through the invention of new cults Reconfiguration of mythology and ritual dreamed of by clever men, was well recorded practice are well documented in the last and wonderfully described in the twentieth millennium. In the north east of Australia century by anthropologists such as William Bruno David has neatly documented the Stanner.14 The capacity of Aboriginal religious creation of a mythology that described one frameworks to adopt, integrate and modify new landscape feature as dangerous, as revealed by cults, as a normal functioning of religious life, the abandonment of uplands about 700 to 800 has two meanings. years ago.9 And in the Torres Strait, David, Ian The changing series of cults and McNiven, Duncan Wright and others have built mythological stories that were the basis a detailed picture of a system of ritual sites of religious theatre provided for constant being constructed roughly 500 years ago.10 ideological readjustment to circumstances. It Culture contact in the period of historical is likely that cults were regularly invented and/ records yields many dramatic examples of or adopted, and in the process religious belief social, economic and religious changes, was regularly renewed. Consequently, when some happening remarkably rapidly. As Scott the environment or economy or social practices Mitchell demonstrated, Trepang fisherman changed, those alterations might be reflected in from Maccassar and other nearby ports the new religious narratives and rituals. This introduced metal tools to Aboriginal groups process would ‘renovate’ religious life in the living on the northwest coast, allowing sense that cults and mythologies were updated Aboriginal people to make dugout canoes for to refer to recent events and social concerns the first time and to harpoon marine mammals, rather than preserving ancient stories intact. so transforming economies and settlement Hence the ritual focus of people typically patterns.11 The cultural ‘trauma’ of this ongoing reflected current concerns rather than contact was reflected in language and belief, presenting stories about events in the distant and was embedded in myths. Notoriously, past. It therefore seems to me that notions that smallpox, a disease that probably killed far in Aboriginal myths faithfully record events from excess of 70 percent of Aboriginal people in the the Ice Ages—say 20,000 years ago—come more late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, from expectations that Aboriginal stories and resulted in territorial reconfigurations, shifts myth were somehow unchanging, than from in gender roles, and even transformations ethnographic evidence of cult dynamism. of rituals such as the instances documented Take, for example, the spread of the Mulunga by Dick Kimber.12 There are even cogent cult, visibly expressed through the elaborate arguments that many myths recorded in and and lengthy Mulunga ceremony, which itself after the mid-nineteenth century dealing was the conclusion of prolonged rehearsals and with floods and the spread of illnesses were preparation of ritual paraphernalia. The set for expressions of Aboriginal encounters with the ceremony included the construction of a Christianity and Old World diseases— two-metre high beehive hut to be occupied by transformed into stories that had meaning in a grandmother spirit, one of the key characters Aboriginal terms.13 in the narrative. The most detailed description A sketch of one such transformation can of the ceremony comes from the missionary give a sense of changes in Aboriginal world Otto Siebert who observed it several times views. At the core of Aboriginal religion in at the dawn of the twentieth century in the
Humanities Australia 43 lands north of Port Augusta.15 A central part regional Aboriginal society of this exceptional of the ceremony involved characters holding event found one expression in the creation of forked sticks, symbolising white men with guns the Mulunga ritual/cult. killing Aboriginal people. In the finale of the The cult spread with remarkable speed, performance a hidden and elaborately adorned transmitted along river corridors and stock performer emerged from behind the hut, routes from near the Gulf of Carpentaria representing a water-spirit surfacing from a to the southern coastline and thence to water body, and ferociously attacked the white Eucla in little more than twenty years, as men in revenge. documented by both John Mulvaney16 and This complex and costly ceremony Tony Swain (fig. 2). The spread was assisted originated somewhere on the Barkly by the relevance of the culture-contact theme Tablelands, probably at the beginnings of to Aboriginal peoples becoming part of the the 1890s. I am persuaded by Tony Swain’s expanding pastoral industry, as well as by (above) suggestion that the massacre theme is a the accompanying threat of death, illness or Fig. 2. Map showing reference to the conflict in the Mount Isa rape to those who did not accept the cult or the dispersal of the region on what is locally called Battle Mountain who wrongly performed the ceremony. While Mulunga cult, based on information from where, in 1884, hundreds of Kalkadoon acknowledging that the origins and expansion John Mulvaney and warriors came out of cover, formed ranks and of the Mulunga cult came from aspirational re- Tony Swain. attacked and/or marched towards a contingent imaginings of intercultural relationships in the COURTESY of Native Police who shot almost all of them complex and disrupted colonial context, I also PETER HISCOCK with their carbines. The reverberation within think this illustrates the process of religious
44 Humanities Australia transformation that prevailed before the archaeologists and environmental scientists for arrival of Europeans. much of the last fifty years. Gammage argues What does all this mean? And how does this that extensive and regular use of limited, low relate to my theme of environmental impacts intensity fires by Aboriginal people reduced by ancient humans? I offer these examples tree coverage, encouraged patches of grass, to emphasise my vision of the dynamism and created parkland-like landscapes across of Aboriginal social and economic systems, Australia. His evidence for this comes from probably throughout the entire occupation two sources: recorded images of landscapes and of Australia. Archaeological and historical written impressions of fire in the land. evidence indicates frequent social, economic The expansive compilation of historical and ideological reorganisation. Aboriginal references to burning that Gammage has social systems were extremely capable of created displays abundant evidence for change, displaying dynamism that I suspect is strategic, planned burning of vegetation by probably typical of all the modern humans who Aboriginal people two and a half centuries emerged from Africa. ago. And yet there is little in those historical What I am emphasising is that the history of observations that demonstrate his claims for humanity in this continent has been dynamic universality of a particular human relationship and evolving, and we must appreciate it as such. with fire or a singular social context of burning. We should not hide this remarkable record It is worth noting that while Gammage has of adaptation and evolution behind slogans developed his argument from numerous such as ‘Aboriginal culture is the longest historical texts he does not give similar continuing culture in the world’, a slogan that emphasis to anthropological descriptions of implies a lack of cultural change, a Western Aboriginal burning, to modelling and fire myth of an ethnographic present stretching experiments by natural scientists, to vegetation back fifty thousand years. This is not an issue history reconstructions, or to archaeological of cultural authenticity. We do not need to data. Instead, his image is carefully crafted to authenticate Aboriginal culture by insisting, represent the state of human-environmental like nineteenth-century cultural evolutionists, interactions in 1788 and surrounding decades. that it was frozen in time. We can and should But his vision is not simply about the nature of hold a view of the history of Aboriginal culture Aboriginal life only in 1788. Gammage implies as impressively transformative. I am therefore the nineteenth-century use of fire had a deep perplexed by histories that present a fixed, history, writing that ‘an ancient philosophy was unchanging Aboriginal way of life. destroyed by the completely unexpected, an invasion of new people and ideas’.18 THE GAMMAGE ARGUMENT In one sense Gammage combines/reconciles the elements of that Genesis origin story, by In The Biggest Estate on Earth historian Bill having the leisurely life of foraging abundance Gammage has presented an Edenic vision of created by the foragers through farming/ human-landscape relationships in pre-contact land management. Gammage expresses this Australia.17 I discuss his book as an example in various ways; he depicts Aboriginal peoples of current views on Aboriginal history and as affluent foragers with abundant food from environmental relationships because its few hours of labour, even as he presents them publicity and prizes have made it a powerful as farming the land with fire, leading him influence on popular thinking. Of course, as to conclude that ‘in 1788 people assumed many of you will know, Gammage’s thesis abundance, and so did Genesis’.19 Gammage revolves around the practice of eighteenth- and interprets Aboriginal fire management as nineteenth-century Aborigines setting fires in ‘farming’, an imagery that evokes Alistair strategic ways that sometimes enhanced their Paterson’s recent observation that such views foraging economy. Now there is no doubt about imply ‘fire was used as a tool—like a farmer’s the reality that underpins that statement; spade’.20 In fact ‘farming’ is one of many terms it has been well observed and discussed by Gammage uses to conjure a vision of Aboriginal
Humanities Australia 45 people as counterparts to landed gentry in that is immensely environmentally varied and Britain; his claim is that Aboriginal burning has been subject to dramatic environmental created ‘estates’ comparable to the parklands of shifts during the last glacial, that is Ice-Age, rural Britain and that the complexity of social cycle, I find the notion that Aboriginal society life revealed their ‘civilisation’. persisted through the use of a single, inflexible, My first comment is that such phrasing unchanging adaptation to be extremely invokes diverse Eurocentric associations and puzzling. It creates a proposition that is difficult invites re-evaluation of Aboriginal actions to reconcile with the accompanying claim that and goals as functionally similar to those in Aboriginal people were optimally adapted to the historical Europe. The implication that such a landscape, because in an optimal relationship comparison elevates Aboriginal society in our to land that is constantly changing any forager view is a distinctly colonial approach to cultural will be required constantly to modify their comparisons. Yet even this characterisation of economic practices. Changes in economy Aboriginal interactions with the environment would flow through the interconnected web of in inherently European terms, suggesting that social practices and understandings, creating they farmed the land and made it ‘civilised’, is constantly changing cultural systems. From an not the most radical element in the argument evolutionary viewpoint, and in such a dynamic Gammage offers us. land, rigid unchanging societies are simply an His core proposition is that Aboriginal implausible fiction. people were inexorably committed to a The value of any ‘contract’ with fire must specific physical and spiritual bond with have varied geographically and chronologically. the environment that was and could only be We can identify times and places in which fire
THESE WERE ENVIRONMENTS UNLIKE ANY IN HISTORICAL AUSTRALIA AND THE VALUE OF FIRESTICKS IN THEM IS LIKELY TO HAVE BEEN LOW.
mediated through fire. This bond compelled cannot have operated in the way Gammage people to be devoted to the process of fire. In describes. The use of landscape burning at the Gammage’s view fire provided people with last glacial maximum, at the peak of the last abundant resources and a life of ease, but it also Ice Age some 25,000 to 18,000 years ago when bound them to lives of mobility as they were average temperatures were roughly nine degrees required to regularly tend all portions of their centigrade below today’s, is difficult to conceive. territory with their firesticks. This pattern was, During the last glacial maximum, dune systems for Gammage, exacerbated by his view that in the deserts were mobile sand sheets with population size was everywhere maintained little vegetation to restrict sand movement or to well below carrying capacity, obliging groups to be burned. Upland Tasmania contained alpine forage/firestick across territories much larger meadows with a mosaic of grasses so fragile and than they actually required. His conclusion unused to fire that they might easily be damaged. was therefore that ‘It imposed a strict and rigid These were environments unlike any in historical society, but it was an immense gain’.21 Australia and the value of firesticks in them is Beyond the claims that Aboriginals were likely to have been low. Of course the people at universally, constantly and optimally ‘farming’ those times and places may have operated in their estates with fire, it is this conclusion that ways unlike those in the historic period, creating Aboriginal society was strict and rigid that adaptations that suited their circumstances, most intrigues me as an archaeologist. Such but if that were the case such a conclusion claims have repeatedly been made, and the contradicts notions of a universal and long-lived imagined rigidity implies a fixedness of cultural ‘contract’ between fire and a rigid society. institutions and social actions that prevents or The cultural rigidity Gammage claims in minimises cultural change. Now, in a continent his hypothesis is underpinned by his static and
46 Humanities Australia deterministic vision of Aboriginal society. to terms with their relationship to the land He builds a story of an articulation between in some similar fashion. Leaving aside the people and environment based on his notion obvious point that the concept of being that Aboriginal treatment of land and Australian is itself a colonial imposition, landscape was a sacred dictate, shaped by the there is the more fundamental paradox that requirements of a Dreamtime law that obliged Gammage wants to congratulate or applaud them to act as they did. Gammage presents fire Aboriginal people for their fire-farming as the instrument for creating Eden, saying covenant with the land whilst simultaneously ‘It made the land comfortable, comforting, denying them any choice in the matter. We are bountiful and beautiful’.22 He also imagines left with an idolising, actually fetishising, of fires as a commandment, saying that ‘The Aboriginal culture as inherently conservation- Law—an ecological philosophy enforced by minded. This certainly weakens to breaking religious sanction—compelled people to care for point Gammage’s negative comparison with all their country’.23 This proposition not only modern non-Aboriginal society, which does misreads the complex cultural dynamic that have choice of action and is actively debating underpins the construction of and continual how to reduce its environmental footprint. His transformation of mythology, cosmology and denial of choice in the matter for Aboriginal social practice in Aboriginal society, it also Australians threatens to invert the moral that effectively dehumanises Aboriginal people Gammage advocates. and the culture within which they operated In the end the story Gammage offers, by removing any suggestion that they were including his assessment of our current active agents in their own fate. His statements position and his call for future reconciliation avoid mentioning the constant debate that with Aboriginal views and practices, is a would have taken place between individuals Christian/Enlightenment recovery narrative, about where and when and how much to burn, in the phrase of Carolyn Merchant. It is a about priorities in a landscape that cannot be desire for redemption. Gammage constructs everywhere occupied at the same time, about the Fall of our land, from pure, productive and the evaluation of opportunities in an ever well-managed, as occurring when Europeans changing landscape (such as in a dry year or a entered this Eden and failed to nurture it wet year). Consequently his discussion does not through a disregard for the Edenic rules (which consider the plausible alternative, which is that Gammage claims are encoded as Dreamtime the cultural pronouncements about burning he laws). He calls on us to rethink our destruction calls the ‘law’ only exist because people were of the Edenic estate and as far as possible using fire. Social conventions were constructed return to an innocuous interaction with to reflect social practice. Fire-lighting strategies the environment. This proposition displays did not exist because an abstracted ‘law’ remarkable parallels with the version of Genesis controlled people; rather the social norms and (Genesis J) that advocates that only human expectations existed because people employed labour and stewardship can restore Eden, fires, reflecting the use of fire. through tilling the garden and in the process Gammage represents Aboriginal people redeeming our souls, or at least moral authority. as having been without choice, obligated to follow a fixed set of actions as their ancestors FIRE AND SCALE: THE LESSON FROM always had and as their belief system dictated. ARCHAEOLOGY Curiously, his advocacy of a cultural system compelled to a specific ecological relationship As an archaeologist I receive a different by its own internal rules, creates logical image of the operation and consequences difficulties with the moral point he wants of anthropogenic fire, because human- to make. He argues that Aboriginal peoples environmental interactions are visible at a held a near-perfect ecological position and different temporal scale. In Holocene Australia non-Aboriginal people cannot conceptualise archaeological and environmental records themselves as Australians unless they come often have a minimum resolution of hundreds
Humanities Australia 47 of years, but we track trends over a very long Hughes extended this work in the scarps of time, often thousands of years. What we Western Arnhem Land where, with Geoff Hope witness is a disjunction between the decision- and Jeremy Russell-Smith, he showed that making of humans for their short-term self- when human occupation began, the floor of interest and the consequences of their actions valleys in the Arnhem Land Escarpment, such for environments and their descendants in as Deaf Adder George, were thinly veneered the long term. To see this we need to escape with sand.24 Sediments sat on the face and top from the ethnographic scale and the intuitive of the escarpment, providing niches for plant understandings of things we bring to short- communities which in turn held the sand in term events. place. After humans arrived large quantities My old colleague Phillip Hughes, a of sand were shed from the escarpment, filling geomorphologist turned archaeologist, the valley floors with sand more than three would always ask people ‘why are the caves to four metres deep. Again it was disturbance archaeologists dig filled with sediment?’. His of vegetation that released the sediment, and point was that in valleys and along some cliff the evidence of relic vegetation communities lines across Australia there are numerous caves in fire-shadow locations implicates fire. Since or overhanging shelters that formed long before the timing coincided with the appearance of humans appeared in this land. Many such archaeological artefacts it is human firing that concavities are probably hundreds of thousands of is implicated. years old. Typically they are filled with sediment. This is merely one example of the kind But the surprising observation is that those of evidence that continues to emerge, as sediments often contain artefacts at all levels— archaeologists dig down through great depths there are artefacts at or near the very bottom of of sediment that contain artefacts, and ask why most deposits. How can this be? The shelters/ it is that all this sediment has accumulated caves were largely bare for perhaps several since humans arrived? The implications are hundred-thousand years, reflecting a rough worth spelling out. In some, perhaps many, balance between the input of sediment and the landscapes the burning of vegetation had rate at which it was naturally moving out of the consequences that were not anticipated by the shelter (under the influence of gravity or water). humans who did the burning, consequences But then humans arrived and two things that took hundreds or thousands of years to happened. They occupied the shelters and eventuate, and which affected the resources dropped things on the floor, thereby trapping that were subsequently available. In this sense sediment and beginning the cycle of deposit firing of the landscape to obtain short-term formation, while at the same time they benefits in hunting, harvesting or travel was increased the rate of sediment deposition by simply an act of self-interest, an act which changing the environment. Within shelters everywhere altered natural biological niches their hearths created a pattern of fluctuating and which in some times and places created temperatures while they brushed against, transformations of the land itself. While in sometimes painted or engraved, the walls, some localities the introduction of human fires creating increased roof fall. Outside those might have set up new and balanced ecological shelters, in the surrounding landscape, systems, in others there were progressive people reduced vegetation, intentionally long-term transformations as positive feedback or unintentionally, creating a vast pool of cycles were launched. Degradation of soil exposed sediment that could be washed to nutrients, local extinctions of species, and different places, including into archaeological massive erosion and reshaping of the country sites. Hughes showed that archaeological all occurred, as well as the creation of grassy sites recorded the increased mobilisation patches that were bountiful and convenient. of sediments in the presence of humans, The impacts of humans on Australia’s documenting clear relationships between environments were complex and varied. There sedimentation rates and rates of artefact was transformation, but it was not always Eden accumulation in both shelters and open sites. that was wrought.
48 Humanities Australia As you can see I am in complete agreement change through pollen and plant fossils, and with Bill Gammage that the ancestors of many other techniques. These are valuable contemporary Aboriginal people transformed but challenging datasets to add to those the Australian landscape long before 1788. more familiar to researchers working in the That transformation was in many parts of the humanities. I will examine just two studies. continent probably far more dramatic and less In the first, published in 2011 inQuaternary predictable than Gammage has depicted. It was Science Reviews, Scott Mooney and his also certainly patchier than his story presents. colleagues synthesised sedimentary charcoal Each kind of landscape would have responded records from around Australia to characterise differently to the activities of humans, and the the changes in fire regimes over the last 70,000 actions of humans would have been different in years.26 Interpreting charcoal fluctuations each environment. as a measure of biomass burning, they have One of the newest archaeological findings documented that the levels of burning in the in a number of arid and semi-arid landscapes Australian landscape fluctuated over time in is that even in the last few thousand years rough synchronicity with the glacial cycle: people abandoned areas for prolonged periods. less burning during cold stages and more The rightfully famous example of this is during warm stages. They do not see people Simon Holdaway and Patricia Fanning’s studies as responsible, claiming that ‘Although there of valleys in western New South Wales.25 are marked changes in fire activity during
… THE BURNING OF VEGETATION HAD CONSEQUENCES THAT WERE NOT ANTICIPATED BY THE HUMANS WHO DID THE BURNING, CONSEQUENCES THAT TOOK HUNDREDS OR THOUSANDS OF YEARS TO EVENTUATE …
Dating stone hearths, they established a record MIS 3 […] there is no fundamental shift in of human occupation throughout the last the composite charcoal record that could be 2500 years. But their study also showed cycles associated with the colonisation of Australia by of occupation and abandonment. For instance, Aboriginal people’.27 This statement misses the it is likely that between 900 and 1150 years ago opportunity to discuss what their evidence may no hearths were constructed in the region. This actually show: when humans arrive they do not was an unusual climatic period, the Medieval increase the magnitude of biomass burning. Climatic Anomaly, and environmental changes But if humans are burning soon after they at the time appear to have triggered changes arrived, this evidence means they changed the in human settlement. In this case they nature rather than magnitude of the burning. involved exploiting different territory for a An early change in fire regimes following the couple of centuries. This is an example of the arrival of humans in the Australian landscape archaeological evidence that reveals Aboriginal is suggested in a study published in Science occupation, even in recent centuries, was in 2012 by Susan Rule and her colleagues.28 complex, surprising to people who expected to They re-examined the famous upper five find a resident group permanently occupying metres of the deep column of sediment from and uniformly exploiting well-defined Lynch’s Crater in North Queensland and territories. Territoriality and land use was showed that Sporomiella, a fungi found in the much more fluid and dynamically changing dung of herbivores as recognised from spores than Western concepts of residency and use found in the sediment, largely ceased 39,000 have anticipated. to 43,000 years ago, at the same time as the With this in mind I turn now to the evidence signal of micro-charcoal magnified. They offered by environmental scientists. A wealth interpret this as evidence that megafaunal of data is becoming available on fire history in extinction, or at least substantial reductions in Australia, acquired from sedimentary records numbers of large herbivores, occurred at that containing charcoal, studies of vegetation time, and that locally high levels of natural
Humanities Australia 49 evidence of repeated cultural change. For instance, the evidence clearly shows dramatically less burning during MIS2, the peak of the last glacial cycle. In the reduced vegetation cover of that period humans may have been lighting very few fires compared to the level of fire-lighting in the early historic period. This is a clear indicator that the pattern and extent of environmental manipulation in the distant past was almost certainly different to that in the immediate past. The magnitude of change in burning is indicated by the charcoal influx evidence for recent millennia (fig. 3). Biomass burning inferred from standardised measures of charcoal abundance in dated sediments shows that the burning histories of tropical and subtropical Australia are distinctly different. In the tropics, burning was much less frequent than today during the last glacial maximum, until 16,000 years ago, and again from 7000 to 5000 years ago. There were also periods with burning distinctly higher than the long- term average, such as about 15,500 to 14,000 fires were a consequence of the extinction of years ago and 9000 to 7500 years ago. And large herbivores increasing fuel load in the for the last 4000 to 5000 years burning levels environment and so creating preconditions have varied around the long-term mean. for wildfires. Subtropical burning histories display a more This interpretation brings us back to subtle variability, but it is still obvious that considerations of the complex intertwining from 20,000 until about 7500 years ago biomass of humans with the Australian landscape. burning levels were typically less than the long- In an ongoing debate some researchers argue term average, and from 7500 until the historic that humans created the situation because period levels resemble the long-term average. extinctions were a consequence of human These patterns in biomass burning records hunting. The evidence presented by Rule does suggest, as we should expect, that i) burning not test the role of hunting in the extinction in tropical and subtropical landscapes was (above) events, but a sequence of increased burning different, ii) the burning histories of different Fig. 3. Calculated following rather than preceding large marsupial regions are dissimilar, and iii) the historic continental extinctions is consistent with the hypothesis patterns of anthropogenic burning are unlikely biomass burning trends for Australia. of Tim Flannery, that extinction of megafauna to be more than a few thousand years old, and Top = Tropical created conditions favouring intensive may well be substantially younger. regions, Bottom = fire-management regimes amongst people The biomass burning records measure Temperate regions. Taken from fig. 4 living in some parts of Australia in order to natural as well as humanly light fires, and in Scott Mooney reduce the dangers of uncontrolled bushfires the composite burning record is primarily et al., p. 37. that intensified after the large herbivores a reflection of environmental fluctuations, Line represents standardised disappeared from the environment. of fuel load and dryness, as Mooney has shown. charcoal influx However we can also infer from the new However climate cannot have been the only trends smoothed biomass burning data that the pattern and factor involved, and rates of human burning with a 400-year line. intensity of any human burning activities are likely to have varied in response to other
COURTESY would have changed repeatedly over time and factors. For example, the intensity and nature PETER HISCOCK. across space, mirroring the archaeological of land management of all kinds,
50 Humanities Australia and certainly fire-lighting, was probably driven people modified and perhaps enhanced their by demographic conditions. At low population environment, especially in the short term. densities there is neither the need nor the It also records that the actions of foragers capacity for foragers to undertake intensive triggered the release of sediments that flooded management, nor would the returns warrant valleys and created plains, and filled rock the investment. At higher population densities shelters, changing the nature of the land. the calculation would be different: there might The ancestors of historical Aboriginal people well be the capacity to spend substantial labour were simultaneously creators and destroyers, in management schemes that would give a as they, and we, must be. worthwhile return on the social investment. There is still much to be studied. We do That demographic context alone ensures not have a robust record of the history of that there will have been transformations of Aboriginal burning or the way changing environmental relationships, including the burning regimes articulated with changing use of fire, over time as human population economies, social worlds, or even the sense sizes/densities altered in response to changing of place. But I think what we do know is environmental productivity. that the history/prehistory of human life in Australia is a history of transformation—of CONCLUSION not only the landscape but also the people who lived within it. The human occupation of The story of fire is clearly an important one Australia is an ongoing and multidimensional in human history; in Australia we have a cultural evolution. To suggest Aborigines were particular interest in the role fire played contracted to a single way of life, that there in our environments, and the role humans was but one obligatory ecological relationship played in that fire lighting. Fire and land which specified the details of daily life and were manipulated, exploited and tended by was ruled by an invariant Law, is to ignore the humans. But humans were the agents that reality of that evolutionary process. The rich made decisions in that nexus. In responding conceptual worlds of historical Aboriginal to changes in circumstance, whether driven societies, placed in a sense of an abiding by climate or by social life, humans altered the existence often called the ‘Dreaming’, were a decisions they made. part of the continuing evolution of Aboriginal To understand this long record of human life. While the sense of abiding might remain, decision-making we need all the evidential the concepts of the world could and did readily strands I have reviewed here. Historians such as change. So while there would always have been Gammage and many others have documented views of the appropriate treatment of the land, how in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the foods that were accessible and desirable, fire was habitually employed by Aboriginal the identity of potential marriage partners, people in many areas. Palaeo-environmental the stories of how humans came to be and reconstructions reinforce our understanding should operate socially, all of these have been that human society operated within and varied transformed time and time again. The study in response to the long cycles of our globe. of human evolution is a pursuit to understand Archaeological evidence reveals something change, and the burning question in studying of the frequent and rapid transformations of the Aboriginal past is how to shed images of economic and social strategies involved in land stability and comprehend the processes by use, as well as the transformations in stories which constant cultural evolution occurred. and religious beliefs that emerged from those I thank the Australian Academy of the changing social experiences. Archaeology Humanities for their invitation to deliver reveals occupation of landscapes, abandonment the 2013 Academy Lecture, and acknowledge of landscapes, fundamental changes in the the support of the University of Sydney way people moved through, made use of and Tom Austen Brown Endowment. ¶ thought about their environment. It records that, in actively creating a niche for themselves,
Humanities Australia 51 PETER HISCOCK FAHA is the the Horn Expedition: A Speculative History’, in inaugural Tom Austen Brown Exploring Central Australia: Society, the Environment Professor of Australian and the 1894 Horn Expedition, ed. by S. R. Morton Archaeology at the University of and D. J. Mulvaney (Chipping Norton, UK: Surrey, Beatty and Sons, 1996), pp. 91–103. Sydney. He was awarded a DSc by the Australian National 13. For example, Peter Hiscock, ‘Beyond the University for his contribution to the fields of lithic Dreamtime: Archaeology and Explorations of Religious Change in Ancient Australia’, World technology and Australian archaeology, and his book Archaeology 45 (2013), 71–83. Archaeology of Ancient Australia won the Mulvaney Book Award in 2010. In addition to being a Fellow of 14. W. E. Stanner, On Aboriginal Religion (Sydney: Oceania Publications, 1989). the Australian Academy of the Humanities, he is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and a 15. Tony Swain, A Place for Strangers: Towards Research Associate of the Australian Museum, Sydney. a History of Australian Aboriginal Being (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 16. D. John Mulvaney, ‘“The chain of connection”: 1. Carolyn Merchant, ‘Reinventing Eden: the material evidence’, in Tribes and Boundaries Western Culture as a Recovery Narrative’, in in Australia, ed. by Nicholas Peterson Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal in Nature, ed. by William Cronon (New York: and Islander Studies, 1976), pp. 72–94. Norton, 1996), pp. 132–170. 17. Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How 2. For further information about case studies see Aborigines Made Australia (Sydney: Allen and Peter Hiscock, Archaeology of Ancient Australia Unwin, 2011). (London: Routledge, 2008). 18. Gammage, p. 323. 3. Peter Brown, ‘Artificial Cranial Deformation: 19. Gammage, p. 321. A Component in the Variation in Pleistocene 20. Alistair Paterson, ‘Enduring Contact: Australian Aboriginal Crania’, Archaeology in Australian Perspectives in Environmental Oceania 16 (1981), 156–67. and Social Change’, Occasion: Interdisciplinary 4. Gail Robertson, Val Attenbrow and Peter Studies in the Humanities, 5 (Stanford: Stanford Hiscock, ‘Multiple Uses for Australian Backed University [Arcade], 2013)
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