First Knowledges Country

Future Fire, Future Farming

Bruce Pascoe, Bill Gammage, Margo Neale

• Publisher: Thames & Hudson Australia
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781760762155
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Conservation & Protection
• Index: Biological Sciences

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.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.Country: Future Fire, Future Farming highlights the consequences of ignoring this deep history and living in unsustainable ways. It details the remarkable agricultural and land-care techniques of First Nations peoples and shows how such practices are needed now more than ever.

1

PERSONAL PERSPECTIVES

LITTLE BOOK, BIG STORY

BILL GAMMAGE

I’m delighted to write this book with Bruce Pascoe. He enlarges minds. His listening to and reading of long-available evidence offers fresh insight into the achievement of the people of 1788, and the failure of those who came later to do more than glimpse its scale and grandeur.

For this book we have a specific brief: Bruce to write on plants and animals, me on fire. I suggested and Bruce approved our title, Country, but we know that keeping only to plants, animals and fire omits much essential to Country as a philosophical and emotional understanding of how places, people, plants and animals share responsibility for the harmony and continuity of existence.

But help is at hand. The first book in the First Knowledges series, Margo Neale and Lynne Kelly’s Songlines, explains Songlines and their expression on the ground and in paint, song, dance and story. These are essential elements of Country, and no doubt later books in the series will add more.

Much of my writing here stems from work for my book The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. On many aspects that book is heavy with evidence, freeing me to tread lightly here. This might reverse the balance of two common responses to The Biggest Estate: some readers will think I offer too much evidence, and others too little.

There are four ground-floor changes from that book.

1.In reporting fire in the Centre and north, this book is more likely to use recent examples. In those regions I see continuity from 1788, while this book has more on fire after 1788 than did The Biggest Estate. One consequence is that the tense I use flips between past and present. In those cases I am arguing or accepting that what is so now was essentially so then.

2.In discussing fire in The Biggest Estate I took ‘no fire’ – deliberately not burning – as its obvious corollary, and I assumed readers would too. My mistake. I correct this with a note on no fire in opening Chapter 5.

3.The Biggest Estate and my talks since rank fuel reduction as the basic 1788 fire, the necessary preliminary to every other fire type. My mistake again. Joe Morrison, Group CEO of the Indigenous Land and Sea Corporation, pointed out, ‘Reduced fuel is an outcome of why people burn. Fuel reduction was not an end in itself, but a colonial paradigm in which fire is seen as ultimately bad and associated with evil, not renewal, rebirth and as good.’¹ Fuel reduction fire was never necessary because other fires regulated fuel anyway. Only after 1788 did whitefella neglect spur fuel reduction to prominence. I have upended my earlier accounts of fuel reduction fire.

4.A caution about ‘management’. The word is entrenched, and I use it. Yet it downplays 1788’s necessary ceremonial envelope, and it is hierarchical – people manage, the rest are managed. ‘Care’ is closer to 1788, but it too assumes hierarchy. In 1788 people thought more of collaboration. All creation shared responsibility for maintaining the universe. This was the point of ceremony. Ceremony voices one of 1788’s great intellectual achievements – to assert the interdependence of life and things. Trying to understand 1788 in simply Western terms is folly. It lets some researchers say in effect, ‘We can’t see why or how Aborigines did x or y, so they didn’t.’ They think like managers. Be warned.

BELIEVING IN GOD, ACTING LIKE THE DEVIL

BRUCE PASCOE

The past two years have shaken our assumed ability to control nature. We should reflect on our impact on the world and our attempts to assert dominance and pursue more conservative land management and more modest demands on soil, water and air. If the world is determined to have this massive and increasing population, then we might only survive by modifying our wasteful lifestyles.

There are commercial opportunities in changing our approach to land use and consumption. To change is not an abnegation of capitalism but a repudiation of its dangerous profligacy. We can keep our computers and mobile phones as long as we recycle their components, we can keep our washing machines and fridges as long as their parts are recyclable, and we can afford to power all of them as long as we use sustainable power. We do not need to throw babies and bathwater all over the geraniums in order to have a more sustainable world.

Advances in medical science are responsible for our dangerously high population, but a few well-planned social reforms can redress that issue. For example, smaller families across the globe can help raise living standards in the developing world. To suggest measures of restraint in the developed world is not class warfare but the application of decency.

My family has benefited directly from modern science, so I am not one to suggest we all need to don sackcloth and dust ourselves with ashes. Changing behaviour doesn’t mean abandonment of all that is useful. Fifty-five years of right-arm medium-pace bowling reduced my left hip to a degenerate EH Holden brake disc pad, scooped and dysfunctional. I had a replacement performed by a surgeon going by the disconcerting name of ‘Crayfish’. The anaesthetic was so light and acutely graduated that I woke towards the end of the operation and looked up to see the Crayfish talking to someone. His apprentice. The trainee was hammering a 5000-dollar stainless steel device with what looked like Uncle Alan’s wooden mallet. I wish I hadn’t seen that, but I am eternally grateful for the medical science and engineering that allowed me to play another decade of cricket, to swim, to climb mountains, to jump into my boat.

My mother had a seizure due to her epilepsy and a large clot formed on her brain. We lived on King Island. She was flown to Melbourne by Brain & Brown’s geriatric airline. It was early days in cranial pressure relief and later, my father asserted, he could have done the operation himself for half the price with his own brace and bit.

My mother prospered and, thanks to the surgeon, went on to win gold medals for Australia in the Paralympics. She was grateful too, but then Mum was grateful for everything her God gave her. I had long ago stopped believing in her God but was deeply appreciative of her survival because she hadn’t stopped teaching me about grace, beauty and goodness. I was nowhere near the top student in her class, but I’ll never forget her love and greatness of mind.

So, my family has many reasons to be grateful to science and respectful of its ability to help humans. But we don’t have to approve of everything it does. I’m not sure the Crayfish approved of the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki; I’m certain Mum’s surgeon would have deplored Agent Orange. There are some things about modern science, engineering and industry that we could do without. Built-in obsolescence and the cascading range of automobiles from a plethora of companies seems an extreme adherence to the market system. Some innovations are generated by that competition, but the price of waste and excessive resource use must be where a mature economic system has responsibility for change. Plastic electric toothbrushes, disposable televisions, disposable nappies, disposable serviettes and dental floss apparati are things a world determined to conserve itself cannot afford.

We can modify the market economy and not threaten to create a communist state. Democracies should be flexible and honourable enough to act reasonably and caringly without the need for street demonstrations against a languishing state. Some claim this is hoping for too much from the human spirit, but I think an example of innovation and ingenuity without waste or damage to Mother Earth is right here under our noses. It is common for Australians to look elsewhere for spiritual enlightenment: we float lilies on other people’s sacred pools, climb the steps of ancient temples, pray in churches because they happen to be in Paris or Rome, but we have rarely chosen to examine the spirituality and philosophy of the world’s oldest continuing and most sustainable culture – here, Australia.

I receive plenty of electronic invective abusing me for gilding the black lily, but what I ask is that we consider this ancient and successful civilisation as a necessary part of any future analysis of human survival. There are many aspects of modern life where simple respect for the earth could be a successful investment in our combined future.

The modern industrial state can mine where we could never mine before, but seemingly cannot prevent its tailings dams from collapsing and drowning thousands of people in sludge and poisoning the environment for a thousand years. We can mine ores and render them into metals to clad spacecraft but cannot prevent the miner from exploding a cave of 46,000-year-old art.² Why? The public acquiesces so easily to the demands for progress regardless of the cost to our common wealth. In the case of that art gallery, the mineral involved is so common that the need to mine anywhere within a bull’s roar of the cave was negligible. The fact of doing so, contempt.

This demand for exploitation debases the meaning of the word ‘progress’. Polluting a river, destroying the ozone layer and seeding the ocean with plastic fragments that eliminate whole species of fish should not be seen as collateral damage but as a signal that our methods of production cannot be tolerated if we wish to hand over the globe to our grandchildren in such a state that they may prosper.

When the Industrial Revolution began, the European mind devised laws to eliminate the rural peasantry and convert them into factory slaves; the workhouse.³ The old system of landed peasantry was abolished so that a class of incredibly wealthy people could eat larks’ tongues and saffron. This is not innovation, it is an aberration and ought to be repulsed by our religions.

Those convicts and migrants who rode on the heels of the Australian invasion were children of that thought process and, dismissing the local population to feed their ambition for wealth, they used brutal methods of land clearance.⁴ The effect of sheep and cattle is recognised,⁵ but in the east-coast tropical forests and the wet sclerophylls of southern Australia the aggression and greed were breathtaking.

At Byron Bay great forests of cedar trees covered the ranges right down to the beaches but such was the unrestrained avarice and rapine that every tree had been felled within decades. The book Red Gold by John Vader ⁶ speaks in awe of the energy and ingenuity of the cedar getters. Many Australian history books are like this, breathless and genuflectic to the brave explorer and the indomitable miner, forester, squatter and, like Red Gold, they never mention Aboriginal people or the invasion, just as a second-hand car dealer never mentions the banana skin in the wonky gearbox that will get you only far enough away from the car yard that you can’t come back.

The energy of those early entrepreneurs cannot be denied, but their short-term business plan, ‘how much can I get before it’s all gone’, has to be deplored.

Where the terrain was more difficult or where the absence of cedars made the forest of less interest to Europeans, the cheapest way to ‘clear’ the land was to destroy the forest entirely. In the books Green Mountains by Bernard O’Reilly and The Bush by Don Watson,⁷ the methods used are explained in appalling detail. The trees of a mountain slope were scarfed, deeply notched with an axe on the downhill side, and then the trees on the ridge were felled onto those below so that the whole forest cascaded onto itself like dominoes, like the dominion the Bible endorsed.⁸ The forest became a million split and tangled skewers. The timber was impossible to salvage and so the whole thing was burnt. Soils that had not been exposed for a million years were naked.

Find an eight-year-old and, when they have finished fixing your computer, ask them this question: What do you think will happen next time there is heavy rain in such an area? The child will not even need to know the annual average rainfall of the region; they will tell you that the soil will plummet from the hillsides in a slurry that will render once-navigable deep-water streams into sterile puddles.

Why were these ‘farmers’, these ‘husbands of the soil’ surprised when the land they had ‘cleared’ was immediately devoid of its topsoil? The kid will be asking you that question. It was carnage, the profligate enterprise of vandals, with no adult willing to raise a voice against the destruction. This stupidity should never have been tolerated in a Christian heart. We should be using this example as a caution to every agriculture and business studies student. Just because there is a resource does not mean it must be expended in one individual’s lifetime.

Our misuse of resources is not limited to the soil. The orange roughy, a fish discovered by commercial fisheries in the 1980s, was all but eliminated by overfishing in only a few years. The fish can li...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• First Knowledges: An Introduction
• 1. Personal Perspectives
• 2. Land Care
• 3. Cultivating Country
• 4. Future Farming
• 5. Country
• 6. An Ancient Alliance
• 7. Holding the Spark
• 8. Babes in the Wood
• 9. Poor Fella My Country
• 10. How We Might Love Mother Earth More
• Acknowledgements
• Image Credits
• Notes
• Further Reading
• Index
• Copyright