| Australia is the most ancient and isolated of
settled of continents, so isolated that is has developed its own unique
flora and fauna. So Unique that one of the first Europeans to set eyes on
it, a chap called Dirk Hartog, who landed on the West Coast before Jim Cook
was even a twinkle in his mothers eyes, wrote in his log book as he sailed
away:
|
"This land is
cursed, the animals hop not run
the birds run not fly
and the swans are black not white.
This land is cursed and I'll have naught more to do with it." |
And so he sailed away, and the place was
left to itself for another 100 years or so until whole fleets of people
with the same attitudes started turning up. People who could see no value
in the native plants and animals and who vigorously set to getting rid of
them, replacing the native grasses with good European grass and grazing
them with good European animals. People who energetically and
enthusiastically, bless their soles started, turning the place into how a
good European farm should be. In the process the native animals, the
animals adapted to the place, became pests, vermin or at best dog tucker.
Latter as life became more comfortable an equally well meaning group, but
one which I believe saw the animals just as much as an anomaly as did the
farmers, decided they should be locked away in National Parks and
'protected', left to their own devices and not disturbed in any way by man.
These are the physiological barriers which have been built around our
wildlife by a couple of hundred years of blinked, tunnel vision, European
settlement. These psychological barriers are firmly entrenched they tell
us:
|
Wildlife are vermin
or
Wildlife are sacred,
but certainly
Wildlife are not to be viewed in the
same light as European livestock |
But thankfully for the sake of the
environmental well-being of this land attitudes have started to change in
recent decades, both domestically and internationally. Locally many of our
notable ecologists have realised that Australia is vastly different to the
Old World. Different in almost every respect, that our climate is driven by
El Niņo effects and subject to huge variability, Old World climates whilst
variable between seasons are highly predictable between years. That our
soils are amongst the most ancient and fragile on earth. These realisations
about the fundamentals of the Australian environment has lead to a school
of thought attempting to develop production systems which fit in with our
ecology, indeed which even find a place for the animals which are adapted
to the land, rather than relying on introduced sheep and cattle. |
