The Emu’s Perspective – Part 2.

Country is central to everything Aboriginal: it is a continuum, without beginning or ending. In this worldview, everything is living – people, animals, plants, rocks, earth, water, stars, air and all else.

So begins a new book by Bill Gammage and Bruce Pascoe entitled Country: Future Fire, Future Farming.

The authors are popular – lauded by academia and often on the national broadcaster – yet their core message in this new book is subversive, along with much of the content.

They state outright that the terrible infernos that burnt so much of south-eastern Australia two summers ago cannot be blamed on climate change.   That such fires could be a thing of the past, if only forests were properly and actively managed (page 163).

It is a fact that for Australian Aborigines wilderness is not a place of fond nostalgia – as it is for many armchair conservationists – but rather a land without custodians.

Aboriginal culture was one of continuous manipulation of the landscape, recognising that plant and animal species have preferred habitats that can be created through careful management.   To maintain diversity of plant and animal species there is a need to ensure a mosaic of different habitat types arranged in such a way that fire can always be contained.

In the new book Gammage and Pascoe very clearly state – what one of my other heroes Viv Forbes has been telling us for years – that responding to environmental degradation through the planting of more trees is misguided (page 80).

If we are to restore a balance appropriate to the plants and animals that existed pre-European settlement then we need more, and better managed, grasslands.  To quote from the new book:

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 forests, making forest resources more predictable.  Almost always it took the best soil, and probably there was more grass then than now.

Of growing concern to me is that the grasslands of western Queensland, already degraded by two centuries of mostly mismanagement, are likely to be destroyed with the new goat industry.  Yes goats!

If only there was support for a kangaroo industry.  But no, the elites – Hugh Jackman guided by Terri Irwin oppose the harvest of native Australian wildlife – so now we have goats.

Just last year the Queensland government contributed $4 million towards the expansion of the local abattoir, not for cattle or kangaroos, but for sheep and goats.  The plan is to process 900,000 a year.

A culture that better understood the connectedness of everything –  that made less of a distinction between the animate and inanimate – might arguably recognise that goats are fundamentally incompatible with a healthy and diverse landscape in western Queensland.

Instead we have the tax-payer funded expansion of an abattoir for goats as a 'much needed financial boost for western Queensland graziers during drought'.