Canada and Australia - Comparing Environmental Policies in 16 Countries - page 143

At that time about 350,000 Aborigines inhabited the entire continent,
descended from ancestors who immigrated from Asia 40,000 years ago.
At the time of European contact, up to 600 different tribes existed, speak-
ing 200 languages. They were hunters and gatherers. Although virtually
none of them practiced agriculture, they had affected the landscape by fire.
They routinely set fire to the grass and scrub bushes in order to encourage
new growth that attracted animals they hunted. White settlement pushed
the Aborigines out of the fertile land, and disease took its toll.
Unlike North America, most of Australia was unsuited for agriculture.
The entire interior is extremely dry with only a few inches of rainfall a
year. Moreover, the precipitation is not seasonal, so farmers cannot count
on rain each spring or each winter, but experience great variation from
year to year. A wet year may be followed by another wet one, or more likely
by four or five dry years. Scientists believe the weather may be related to
the El Niño patterns. The only area good for farming is a boomerang-
shaped crescent along the southeast. The extreme north has tropical con-
ditions and heavy rainfall, but the soil is poor. Although conditions do
not favor agriculture, the country is rich in minerals. It has abundant coal,
gold, alumina, and iron ore. Much of its 19th-century history revolved
around gold rushes, and Melbourne is still a banking center based on gold
mining a century ago. Australia is the biggest coal exporter in the world.
The animals are unlike the rest of the world. Marsupials dominate. At
the time of European settlement, the only placental mammals were bats
that had flown in from Indonesia, and feral dogs, called dingoes, which
the Aborigines had brought in their original migration. With the con-
tinent isolated from the rest of the world, marsupials have evolved to
occupy all ecological niches. Kangaroos and wallabies are herbivores, and
Tasmanian devils are carnivores. The now extinct Tasmanian wolf occu-
pied the place at the top of the food chain. Australia is the only home of
the platypus and the echidna of the primitive monotreme order. Many
plants are unique, also. The continent has hundreds of species of eucalypts
and acacia, like the golden wattle.
The colonists soon decided that the native animals and plants were
inferior and began introducing European ones. Some were livestock for
farming like sheep and cattle, which at least could be justified on the basis
of establishing profitable farms, but the settlers introduced songbirds like
sparrows, robins, and starlings just so their homes could seem more like
England. One of the worst ideas was to introduce rabbits, which soon
bred like rabbits, overrunning the countryside. They were introduced by