Canada and Australia - Comparing Environmental Policies in 16 Countries - page 144

a wealthy landowner who wanted to hunt them. In 1859 he turned two
dozen rabbits loose on his estate in Victoria, and soon their descendants
inhabited nearly the entire continent. They had no predators because the
native ones—the dingo and the Tasmanian wolf—were already being shot
and kept in check by sheep ranchers.
Farmers did not always accept the fragility of the land, in spite of wise
governmental policies. In 1865 the Surveyor General of the colony of South
Australia, George Goyder, charted a line to delineate areas with adequate
rainfall for growing wheat from areas that were too arid. Settlement was
not permitted north of the line. Several years of above average precipita-
tion prompted farmers to establish farms beyond Goyder's Line. Then in
1880, droughts began that caused total crop failure. Farms and towns had
to be abandoned, and people lost all their wealth.
Australia was influenced by European and North American trends. As
early as the 1830s, John Gould was painting birds in Van Diemen's Land
and the Swan River Valley, eventually published as Birds of Australia . he
colonists were influenced by British Romantic poets and by American
writers like Henry David Thoreau. A group calling themselves the
Woodlanders named their retreat Walden Hut. Scientific societies were
founded. The first was the Philosophical Society of Australasia, established
in New South Wales in 1821. By 1857 the Zoological Society of Victoria was
meeting. The Royal Society of New South Wales was founded in 1866. One
member, William Clark, addressed the society on the disastrous effects of
forest clearance. Another member, Eccleston du Faur, a surveyor for the
government, became chairman of the Geography Section and promoted
environmental approaches to understanding climate patterns. He pro-
posed an expedition to travel to Antarctica to study how the polar icecap
influenced Australian weather. 6 The predecessor of Birds Australia was
founded in 1903 as the Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union.
R. M. Collins, who came from a wealthy sheep-raising family, took a
world tour, and in 1878 visited California, where he learned of Yellowstone
National Park and of the proposal to establish another one at Yosemite.
Upon his return he was elected to Parliament and later to the presidency
of the Queensland branch of the Royal Geographical Society. Collins
proposed a national park in the McPherson Range in the southeast high-
lands of Queensland, and although this met with local opposition, the
Queensland parliament did pass legislation in 1906 that created two other
parks. Finally, in 1915, the McPherson Range became Lamington National
Park. 7 In New South Wales, the Royal National Park, encompassing