EXPERIMENTS IN THE RANGELANDS - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 100

EXPERIMENTS IN THE RANGELANDS
White bodies and native invaders
Cameron Muir
The 'scrub' country west of the Bogan River, in the rangelands of western New
South Wales, was a problem for settlers, governments, and the whole civilising
project right from the start. It was a place marked by massacre, environmental
degradation, extinctions, and animal suffering. In the nineteenth century, great
hordes of cattle, sheep and rabbits spilled into the interior of Australia and began
eating up its grasslands. The loss of vegetation and the exposure and trampling of
ancient soils, combined with drought, caused 'horrific' dust storms which left 4ft
fences buried under sand (Griffiths, 2001). The stockmen and squatters accom-
panying the animals fought to the death with Aboriginal people for control of
territory and scarce environmental resources. Killing was so common during the
expansion of grazing on the plains that 'violence was normalised' (Broome, 2010:
46). Yet, for all this, the colonists did not recognise themselves and their agriculture
as invaders.
Instead they built a society preoccupied with persuading itself and others of the
legitimacy of its occupation of Australia. Whether something was native or not
mattered less than whether it supported their vision for what the inland plains
should be: in the late nineteenth, and for much of the early twentieth century, this
was 'white' and agrarian. Introduced rabbits were despised as much as native
dingoes. Aboriginal people, and Chinese settlers, in different ways, were both
obstacles to a white civilisation for the antipodes. I will explore these ideas and
obsessions in the story of two experiments carried out at the 'Bogan scrub' between
1896 and 1908.
In the first, 700 unemployed men were sent to the semi-arid woodlands along
the Bogan River to clear 'invading' native vegetation so that others could settle
there. It was a policy decision influenced by curiosity about the ability of white
men's bodies to undertake manual labour in isolated and hot environments. In the
second, the New South Wales Colonial Government established an experimental