EXPERIMENTS IN THE RANGELANDS - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 105

By the end of the scheme the scrub-cutting gangs had cleared over 600,000 acres
(Anon, 1899: 4). The Department of Lands had released 187,194 acres of the
cleared land for Improvement Leases - the condition of the country was still so
poor that those 200,000 acres could only support 49 mixed farms (Anon, 1898: 3).
In 1900, of the half a million acres cleared, only 3,000 to 4,000 were under crop
(Peacock, 1900b). The newspapers proclaimed the scheme a failure:
Persistent attempts have been made to make it wealth-producing, but in a
large number of cases the experiment has been heart-breaking. Hundreds of
thousands of pounds have been lost there, and many a man discouraged almost
beyond redemption
(Anon, 1900a: 4)
Some of the scrub cutters were directed to clear the major stock routes in the west
as well. Dubbo's Daily Liberal complained, 'the result now appears in the steady
and indiscriminate destruction of almost all the shade trees along the routes' (Anon,
1900b). Some residents took 'grim consolation' in the fact that the ring-barking
work was so poorly done it appeared not every tree was going to die (Figure 7.2).
In 1896, Australia led the world in formalising the idea of whiteness. In the
words of Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Australia embarked on a 'radical
new departure in international relations' when the New South Wales Colonial
FIGURE 7.2 A photo of semi-arid woodlands, or 'scrub country', near Coolabah, taken
in winter 2013.
Source: Cameron Muir.