THORNY PROBLEMS - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 118

that almost all future products - such as sugar, coffee, tobacco, cotton &c.,
whether for home consumption or exportation, will have been similarly
originated.
(Anon, 1866: 5)
Pastoralism and acclimatisation became the narratives through which Australian
colonies attempted to rewrite nature and write out natives from the landscape.
They provided the means for 'civilising' the landscape with sheep, cattle, and exotic
plants and thus securing the land from native incursions of all kinds. The industries
arising from improvement and acclimatisation projects formed the heart of the
Australian settler economy and identity for over a century. Despite the majority of
the population being concentrated in coastal cities and tied to the global imperial
economy, Australia's cultural identity was seen as being forged by the grit and
ingenuity of pastoralists who wrenched success from battling against the alien and
hostile native nature of the land (Bean, 1910; Tyrrell, 1999).
The metaphor of 'battle' carries an enormous amount of symbolism in Australian
national consciousness both in terms of its Anglo-Irish settler history and everyday
life on the land (Powell, 1988). Robin (2007: 6) notes that the popular celebration
of Australian identity centres on being 'perversely proud of “battling the elements”
and making life in a contrary environment', rather than 'coming to terms with
Australian nature with all its richness, and its limitations and exceptionalism' (ibid.:
205). Settlers who battled against the most 'Australian' aspects of nature in the
'Outback' - the searing heat, droughts, floods, dingoes, natives - became the
quintessential icons of Australianness. Paul McGuire described the drive to battle
against the land as an 'Australian Thing', writing:
She was hostile to me. She has been subdued to our human purposes only
with fierce struggle, and in that struggle has appeared the Australian Thing.
A culture is something more than the flower of civilisation. It is a whole way
of life. It shapes men's characters and it shapes their landscapes: it is itself
shaped by all the conditions of time and place and by men's intellectual and
moral energies and values . . .
(1939: xvii)
The relationship between Australianness, natives, and native nature underwent a
radical shift from the 1960s onwards with the political struggles for Aboriginal
rights, the rise of environmentalism, and the reimagining of national identity. As
the White Settler nationalism began to be revised into a more inclusive narrative
of the Australian nation, the focus of battle swung away from natives and native
nature towards tackling 'alien' nature. The new imagining of Australian nationalism
enthusiastically embraced native nature and turned against introduced plants and
animals that appeared to threaten the country's unique environment. Despite the
pastoral and agricultural economy being centred on introduced crops and animals,
national economic development emphasised the importance of quarantine in