Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
species eradication and biodiversity protection (Commonwealth of Australia, 2013).
The title of the broader program was adapted from the Northern Land Council's
(NLC) 'Caring for Country' unit, launched in 1995 to help Aboriginal owners to
manage their land and coastal areas. As Holmes (2011) observes, the Australian
government's program is significant in not just appropriating the name of the NLC
program, but reasserting a settler-descendant claim of ownership and national
patriotism over land. 'Caring for Country' conveys the Aboriginal sensibility of
'country' as encompassing a living world of relationships and affinities.
Caring for
Our
Country
, on the other hand, conveys the sense of tending a possession. Despite
these critical differences in meaning, the emergence of the word 'country' in
contemporary land management discourse has revived debates regarding the role
of native and introduced species in sustaining Australian agriculture, pastoralism,
'authentic' nature, and national identity.
In the following sections, we trace this evolution in thinking about 'country'
through the history of pastoralism in Outback Queensland. We illustrate our
discussion of contemporary concerns about sustaining the pastoral economy with
interviews we conducted with pastoralists to elicit and compare their attitudes to
prickle bush eradication and land management for cattle production.
Evolution of pastoralism in Outback Queensland
During the 1840s, the colonial governments of Victoria, New South Wales and
South Australia were keen to find an overland route to the Gulf of Carpentaria so
as to reduce shipping costs and garner greater profits from direct trade with the East
India Company (Mitchell, 1848). Queensland was gradually opened through
exploration and increasing settlement from the 1860s onwards. Much of the
exploration and building of infrastructure was achieved by using cameleers and
camels recruited from the northwest regions of the Indian subcontinent (Stevens,
1989). By the 1880s, most of the inland frontier was claimed as Crown Land by
the colony and subdivided into pastoral leases.
Early pastoralism in northwest Queensland primarily centred on sheep rearing
for wool. Remote sheep stations received supplies from and transported their
wool to railheads and coastal ports using cameleers and their camels (Rangan and
Kull, 2010). Pastoralists were largely concerned with rearing a healthy sheep stock
that would produce wool of certain quality, shearing the sheep and shipping the
wool off to market. Stocking rates on pastoral leases were partly determined by the
colonial government which, ever committed to the ideal of 'improvement',
specified the minimum number of animals to be grazed per unit area based on the
size of their leasehold properties and availability of fodder and water (Seddon, 2003:
36). Sheep were left to graze across the properties and rounded up only during the
shearing season or during periods of drought, when fodder and water were in short
supply and had to be provided to keep the animals alive. This mode of pastoralism
was significantly different from traditional Old World practices of raising sheep.
For as long as pastoralism has been practised, it has been the shepherd's role to
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