THORNY PROBLEMS - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 123

worked in harsh, unforgiving environments to muster the animals and take them
on long stock routes from inland stations to coastal stockyards.
Pastoralism in Queensland underwent another significant shift between the
1950s and 1970s, this time in the organisation of production. In 1959, a report
prepared by the national Department of Agricultural Economics recommended the
reorganisation and expansion of the beef industry in northwest Queensland (Kelly,
1959). It called for a fundamental restructuring of the beef industry to promote
greater efficiencies and economic advantage by separating and specialising in
different stages of production and value chain. Instead of cattle being born, raised
and fattened on a single property before being sent to market, the report recom-
mended that pastoralists could specialise in different stages of the animal's life cycle
depending on the resource attributes and locational advantages of their properties;
some could specialise in breeding, others could raise cattle to maturity, and yet
others could specialise in fattening or 'finishing' the cattle on richer pastures or
feedlots before they were sent to slaughter. Improvements in road infrastructure
combined with innovations such as large 'road trains' for transporting cattle en masse
from one production site to another along the beef value chain also enabled quicker
returns and the promise of larger profits for pastoralists. Although the proposal
seemed fairly radical in the 1960s, this 'flexible industrial' system has since become
the norm for large-scale cattle production in Queensland and other regions and
countries involved in global beef markets and commodity chains. The pastoral
economy of northwest Queensland was thus transformed from a grazing-centred
industry to industrial pastoralism requiring greater capital investment in technology
and infrastructure along the commodity chain.
Most pastoral properties in northwest Queensland realigned and integrated with
the new system of beef production as domestic and global demand for beef grew
through the 1970s. The landscape, too, reflected the shift from sheep to cattle and
presented new problems for pastoralists at the early stages of the value chain.
Following the heavy rains and floods in 1974, pastoralists confronted a massive
expansion of prickle bushes that had previously dotted the grazing landscape and
lined bore drains. None of them recollected previous floods as having caused such
an explosion of prickly trees. One pastoralist recalled:
We'd started off with two trees at 'Isobel'. We thought they were wonderful.
My husband and I were planting them along the bore drains and everything
. . . In 1974 the prickly acacia grew out of the floods in all proportions . . . it
went on from September that rain, from September to March. It rained in
April and those seeds got absolutely soaked . . . and we didn't realise that we
had such a terrible problem . . . and after '74 I just hated that tree because it
infested our place.
(Pastoralist E, interviews, 2007)
One of the main reasons for the proliferation of prickle bushes in pastoral holdings
was the replacement of sheep with cattle. Although prickle bushes still served the