Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
and fieldwork support for Anna Wilson. We thank Pat Lowe, Judith Carney,
Heather Goodall, Jodi Frawley, Virginia Brunton, Lesley Head, and many more
participants of the Rethinking Invasion Ecologies in the Anthropocene conference/
workshop at the University of Sydney for their insights and comments on the ideas
presented in this chapter.
Notes
1
This agency has been renamed several times, depending on the government in power. Over
the past ten years, it has been called Department of Primary Industries (DPI), then renamed
Department of Employment, Economic Development, and Innovation (DEEDI), and is
currently called DAFF (Queensland Government, 2013). Essentially, it is the department
that is responsible for overseeing the state's agricultural and pastoral sectors.
2
Fieldwork was initiated by Christian Kull and Priya Rangan as part of their ARC-DP
0666131, 'Acacia exchanges around the Indian Ocean'. They set up meetings with
government officials and conducted a preliminary survey of the areas targeted for prickle
bush control in the Southern Gulf Catchment area of northwest Queensland. Anna
Wilson and Alyse Weyman were recruited as Master's research students to develop their
thesis projects within the rubric of the larger project, and to carry out field interviews
with pastoralists in this region. They interviewed family-run cattle stations within 100
km of Flinders Highway. The pastoralists were selected through a snowball process,
beginning with a contact list provided by key representatives of the state Department of
Primary Industries (DPI) and the National Prickly Bush Management Group. The agency
officials suggested a range of contacts with different ideas and approaches towards land,
prickle bushes and pastoral management. Semi-structured conversations were carried out
with 35 individuals associated with family-run properties, and with 34 individuals from
19 organisations and government departments. Interviews with pastoralists were
conducted on their stations both in their homes and while touring their properties.
3
Many thanks to Virginia Brunton for pointing out to Priya Rangan that this group should
be categorised as Pragmatists because they utilised the funding opportunities for prickle
bush clearance provided through Landcare and WoNS programs.
4
Savory's cell-grazing technique has been positively evaluated by some scientists (Wolf
and Allen, 1995; Gompert, 2006; Roncoli et al ., 2007), while others claim the benefits
are uncertain and scientifically inconclusive (Brown, 1994; Dagget and Dusard, 2000; Li
et al ., 2002). Savory's 'holistic' approach to pastoralism is similar to that of traditional
pastoral communities that recognise the role of animals in creating and using their
ecosystems by fertilising and nourishing the grasses and soils they need to thrive. The
holistic agricultural approach was also emphasised by Albert Howard during the 1940s,
who called on farmers to take a step back and watch and learn from nature, 'the supreme
farmer'. He argued that industrial agriculture generated enormous waste in production
and undermined the longer-term health of soils and ecosystems. The healthiest way to
farm was to mimic nature and ensure that nothing was wasted; animals and plants needed
to be managed in rotation between fallow and productive areas in ways that preserved
soils and enriched the farming ecosystem (Howard, 1943). Howard's ideas are better
known within the contemporary organic farming movement than among the pastoralists
we interviewed.
5
The history of camels and prickly trees in the making of Outback Australia is described
in greater detail in Rangan and Kull (2010). Following the passage of the Immigration
Restriction Act of 1901, the Afghan cameleers were not given citizenship because of their
ethnicity. Many of them released their camels in the Outback before leaving for the Indian
subcontinent. Just as the shift in the pastoral economy from sheep to cattle led to a
landscape with more prickle bushes, the White Australia policy led to an Outback with
feral camels. In this sense, feral camels can be seen as living reminders of the forging of
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