Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
before the fi res got out of control, groups of people deployed swiftly and beat
them out using green branches. On average, a piece of land was burned of
about once every fi ve years.
This controlled burning had a huge ef ect on both the landscape and the
plant life. Just as the Indians of the American Northeast used fi re to open up
the landscape and make it easier to hunt, the ef ect of the Aborigines' burn-
ing was to open up the wetter regions of the Australian landscape. The result
was extensive open grassland with a scattering of large trees. As soon as the
Europeans began to fence of the land and raise sheep and cattle, brush and
small trees were free to grow up. As in the American West, where the sum-
mers are dry, this ecological change has exposed entire ecosystems to disas-
trous wildfi res that now threaten entire cities.
Because the Aborigines had always been hunter-gatherers they depended
on an abundance of wild plants. Before the arrival of Europeans a great vari-
ety of seeds and tubers accounted for at least half their diet. In southeastern
Australia one of the most important of these is the Murnong plant, a tough
root, and thrives in areas recently swept by fi re. Nineteenth-century settlers
wrote of seeing huge fi elds made up of millions of these wild plants. Large
numbers of Aborigines would wander among them, digging up the roots.
The Aborigines had not deliberately planted the Murnong, and thus had not
invented agriculture in the formal sense. But they were perhaps on their way
to an agricultural revolution before they were interrupted by the arrival of
the Europeans.
The productivity of grasslands, too, was fi re-dependent. In the absence
of fi re Australian native grasses form dense tussocks with no room for other
seed-bearers or tuberous plants. Fire releases the productivity of these lands,
but when fi re is suppressed in order to protect grazing, tussocks form and
the native plants that are unable to survive in them disappear.
The fi elds of Murnong plants largely vanished with the introduction of
sheep and cattle, driving many Aboriginal tribes to near-extinction along
with them. Grazing brought negative changes in other parts of Australia as
well, dramatically reducing the diversity of plants on which the native peo-
ples depended.
