When explorer and surveyor Major Thomas Mitchell ventured into Australia’s inland in the early 1800s, he recorded in his journals his impressions of the landscape. Around him he noted expanses of bright yellow herbs, nine miles of grain-like grass, cut and stooped, and earthen clods that had been turned up, resembling ‘ground broken by the hoe’.
Mitchell, like other early explorers, noted what many white Australians would later overlook: there was evidence everywhere on this vast continent that Aboriginal Australians managed the land.
Historians, writers and academics are now rethinking Australia’s perception of Indigenous land management. They argue that the first Australians had complex systems of agriculture that went far beyond the hunter-gatherer tag. They were, in fact, our first farmers, whose intimate knowledge of managing native plants and animals sustained them for thousands of years.Historians, writers and academics are now rethinking Australia’s perception of Indigenous land management. They argue that the first Australians had complex systems of agriculture that went far beyond the hunter-gatherer tag. They were, in fact, our first farmers, whose intimate knowledge of managing native plants and animals sustained them for thousands of years.
Gammage argues that early landscape paintings give an accurate picture of what Australia looked like prior to white settlement. Contrary to the popular opinion that the early painters simply romanticised the landscape to make it look more British or European, Gammage argues what they painted was actually much closer to reality: the trees weren’t dense, the land was not completely forested and some areas did, in fact, look like the parks that early explorers described.
The view differs to what we might now think of as wilderness because Indigenous Australians had changed the landscape by clearing out undergrowth, thinning trees and opening up clearings through the clever use of fire.
‘Aboriginal people used fire to distribute plant communities, like grass or open forest, across the country and the reason for doing that was to associate food for animals with shelter for animals,’ he says.
‘The most common example is you create grass, which is food for grazing animals like kangaroos, you put next to that an open forest which is their shelter and that encourages the kangaroos or the grazers to come from the shelter onto the grass.’
‘Then you burn the grass and a fortnight later you get this sweet, fresh growth, that lures the kangaroos to that particular spot … and they can be harvested more easily.’
Some scholars also believe that aquaculture was also an integral part of the pre-settlement Indigenous economy.
‘I have mapped 100 square kilometres of man-made, constructed, modified land which ended up resulting in a network of channels and connected wetlands,’ says Builth.
‘The connected wetlands themselves are all in a mosaic, but they were not natural. The wetlands had been dammed up to ensure the water stayed in them in times of drought.’
There is hope that this kind of ancient knowledge could one day restart industries such as eel aquaculture and wild rice agriculture to provide employment and income for Indigenous communities.
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 