BEAUTIFUL LIES

Correspondence

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John Benson

The issues discussed in Tim Flannery’s Beautiful Lies raise a complex but important debate with major ramifications for how we manage the Australian landscape. The debate is about vegetation structure and fire ecology. It’s also about the way simplistic statements made by reputable authors such as Tim Flannery can be used to justify ongoing damage to the Australian landscape.

First, I must refute some accusations Dr Flannery made in QE11 in response to a letter by the NSW Minister for the Environment, Bob Debus. Debus challenged Flannery’s assertion that increased bushfire intensity is due to less regular burning and that a run of intense fires has caused species extinctions in places such as Royal National Park near Sydney. He argued that there are other explanations for species loss including the introduction of exotic predators and that the fires in the Park were due to extreme climatic conditions. Arson has also increased in recent decades. To support some of his case Debus cited a scientific review paper that I co-authored with Phil Redpath on the nature of pre-European vegetation and fire regimes in southern-eastern Australia.¹

In his response to Debus, Flannery suggested that Redpath or I contributed to the Debus letter before it was published. This was not the case. Neither of us was aware of it until after it was published. However, we agree with its content. Although changed fire regimes may have played a role in some species extinctions in Australia, this has probably been insignificant compared to the impacts of domestic stock, exotic predators and European land use practices.

Flannery also asserted that we had published an “outright lie” about his writings on Aboriginal burning frequency. In our article we stated that the early explorers’ statements were used to give an impression that burning took place annually. In his book The Future Eaters Flannery used the term “frequent” in describing Aboriginal burning practices. However, he failed to qualify this by mentioning Aborigines did not burn everywhere “frequently”. The idea that Aborigines “more or less annually” burnt most of the country has been stated in places such as the booklet prepared by Ryan et al, The Australian landscape – Observations of Explorers and Early Settlers.² They refer to Flannery’s writings to support their case. This booklet is discussed below.

Fire and the mega-fauna

In The Future Eaters, Tim Flannery states that the Aborigines burnt the land “frequently”. This supports his hypothesis of a human blitzkrieg that caused the mega-fauna extinction. In brief, Flannery considers that the Aborigines hunted the mega-fauna to extinction within 2000 years of their arrival 40,000–50,000 years ago. He proposes that this led to a profusion of vegetation that fuelled large-scale bushfires which in turn led to the Aborigines frequently burning the bush to control fuel levels. Flannery asserts that this frequent burning changed the previous vegetation into open grassy woodland and grasslands. He then asserts that a cessation of Aboriginal burning since European settlement led to a regrowth of shrubby vegetation and this caused species extinctions, particularly of medium to small-sized native mammals. This is why in Beautiful Lies and elsewhere Flannery suggests re-introducing frequent burning to manage the bush now.

To the lay reader this sounds like a plausible hypothesis – it is certainly ingenious in its scope. However, it is not supported by much scientific evidence and it is likely that the hypothesis is wrong. Climate change over millions of years was the main director of vegetation change in Australia. Fires have raged on this continent for millions of years including during the times of the mega-fauna. The evidence for this lies in soil cores and palaeo-botanical research, some of which is beautifully summarised in Mary White’s book After the Greening: the Browning of Gondwana. Australia’s flora have adjusted to the drying out of the continent as it drifted north into lower latitudes by developing hard wax-covered leaves, reduced transpiration, hard woody seed coats, underground root systems that allows vegetative re-sprouting and other features. Many of these features are also advantageous to plants surviving fire.

Even if the Aborigines did rapidly extinguish the mega-fauna through hunting pressure, other species would most likely have taken over their herbivore niches. In any case, we know that invertebrate animals account for much of the herbivory of Australian vegetation. As for the loss of small mammals due to cessation of burning after European settlement, this seems an illogical argument since they require vegetation cover to protect them from predators. Cover is lost with frequent burning but is gained when there are long inter-fire periods. To add to the debate, there is evidence that early graziers burnt some areas more than the Aborigines (see our 1997 article for detailed references and discussion about this). Furthermore, recent research at Cuddie Springs south of Walgett in northwestern NSW by Judith Field of the University of Sydney points to an 8000-year co-existence (from 36,000 to 28,000 years ago) of Aborigines with the mega-fauna. If Field’s data is accurate, it not only challenges Flannery’s Future Eaters blitzkrieg hypothesis but also the consequences of that hypothesis about the scope of Aboriginal burning regimes. Field considers climate change may have played a major role in the extinction of the mega-fauna.

Regrowth and land clearing

The other aspect of this debate involves regrowth of vegetation and this relates to the discussion on fire above. The people who are the greatest advocates for clearing vegetation in NSW and Queensland are dry-land grain croppers, cotton growers and beef cattle graziers. Big agribusinesses are involved along with some wealthy farmers. Publications such as The Australian Landscape – Observations of Explorers and Early Settlers, professional rural lobby groups and influential individual farmers have used Flannery’s and other popular writers’ views about fire and regrowth to justify land clearing. They state that there has been massive regrowth of woody vegetation (shrubs and trees) due to a cessation of Aboriginal burning and by clearing it they are restoring it to a pre-European vegetation structure. This is largely nonsense but it has fooled some politicians and bureaucrats.

These people are clearing land to grow crops, not to restore some notion of a natural vegetation structure. If they were simply thinning regrowth it would be less of a problem for the environment. However, one cannot count a wheat crop as an environmental gain. Cropping wipes out most native species, destroys much of the soil biota and replaces them with an exotic monoculture. It’s not as if we don’t have lots of cleared country. In most parts of the Australian wheatbelt less than 20 per cent of the original extent of native vegetation remains. Yet they are trying to clear more of this despite documented species and ecosystem decline and the long-term ramifications of rising salinity levels to agricultural production. And they are pushing the grain belt further into marginal land at a time when climate change scenarios are predicting less reliable rainfall in these regions.

Nyngan is a town of about 3000 people on the western edge of the NSW wheatbelt. The surrounding countryside has moderate to poor soils and an unreliable and relatively low rainfall. It is marginal cropping country. Some landholders want to convert grazing country to crops to cash in on the better commodity prices for grains than for sheep or cattle. This requires them to clear the country. In fact, they want to clear about 80 per cent of the private land in the region. Recently massive areas have been cleared in the region leading up to the introduction of new vegetation management laws in New South Wales. This has mostly been done without permission under current laws. The land clearers in the Nyngan region argue they are clearing “woody shrubby regrowth”. However, in clearing the shrubs they sometimes also clear everything including old eucalyptus and wattle trees. More importantly, they are sowing annual crops so this radically impacts on the environment. The farmers say the woody regrowth is causing soil erosion and the shrubs have grown due to a lack of Aboriginal burning – thereby reflecting Flannery’s writings. An expert science panel reviewed the literature on soil erosion in relation to woody regrowth. It reported that site management, seasonal conditions and grazing pressure are most important in determining ground cover and therefore erosion.³ It is possible that the loss of topsoil after 150 years of excessive grazing, particularly during drought periods, may have created conditions that favour the survival of shrub species over herbaceous plants. Nevertheless, this does not suggest that shrub species did not occur in those areas, but rather are advantaged by the prevailing land management activities.

The creation of a myth

In 1995 a booklet was published titled The Australian Landscape – Observations of Explorers and Early Settlers. It was compiled by David Ryan, a former fire management officer with State Forests of NSW, Jim Ryan, an ex-hydro engineer and landholder from the town of Bredbo on the NSW Southern Tablelands, and Barry Starr who was then an employee in the former NSW Department of Land and Water Conservation (Murrumbidgee Region). The timing of the publication of this booklet coincided with the introduction of the first regulations in New South Wales to control land clearing. These regulations were in response to a public outcry over land clearing rates in New South Wales and the impact this was having on landscape functioning, river systems, wildlife and soil salinity.

The Ryan booklet was financed by the NSW Farmers Association and the former NSW Department of Land and Water Conservation. One could interpret it as a propaganda tool to convince those in power that clearing land was restoring the landscape to a notional natural state. It relied on the selective use of quotations from early explorers and some popular texts to support its case. One of these was Tim Flannery’s The Future Eaters and Flannery has repeated similar statements in his essay Beautiful Lies.

In 1997 Phil Redpath and I exposed major flaws in the Ryan booklet. A review of its historical references showed that different interpretations could be made of journal passages when read in their full context and when other passages were taken into account. The scientific literature on species–fire interactions, also reviewed, cast further doubt on the claims in Ryan et al and in Flannery’s writings on fire and vegetation. Yet the views of Ryan et al have been perpetrated as a myth by some farmer lobby groups, elements of the forest industry and others in order to justify frequent widespread burning and clearing native vegetation.

This is not just an esoteric academic debate. It impacts on the sustainable management of the natural resources of this fragile continent. It is about the way some loosely researched material in Tim Flannery’s The Future Eaters and in his essay Beautiful Lies are taken as scientific fact and used by those intent on continuing the degradation of the Australian landscape for economic gain without being made accountable for the long-term effects of consequences such as salinity.

Other controversies

Much of Beautiful Lies is drawn from Flannery’s earlier book The Future Eaters. I have no qualms with most of the essay’s content including the sentiments expressed in the chapters titled “The Founding Lie”, “White Liars”, “The Colonial Drain”, “Fighting for the Future”, “Australia Adrift” and “Sweet and Sour Nation”. These discuss some important social issues and matters to do with sustainable management of rural lands including the problems of over-allocation of water, soil erosion and degradation and salinity. Flannery is right to raise these big natural resource issues but he is wrong to criticise the benefits of the national reserve system and wilderness to the conservation of biodiversity and natural ecosystems and by default to our own sustainability.

Beautiful Lies contains several controversial statements, some of which were debated on the ABC Radio National Earthbeat program in April 2003. The participants in this debate were Flannery, a New Zealand whale expert Mike Donahoe, and me. Besides the issue of fire frequency, the debate covered these matters:

Cats: In his essay Flannery states that there is no evidence that cats caused the extinction of any species or animal in Australia. During the radio debate I handed Flannery a copy of a definitive review paper on this topic compiled by Sydney University researchers that reveals that up to seven species of animal may have become extinct due to predation by cats by 1850.⁴ Other factors such as sheep and changed fire patterns may have played a role but you cannot state, as Flannery does in Beautiful Lies, that cats did not cause any extinctions.

Sustainable whaling: It seems Flannery fell for Japanese propaganda about sustainable harvesting of Minke whales by repeating their hypothesis that the relatively large numbers of Minke whales may be inhibiting the recovery of large, rarer whales such as the South Right Whale through competition for food. Mike Donahue shot this hypothesis down by revealing that Minke whales eat different food than Southern Right whales and that illegal whaling by the Russians in the 1970s was mostly to blame for the lack of recovery of the Southern Right whale.

Wilderness, the reserve system and Aboriginal burning

In the chapter “The Dead Hand” Tim Flannery plays down the importance of the “flagship” battles won by the environment movement such as protecting special places such as Frazer Island and the Franklin River, stopping whaling, saving tracts of forest from the chainsaws and establishing a system of conservation reserves and wilderness areas to sample biodiversity and protect landscapes. He considers that reserves have failed to protect species from becoming extinct because they were intensely managed by Aborigines through the application of frequent fire and now are not.

Fire doubtless has a role to play in species management. By studying the ecology of a range of species that occur in an area, an appropriate fire regime can be implemented including through controlled burning if that is required. And burning to protect property is not in question here. However, species extinctions from natural remnants are most likely explained by the direct and indirect impacts of fragmentation of the landscape – a fact well established in scientific literature.

Taking Royal National Park near Sydney as an example, it is now surrounded by an urban sprawl, is encroached upon by domestic pets including dogs and cats, the voracious fox is common and pollution of waterways is difficult to control. These factors explain the loss of wildlife. You cannot just blame this on altered fire regimes due to a cessation of frequent Aboriginal burning. In any case we do not know how the area was burnt by Aboriginal people, although, paradoxically, recent charcoal evidence from Gibbon Lagoon near the town of Bundeena suggests that fire may have increased in frequency since European occupation of the region.⁵ This is the opposite scenario to what Flannery suggests. Besides, when it comes to assessing fire frequency the most informative approach to study is the life cycle of a number of species of plants and animals that exist in an area.

Researchers have demonstrated that a fire-free interval in the order of 8–25 years is required to maintain biodiversity in shrubby sandstone country around Sydney, including Royal National Park. This possibly mirrors long term El Nino climate patterns. However, it needs to be emphasised that appropriate inter-fire intervals vary for different types of vegetation in different locations across Australia, a fact recognised in many bushfire management planning instruments.

In Beautiful Lies Flannery questions the concept of wilderness, suggesting it supports terra nullius. He has stated that the Aborigines managed all of the landscape therefore none of it (other than the uninhabited Lord Howe Island) was wilderness at the time of European settlement. In a recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend magazine about the Wollemi National Park wilderness west of Sydney, Flannery was quoted as stating that Aboriginal people ought to be allowed to “hunt, use four-wheel drives and set up camps” because they originally managed these areas.

Over thousands of years Aboriginal people would have traversed every part of Australia but it is doubtful they intensively fire-stick managed all of it as was suggested in the 1950s and 1960s by anthropologists such as Tindale and Rhys Jones. Aboriginal numbers were limited (300,000–1,000,000 for the continent) and they concentrated mostly where Europeans now live or farm – on higher nutrient soils that produce more game and edible plant life. I agree that Aborigines may have regularly patch-burnt some grassy woodlands, grasslands, areas around camps and access routes. However, shrubby places such as Wollemi National Park are so low in nutrients it is doubtful that many Aborigines could have survived there other than for short visits, let alone intensively managed the whole 500,000 ha area. The recently discovered art sites in Wollemi may confirm the area was visited for certain purposes.

The biology of species reveals more about how places may have been burnt either by Aborigines or by natural fires. Many reserved lands in south-eastern Australia contain groups of plant species that are intolerant of being burnt every few years. Some vegetation types such as rainforest or saltbush cannot survive frequent fire at all and may become locally extinct. It is unlikely that Aboriginal people would have burnt too frequently if it affected food resources in rainforest or wetter forests. However, they may have regularly patch-burnt grassland areas to stimulate native yams that were a staple diet in south-eastern Australia. The point is that different types of vegetation were probably burnt differently by Aborigines. However, it beggars belief that such small numbers of people could have burnt the whole country all of the time as is suggested by some popular writers.

The national conservation reserve system and wilderness areas are the prime means of ensuring the survival of species simply because it is unlikely they will be grossly changed by humans. This contrasts with bushland on private land that is being cleared or over-grazed and some state forests that are being felled at unsustainable rates. At least our national parks are being professionally managed, albeit on limited budgets, by well-trained people who are dedicated to maintaining biodiversity. To downplay the importance of the national reserve system is foolhardy, yet this is what Flannery does in Beautiful Lies. However, most biologists (me included) agree with Flannery’s call to improve the sustainable management of the ecosystems across rural landscapes as this is the matrix between the conservation reserves. This (mainly private) land is vital to the long-term survival of numerous species and to future agricultural production. For these reasons a number of scientific colleagues and myself have been calling for a cessation of broadscale land clearing for over a decade now and have endeavoured to persuade governments to help farmers rehabilitate over-cleared regions! In that decade about six million hectares of bushland in Queensland and between 500,000 ha and 1 million hectares of bushland in New South Wales have been cleared. The next year or so will see if the politicians are serious about stopping this onslaught. Most of the public certainly want it stopped.

After the ABC radio debate on Beautiful Lies Tim Flannery lent over to me in the studio and said “I guess I should do better checks on my facts.” I agreed. Tim Flannery does himself a disservice by not doing so. He has a gift for writing and raises some important issues. However, he sometimes covers topics in which he lacks expertise and is therefore prone to make erroneous statements. These have been used by some as justification to destroy more land and wildlife habitat. Without losing his enthusiasm for environmental issues, Tim Flannery should check details more thoroughly when he pens articles for popular consumption.

John Benson

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Acknowledgements: I thank Phil Redpath for commenting on the text. The views expressed are my own and are not necessarily those of the NSW government.

1. Benson, J.S. & Redpath, P.A., “The nature of pre-European native vegetation in south-eastern Australia: a critique of Ryan, D.G., Ryan, J.R. & Starr, B.J., The Australian Landscape – Observations of Explorers and Early Settlers”, Cunninghamia 5(2), 1997, pp. 285–328.

2. Ryan, D.G., Ryan, J.R. & Starr, B.J.,The Australian Landscape – Observations of Explorers and Early Settlers, Murrumbidgee Catchment Management Committee: Wagga Wagga, 1995.

3. Oliver, I., Eldridge, D. & Wilson, B., Regrowth and soil erosion in central-west NSW. A report to the Native Vegetation Advisory Council, Sydney, Department of Land and Water conservation, 2000.

4. Dickman, C.R., “Impact of exotic generalist predators on native fauna of Australia”, Wildlife Biology 2(3), 1996, pp. 185–195.

5. Mooney, S.D., Radford, K.L. & Hancock, G., “Clues to the ‘burning question’: pre-European fire in the Sydney coastal region from sedimentary charcoal and palynology”, Ecological Management & Restoration 2(3), 2000, pp. 203–212.