Livestock, Land Cover, and Environmental History: The Tablelands of New South Wales, Australia, 1820–1920

For southeastern Australia, arrival of the First Fleet in 1788 raises similar issues in environmental history as the 1492 landing of Columbus in the Americas. But Anglo-Australian settlement is younger and better documented, both in terms of scientific proxy data and historical sources, which include data on stocking rates that generally were light. Environmental concerns were voiced early, and a lively debate continues both among professionals and the lay public, with Australian geographers playing a major academic and applied role. This article addresses environmental degradation often attributed to early pastoralism (and implicit clearance) in the Tablelands of New South Wales. Methods include: (1) comparison of well-reported travel itineraries of 1817–1833 with modern land cover and stream channels; (2) critical reviews of high-resolution pollen profiles and the issues of Aboriginal vs. Anglo-Australian fire ecology; and (3) identification of soil erosion and gullying both before and after Anglo-Australian intrusion. The results indicate that (a) land cover of the Tablelands is little changed since prior to Contact, although some species are less common, while invasive genera of legumes have modified the ground cover; (b) the charcoal trace in pollen profiles prior to Contact supports an ecological impact of regular Aboriginal burning and rare, catastrophic fires; and (c) most stream channels were already entrenched (“gullied”) well before 1840, with repeated cut-and-fill cycles during the late Holocene, but before Contact. Land impairment has not been a major problem on the Tablelands, although the last two centuries have experienced cumulative and complex environmental change. This unexpected empirical picture suggests that, until high-technology intervention, increasing periodicity/magnitude of extreme drought/precipitation events had been the overriding trend in interior New South Wales, perhaps reinforced by burning. There is no support for an apocalyptic model of colonial environmental history.