Taming of the Great South Land — A history of the conquest of Nature in Australia
By William J. Lines
Allen and Unwin. 337 pp. $19.95.
Reviewed by Dave Riley
When you fly the east coast of Australia on a window seat, you look down on a landscape whose order is very impressive. From such a height you cannot see the activities below but you know that human effort transformed scrub and bush into the pattern that now carpets the contours. This dynamic and undulating texture is the gross national product of the Great South Land for this and every other financial year. Good old Aussie dollars are born in such scenery.
But as William Lines points out in Taming the Great South Land, "without an acquaintance with the past we remain complicit in the orthodoxy of the present". In a mere 205 years Australia has been biologically transformed from a lavishly enriched continent — uniquely blessed with an array of plants and animals — into an outpost of capital set on further accumulation regardless of continuing degradation. This unfortunate meeting of the logic of natural and economic history ruined the accumulated ecological wealth amassed during the previous 200 million years.
The speed of the transformation is mind boggling. We need only to go back a few grandmothers to see a totally different land. Pioneering spirit has a lot to answer for, regardless of its sweat and toil. The pervasive social agreement that tamed this land has only very recently been called to account.
In his study, Lines is keen to trace the genesis of the mess we confront today. In doing so, he rewrites the history of Australia, so that its changing ecology is fused with its politics. Regardless of the rationale of the endeavour, the impoverishment of nature in Australia has always involved changing power relations among humans. This precedes and coincides with environmental impact.
Lines' history is not one of a gentle landscape being destroyed by harsh individuals who must lose their compassion before they ringbark a tree. Instead in this narrative, active social forces blindly pursue a simple purpose succinctly summed up by mining magnate Lang Hancock: "Capitalism means life — environmentalism means death".
Given the scale of the destruction — from the near extinction of the Aborigines to the clearing of the Queensland brigalow belt as recently as the mid-1960s — it is amazing that it was not until 1967 that the first major environmental campaign was fought in Australia. While the indigenous population consistently defended their threatened lands through two centuries, the fight to save the Great Barrier Reef from mining was a turning point that encouraged further struggles throughout the country over the last 25 years.
Lake Pedder, Little Desert, Kelly's Bush, Tarania Creek, Wesley Vale, Franklin River, Daintree Rainforest, Errinundra Plateau, Roxby Downs are all milestones that mark a new political phenomenon as much fostered by the radicalisation in the '60s as by the devastation still ongoing and wrought before then.
But this shift, insists Lines, is not enough: "To the extent environmental organisations refrain from challenging existing political relationships and omit social justice from their agenda, they are a sham; they fight against something they do not really wish to defeat".
These blunt words seem an obvious conclusion to anyone who reads this book with care. The history of the environment in Australia is really a social history that cannot be compartmentalised either geographically or politically like so many side pockets on a billiard table.
"The real choice", he writes, "lies not between different market mechanisms but between industrial capitalism and collective social action, between continued destruction and a more sensitively and democratically planned, non-exploitative future".
Given the sometimes soft approach of so many similar green texts Lines' vigorous rewriting of the history of Australia is an enlightened synthesis we can all cherish.