At loggerheads about logging the landscape
A RECENT Dubbo Photo News edition featured a story about the campaign to log the Pilliga and Goonoo Forest areas with comments that encouraged the intelligent harvesting of timber from the areas.
My interest focuses on the Pilliga area where, in the 1930s, my grandfather purchased 6000 acres at the northern end of the Dandry Creek road.
As a nine-year-old, I recall sitting on the footboard of a combine as my father drove a team of horses, sowing a wheat crop. Other folk recall that what is now a National Park was generally “good open country between two rows of hills”.
When visiting the Pilliga Pottery decades later I discussed the area with the owner – having come to Dubbo from farming country near Lake Cargelligo in the 1960s, it helps one have a bond with the real conditions of the countryside.
The Pilliga area is now dense vegetation. Apart from the “No Logging” restrictions, my grandfather told me that rabbits would chew around the base of new cypress pine shrubs, thus “ring barking” them, but since the rabbit plague has ceased the cypress have proliferated.
The history across our nation was well presented in Eric Rolls’ book “A Million Wild Acres”, which is about the Pilliga Scrub, so we would have a remarkable record of our origins. In his early days Eric Rolls lived on the family farm to the east of the scrub, and in later life, continued farming on the western edge at Baradine. His intimate knowledge of soils, plant life, and his determination to search out the natural and social history makes this record so comprehensive. He details the early explorers, settlements, logging, farming and grazing enterprises over time, rabbits, wild pigs and birds.
An ABC publication is “Black Summer” edited by Michael Rowland which is a collection of stories of loss, courage and communities by ABC journalists working on the ground during the 20192020 bushfires.
The fires burned across the country from June 2019 to February 2020 and were said to be unprecedented. By the time the rains came, 18 million hectares of bush and farmland had been burned along with approximately 3000 homes; it claimed the lives of 33 people and killed an estimated billion animals.
How much of this devastation was due to the lack of land care and government regulations and controls?
A recent publication is “Flames of Extinction” by John Pickrell in which he reviews the impact of the Black Summer bushfires on the wildlife. Many species including the koala, regent honey eater, black cockatoo and platypus are moving towards extinction because of the blazes. The text examines the various species, and the people who have been involved in handling the crisis.
Bill Gammage has written “The Biggest Estate on Earth”. Early Europeans arriving in Australia often commented that the land looked like a park. Gammage has studied early records of explorers such as Sturt, Leichhardt and others who made extensive observations about the landscape and concludes that the Aboriginal system of land management using fire and the life cycles of native plants ensures plentiful wildlife and plant foods.
These land management strategies from around Australia are revealed in his book. Such burning has been virtually eliminated today. What has occurred has proven to be ineffective, particularly in Eastern Australia.
Well respected analyst and commentator on world matters is author Simon Winchester who has written “Land – How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World”. A summary states, “In this sweeping global history, Winchester explores how our land has been mapped, owned, divided, stolen, cared for, fought over, preserved and restored.” Interesting facts emerge including Gina Rinehart’s 29 million acres, how realms of the British monarchy had vast areas, and the 100 Americans who together own as much as the entire state of Florida.
Tim Low is the author of “The New Nature” in which he discusses the “winners and losers in wild Australia”. He also draws on the records of early explorers and settlers to examine the vegetation and wildlife across our country.
When we consider how metropolitan people influence the legislation and decisions about the natural country landscape, the reality factor is disregarded. And in Tim Low’s book he refers to Sydney’s sewerage which is piped out to sea through three deep water pipes up to four kilometres long. The Bondi outfall, the smallest of the three, “pumps out 1700 million litres of toilet and kitchen water each day”. And these are the same people who influence the decisions about intelligent prevention-burning in the bush while their own contamination effects coastal sea-life.
Decisions about nature, landscape, use of land for food production and so-called protection of animals and vegetation are heavily sponsored by metropolitan people who don’t live in the regions thus influenced. They have limited understanding of the elements that cause bushfires and, until we have a resulting crisis, they have no sense of the results of their decision making.
Just recently a customer in the bookstore was talking about the Pilliga timber production and it emerged that he was related to the owner of the now closed Baradine sawmill. There would be no doubt that more timber has been lost to fire in the last five decades than to logging.