Foundations - From Custodianship to the Anthropocene 60,000 BCE

1:  How was fire used by Aboriginal people?

Answer explanation

Aboriginal people burnt the bush to signal, to clear the ground, to hunt, to regenerate plant food and extend the human habitat, and for fun. Fire was a common tool of land management.  James Cook saw cultural burnings from the deck of the Endeavor as he sailed along the east coast of Australia.

2:  How did Aboriginal people manage the land? 

Answer explanation

Aboriginals used multiple natural resources to manage the land. They collected and moved stone to create stone wall fishtraps like those found in the brewarrina fish traps, used firesticks to make cool burns that burnt the undergrowth around water sources and in grass planes before the rainy season to assure the grass would be healthy next season...

3:  How did European settlement change the Australian environment?

Answer explanation

Introduced animals, plants and viruses. 

British laws being imposed on the natives who occupied the land. The british using the land for the construction of their new society in Australia

Waste materials being left around the country.

4:  How did pastoralism change the Australian environment?

Answer explanation

Those who pushed beyond the Limits of Location were called squatters as they illegally used Crown land.  Before long, respectable landowners from Sydney joined the rush to use the free grass on distant Crown land.  Landholders in Van Diemen’s Land looked to the southern coast of Australia, despite it being off-limits.  European pastoralism was profoundly disruptive to the environment, destroying and displacing native flora and fauna, restricting Aboriginal peoples’ access to food resources and resulting in the depletion and erosion of soils.  

5:  How did expansion into the interior of Australia change the Australian environment?

Answer explanation

In 1807 Lieutenant Thomas Laycock was the first European to cross by foot from Launceston to Hobart.  He found some fine grazing land.  Settlers slowly occupied these newly discovered areas, with the help of government land grants.  In 1814f the Blue Mountains were finally crossed by Eruopeans.  Both of these events expanded the possibilities for wool growing.  Resistance from the Wiradjuri on the Bathurst Plains in 1821 resulted in conflict between settlers and indigenous people.  The death of 100 Wiradjuri people was a result.  By 1820, sheep numbers in NSW and Van Diemen’s Land reached 200,000 animals.

6:  What was the impact of the gold rushes on the landscape?

Answer explanation

Miners pot-holed large areas digging shafts and covering the topsoil with infertile clays they dug up. They turned creek beds upside down looking for gold. They sank deep shafts lined with wood in some areas; pounded gold bearing quartz rock with steam-driven and wood-fuelled stamping machines; and washed away hillsides with powerful steam driven sluicing hoses. 

- bark stripping, resource extraction, deforstation.

7:  What was the impact of Black Thursday 1851 on the landscape? p103

Answer explanation

The landscape after the fires was  one that was a“Blackened land”, littered with “horses, cattle and sheep lay dying” on it. Magpies and other such birds.

9:  What was the impact of the Federation drought?

Answer explanation

Colonists experienced drought from their first years in the colony, at least every decade. However, the so-called Federation Drought (1895–1902) was the deepest yet experienced by colonists and covered all of eastern and central Australia.13 Despite some patchy rain, drought-breaking rain did not come until December 1902.

“[Almost] two-thirds of all stock in the state died. Forty million sheep* alone perished, some by design, like the 7,000 emaciated beasts slaughtered at Wagga in November 1902 for their pelts. The grain yield had dropped by over sixty per cent, and in 1902 not a sheaf was harvested in some areas.” 

10:  How did European attitudes towards the environment alter over time?

Answer explanation

The perspective of progress, that the natural resources of the world should be utilised for profit, continued in the 19th century.  The bush was still seen by many as a place to be conquered, and turned into productive farms, or the wood and minerals extracted.  However, the Romantic movement of the late 18th/early 19th century encouraged an appreciation of the sublime in the natural world. Writera such as Alexander von Humboldt, George Perkins Marsh (Man and Nature, 1864) and Henry David Thoreau (Walden, 1854)

Changing views of nature & the environment

       

11: Define Aboriginal custodianship.

Answer explanation

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island peoples attributed a religious value to their Country.  This created rights and obligations to the Country as custodians in partnership with the great ancestors and sanctioned in the Tjukurpa.  As custodians, they were obligated to care for the Country, to clean the land by fire and to keep its plant and animal species in good health.  They performed ceremonies to maintain plants and animals and followed rules to make their numbers sustainable.  First Nations peoples did not view land as a commodity to be traded, taken or conquered.