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The day, the land, the people

By Tim Flannery - posted Friday, 15 February 2002


Australia Day is a day for relaxing and celebrating the good life – a great Aussie holiday – and a time also to think about our origins; what it means to be Australian, and where our nation is going. Perhaps its an Australian characteristic that until now we’ve been long on the leisure and short on the thinking; which is unfortunate, because it has left us with shallow roots in this continent. Our history and our ecology reveal just how superficial those roots are, for they reveal that most of us still live as people from somewhere else, who just happen to inhabit – sometimes unsustainably, ignorantly and destructively – this marvellous continent.

Let’s look at history first. Growing up with Irish ancestry in Victoria, I’ve always had a soft spot for Ned Kelly, with his intolerance of injustice and independent spirit. But the more I think about him, the less I can see him as distinctively Australian. At heart he was an Irishman struggling with his Old World oppressors in a drama transplanted in its entirety to the Antipodes, the khaki backdrop of the Australian bush making virtually no difference. The Man from Snowy River can hardly be counted as uniquely Australian either. Seated astride American megafauna (a horse) that had been introduced to the continent just a century before, chasing other introduced megafauna, he is a figure of a much larger history – the global cattle frontier. Exchange his Akubra for a ten-gallon hat and he becomes a cowboy. Even most written histories of the Australian nation read like the story of a European people who just happen – almost incidentally – to stride an Australian stage. And perhaps that is, until now, precisely what we have been.

Certainly I don’t mean to suggest that the European aspects of our history are irrelevant or should be disposed of – only that they reflect us as a people who have not yet developed deep, sustaining roots in the land. Yet Australia – the land, its climate and creatures and plants – is the only thing that we all, uniquely, share in common. It is at once our inheritance, our sustenance, and the only force ubiquitous and powerful enough to craft a truly Australian people. It ought to – and one day will – define us as a people like no other.

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For 45 million years Australia has wandered in isolation across the Southern Ocean, carrying with it an ark full of ancient life forms. Over this immense period the other continents have experienced violent change – profound swings of climate that saw them transformed from tropical paradises into bare rock sheathed in miles of ice. Their nature has been irrevocably altered by multiple invasions of plants and animals, their ecological stability denied. Australia, however, has remained almost unique in its stability.

It also seems that the evolution of life here was driven partly by a different imperative – towards co-operation for survival rather than competition. Many Australian birds, from kookaburras to blue wrens, breed co-operatively, and many species exist in symbiosis with others. This trend towards co-operation is also evident in the country’s human cultures. As a result of these trends, Australian life forms have become woven into a web of interdependence, which means that a small disturbance of one part has repercussions for the whole.

Despite its relative stability, this ancient Australia was no paradise. Its soils were by far the poorest and most fragile of any continent, its rainfall the most variable, and its rivers the most ephemeral. It was a harsh land for any creature that demanded much from it, and as a result, energy efficiency is the hallmark of Australia’s plants, animals and human cultures.

Our European heritage left us appallingly equipped to survive, long-term, in this country. For a start it left many colonial Australians unable to see the subtle beauty and biological richness of the land, and what they could not understand they strove to destroy as alien and useless. For most of the past two centuries we have believed that we could remake the continent in the image of Europe – turn the rivers inland and force the truculent soils to yield. We even knowingly introduced pests – from starlings to foxes and rabbits – in our efforts to transform this vast Austral realm into a second England. Much of this terrible history reads as a rush towards ‘development’, which was then – and often still is – just a soft word for the destruction of Australia’s resource base.

That arrogant colonial vision left a fearful legacy, for it actually made people feel virtuous while they dealt the land the most terrible blows. Already one of every 10 of Australia’s unique mammals is extinct, and almost everywhere – even in our national parks – biodiversity is declining. Australia’s soils are still being mined – salination will destroy the majority of Western Australia’s wheat belt in our lifetime if nothing is done – while our rivers are in great peril and sustainable fisheries everywhere have collapsed. It is the bitter harvest of all of this that we are reaping so abundantly today.

Yet despite all this, there are signs that things are changing for the better. Today, as the Australian environment subtly teaches those who listen to it, Australians are undergoing a radical reassessment of their relationship with the land, particularly when it comes to the basics like food, water and fire. After 200 years of destruction, revolutionary changes are taking place in the countryside as farmers and graziers strive to make primary production sustainable in Australia’s unique conditions. Leading the way are people like the Bell family, who run cattle sustainably in the ultra-dry Lake Eyre Basin, or the many involved in the development of sustainable aquaculture. These people are my national heroes. They mean far more to me than Ned Kelly or the Man from Snowy River, because they’re not just acting out European dramas on an Australian stage; instead they are throwing out old, inappropriate European-based practices and inventing their own, distinctively Australian futures in a bid to create sustainability in this land.

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I have no doubt that today many farmers are very far ahead of the majority of Australians in most aspects of environmental thinking. What’s needed now is a change in consumption patterns by city-dwellers to provide a market for sustainably produced products. As the ‘buy Australian’ campaigns and the advertising of many products as ‘environmentally friendly’ shows, there is a great desire among Australians to preserve their environment. Yet still much damage continues, in part because urban-dwellers need to become well informed about what environmental sustainability really means, and how they need to alter their patterns of consumption in order to achieve it.

The way we use water is also slowly changing in response to Australia’s unique environment. Because of our continent’s great rainfall variability, Sydneysiders need eight to ten times the water storage of the inhabitants of New York or London – that’s around three Olympic-sized swimming pools’ worth per person. The economic and environmental costs of this are stupendous, and they are forcing us into new ways of thinking about water, as plans for more dams are shelved and water is re-priced. This shift has the power to alter our urban landscapes – for the beloved Europe-green lawn, English rose and London plane tree are all thirsty drinkers.

Three human lifetimes – about 214 years – is simply not long enough for a people to become truly adapted to Australia’s unique conditions, for the process of learning, of co-evolving with the land, is slow and uncertain. Yet it has begun, and the transformation must be completed, for if we continue to live as strangers in this land – failing to understand it or live by its ecological dictums – we will forfeit our long-term future here by destroying the ability of Australia to support us.

While we cannot know what some future nation that has adapted to Australian conditions would be like, we will know when the transformation is complete, because then we will be living sustainably, and for the first time our children and their children will have a long-term future here. Such a culture will almost certainly still contain elements brought from elsewhere, but in all of its truly important aspects – those that touch on our interaction with our land – it will have been transformed by the dictates of the unique Australian environment.

The single most important change is the need for all Australians to achieve true environmental sustainability. An extraordinary start has already been made in the area of primary production, but much more remains to be done. The development of a population policy is central to this process. Such a policy, I believe, would result in better environmental and humanitarian outcomes. Australia’s population policy should be based on recognition of the environmental constraints of our land, our economic needs, and the social desires of its people. The only way that such a policy can be achieved is for the nation to engage in a broad, vigorous and truthful debate, accompanied by a Government inquiry that is charged with setting an optimum population target. Once the target has been decided we should redesign our immigration program in light of it, with an eye to more flexibility and greater fairness. Before the inquiry has done its work it is not possible to say how large the immigration intake could be, but almost any imaginable scenario would allow for a reasonable level of immigration.

The development of such a policy would take much of the hysteria and negativity out of the immigration debate, for an immigration program firmly embedded in a population policy will transparently serve the national interest, and thus have the support of most people. It would also result in a better humanitarian outcome for those involved, because the intake could be framed over a longer period than the current annual intake, allowing us to accommodate those caught up in international emergencies.

Another advantage of such a policy is that by examining environmental impacts in order to set the population target, we would highlight our most unsustainable environmental practices. These could then be intensely targeted for remediation so that our overall environmental impact was lowered, allowing for a larger population if that was what we wished. It would be important for the population target to be reviewed every five years, as that way we can track change. Then if environmental conditions improve, we can, if we wish, increase it. Ideally this important national process would come under the purview of a Minister for Population rather than a Minister for Immigration. Their responsibility should encompass all things touching on population change, including issues such as maternity and paternity leave.

Some people have extremely negative feelings about population policies. It’s important to remember, however, that our schemes of social support for parents and children, and our immigration program, add up to a de facto population policy – one that has not been carefully thought through as a whole. No one has oversight of it, it is not clearly demonstrated to be in the national interest, and there is little acceptance of elements of it in the community. Others argue against a population policy on the basis that it would be preferable, in terms of achieving sustainability, to reduce consumption rather than concentrate on numbers. While focussing on patterns of consumption is important, it is vital to realise that population is the great multiplier of environmental impact, and that sustainability cannot be addressed without considering it.

The darkest horror lurking in the imaginings of 19th century Australians was that this wild continent might somehow claim them, or their children, to itself. Today that dark, lurking fear – that this wide brown land might somehow claim us as its own – is, I suspect, our best hope for a sustainable, long-term future. For we have realised that we have no other home but this one, and that we cannot remake it to suit ourselves. Instead we must somehow come to terms with its conditions, to surrender our ‘otherness’ and thereby find our own distinctively Australian way in a very different, large and sometimes threatening world.

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This is an edited extract from Tim Flannery’s Australia Day address, given to the Australia Day Council of New South Wales on January 23, 2002. The full text is available at http://www.australiaday.com.au/tim_welcome.html.



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About the Author

Dr Tim Flannery is Director of the South Australian Museum.

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