Stepping Off by Thomas Wilson

Author:Thomas Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fremantle Press
Published: 2017-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

Let us consider the human impact on the land outside of Perth. The early white settlers around the south-west obviously did not have a deeply conservationist mindset. Part of this can be excused through ignorance of the biological and geological nature of the land they were entering and settling. Prior to Darwin, Charles Lyell had published his Principles of Geology (1830 to 1833). The Bible ascribes a recent date to Creation (4004 BC). Lyell’s book popularised geology with the argument that the earth was – pace the Bible – millions of years old. Lyell’s work was carried by Darwin on his voyage aboard the Beagle, and was indeed instrumental in allowing Charles Darwin to formulate his own theory of evolution by natural selection. And yet Lyell’s work was not widely known or his theories widely subscribed to among the general population at the time. This was understandable, as John Fowles reflects: ‘Genesis is a great lie; but it is also a great poem; and a six-thousand-year-old womb is much warmer than one that stretches for two thousand million’.2

Despite the arrival of Lyell’s publications, most early Western Australian white settlers would still have thought that they lived in a snugly accommodated universe. If they had have understood the true age of the earth, and the staggeringly ancient nature of the Western Australian rocks and soil that they were stepping over, as well as the process of biological evolution through which the plants and animals of this place had adapted to this ancient and leached land, then they would have had a greater appreciation for the ecosystems they were encountering. But it would not be until 1859 that Darwin’s The Origin of Species was published, and even longer before his lessons had permeated widely amongst the minds of god-fearing Australian farmers. Indeed when Europeans arrived at the Swan River in 1829, Darwin had not yet left Plymouth on his voyage of the Beagle.

So early agricultural settlers were not much interested in ecology. W.H. Hudson was writing about the Argentinian pampas, but he could have been writing about south-west Australia:

There is no longer anything to deter the starvelings of the Old World from possessing themselves of this new land of promise, flowing … with milk and tallow, if not with honey; any emasculated migrant from a[n] [English or Irish] slum is now competent to ‘fight the wilderness’ out there, with his eight-shilling fowling-piece and the implements of his trade.3

Back in Europe where these migrants had come from, a few plant species occupy ranges of many, many thousands of square kilometres. The land is fertile and resilient. Here in the south-west of Australia, on the other hand, there is a fine-grained mosaic of different soil types, just about all with a fragile topsoil. Here in Australia there were and are some plant species that may only exist in a few square kilometres, and have been there for hundreds of thousands of years. Clear the few kilometres of land, and the species is gone. But

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