When the first settlers arrived there (in the 1840s) the whole area was a clear plain as far as the eye could see, with at most one tree per hectare/2 acres. It was surveyed and divided into 320 acre (half square mile) blocks for ‘selectors’ to farm, which they did, felling the few trees to build fences and houses. They and their sheep dogs quickly gobbled up the innumerable rat-kangaroos.
In the 1860s there was a drought which forced them to move away for 7 years. When they returned there was a forest coming up everywhere which every effort for 100 years failed to remove! They brought in huge traction engines from America and built vast sawmills, etc, but all their efforts failed and the forest grew. Eventually they declared it a National Park.
Just across the (Latrobe) Valley from us is the Baw Baw Plateau . I can see it out my study window as I type – Mt Baw Baw itself still snow-capped today. (It holds one of the best walks in the world, the Upper Yarra Track) The whole area is now the Baw Baw National Park (and I may not take my small Jack Russell dogs for a walk there, though I would likely never meet another person there ever).
In 1914 the Long Tunnel gold mine at Walhalla had cleared every tree for nearly thirty miles around Walhalla – ie most of the ‘Park’. today. Back then it looked like the surface of the moon as innumerable miners had turned it completely upside-down. There was a road right along the top of the plateau and much of it was clear land for grazing bullocks to feed the miners.
After the gold mine closed (after WW1) the land was abandoned and regrew to forest. The Mountain Ash (Eucalyptus Regnans – the king of the eucalypts, and the tallest tree in the world – over 300 ‘ or 100 metres!) can grow at an astonishing rate. Trees which were seedlings after the 1939 fire were logged in the 1980s. Each single trunk was more than a log truck could carry!)
We used to hunt the whole area with hounds for sambar deer until the Park was declared in the early 1980s – well, after that actually! The government eventually chased us out with helicopters! Now I may not even take my Jack Russell, Spot for a walk there. Stuff and Nonsense!
It gets worse: I have watched a much larger area, the size of Victoria (100,000 square miles!) grow to be forest in Western NSW after having to be abandoned by farmers in a drought in the 1970s. I think you can see that these are very large changes, so perhaps you can understand why I view the very small changes implicit in ‘leave no trace’ to be the merest ‘butterfly effect’ fantasies.
To prevent these wildfires which destroy every trace of life we need decent firebreaks: we need to reopen most of the closed tracks; and especially along the ridges where most tracks run the vegetation needs to be cleared away by 50 metres either side and the grass kept down (eg cows in spring/summer). Along the valleys (again cows to keep the spring growth down – but the deer are also doing a good job!) also the native vegetation needs to be replaced with more fireproof exotics: willows, alders, poplars, oaks, elms etc so that fires can be effectively contained between tracks and river bottoms.
All fuel needs to be cool burned every autumn. When the willows and aspens have proliferated we should introduce beavers to create dams and a wet sponge along the river valleys. Logging regrowth has an important part to play. Few areas should be exempt from rotational logging because of its enormous benefits to biodiversity. If we do these things we have some chance of containing fire and preserving our unique wildlife and flora in perpetuity – but the fanciful ‘conservation’ strategies of the green brigade will see it all destroyed.
Published on: Sep 25, 2018
Enlightening post, thank-you Steve (?). I came looking for light weight camping tips and got a lot of Aussie environmental wisdom. I will look at all National Parks a little differently now, though I have not seen them as pristine for a while now. Your examples of rapid regrowth even in a dry, arid land are pointers for regeneration everywhere. And Australia clearly needs a large escalation of cool burning expertise, skills, coordination and commitment.
Thank you Murray. I hope you got some lightweight camping tips as well – and perhaps a fox-proof hen-house! Cheers, Steve.
Move over David Attenborough, great photogaphy and wonderful writing.
Thanks Geoff.
I think a lot of this controversy over land management has to do with differences in what is appropriate for different places and our failure (mine included) to recognize this. Clearly, what’s appropriate for Gippsland would not be appropriate for Yosemite Valley or vice versa. LNT makes sense for Yosemite (at least on the part of the patrons) because of it’s huge number of visitors over a relatively small area; it’s the best way of minimizing the negative impact of so much traffic. Whereas, you are fortunate to live and play in places that are a lot more, truly, wild, and strict LNT doesn’t make sense there. Yet, we set these mental rules for ourselves that fit the places we are familiar with, and the philosophies bleed over where they shouldn’t. I’m really appreciative of you showing me a different perspective than what I typically hear hawked over and over. Granted, I still won’t be bringing outside firewood to a state park, because rules like that exist for good reason, but maybe I won’t be so worried about cutting a few saplings or having a small fire outside of an established ring in rural national forest areas.
I haven’t been to the States but I gather there are a lot of wild places away from established trails and that these areas are increasing as land has been abandoned for farming etc and CO2 fuels their growth. (Further reading: Gossamer Gear Blog) Apparently lots of people other than hunters are ‘bushwhacking’ as you call it – or going off track and camping away from hard-pressed areas. I think this is a good thing. This policy of designating camping areas which then become over-run by people is questionable. Likewise trails funnel people who would otherwise be dispersed.
Of course I dislike vandals, people who leave rubbish, people who make rings of stones, chop down large live trees, leave campfires burning, light campfires in warm weather, chop up tracks with their 4WDs, let off guns unnecessarily or have poor gun safety, kill game and leave it to rot…Bizarrely some of these things are permitted or practiced by current land managers – even though they are clearly nothing like ‘leave no trace’ which they religiously preach at everyone else to practice, eg don’t move a stone in a river or pick up a piece of wood, or tie your hammock to a tree, etc, etc.
There needs to be a bit of rethinking, eg about people’s access to the land, fire management and especially fuel reduction, fire breaks, etc. In fact the natural landscape would benefit from more disturbance like logging, mining and grazing – if it prevents large-scale destruction from wildfires for example, or increases species diversity – which it does. There are more species in secondary growth than old growth, for example.
Most people have become far too religious in their attitudes to ‘conservation’. When I was young ‘conservationists’ were people who planted (thousands) of trees on their land (as I have done all my life – I must have planted out square miles by now!) I think this allows me to chop up a dead tree for my winter firewood for example – which is our only source of winter warmth, and has been all my life.
I have never lived in a city or town. Most of my life I have never even lived where I can see another house, but instead where within minutes I can step into ‘untouched ‘forest either on my own land or adjacent to it!) I can show you a photograph looking up our valley in as little ago as 1983. You can pretty much count the trees in the (couple of square miles of valley behind us (which then used to be a large sheep grazing property – and before 1968 small dairy farms).
Now it is mostly unbroken forest from here to Yarram, perhaps 40 miles away. Before 1968 it was all bare ground. Over a thousand square miles of forest has sprung up right behind us in that (to me) short time. Now (evidently) I am being told by ‘conservationists’ that I may not even walk off the edge of my property into that forest (I must ‘leave no trace’) when, as I pass through it, I can recall the names and faces of people who lived and worked it (milked cows etc) in what to me is the recent past.
I remember another area (near Barrington in NSW – which is now a National Park). At European settlement this area was clear grassland, and was ‘granted’ to the AA Company for (sheep) grazing (100,000) acres. They found it unsuitable after a few years. Copper deficiency in the soil rendered it poor land for sheep. They (successfully) applied to have their grant moved to near ‘Goonoo Goonoo’ near Tamworth in NSW where they still have the property (I think). After they left, it regrew to be a forest. Later, after the Second World War the Government ‘granted’ this forest to ex-soldiers as ‘Soldier Settlement’ blocks to clear and turn into dairy farms – which they did.
I can remember as a child visiting my father’s old mates on these blocks in the 1950s. Mile upon mile of ring-barked forest turning into grassland – which it did. After Britain joined the ‘Common Market’ in 1968 Australia could no longer sell dairy produce, so that all over Australia these dairy farms were abandoned to the bush (like the land behind us). It regrew to forest. I remember visiting my uncle at Barrington in about 1990. He had retired there because the Barrington River is great for white water canoeing (he took me). By then the regrowth forest was so ‘pristine’ that the Government had decided to make it into a National Park – yet I could remember it as clear land!
I will give you another example: the Pilliga National Park near Moree is the largest in NSW (over a million ‘wild’ acres). I used to roam it as a boy, as my parents were itinerant bee-keepers who followed the ‘honey flow’ all over Western NSW. Then there was still a major logging industry (mainly native pine) which had been going on for nearly a century – and could have continued with sensible management forever.
When the first settlers arrived there (in the 1840s) the whole area was a clear plain as far as the eye could see, with at most one tree per 2 acres. It was surveyed and divided into 320 acre blocks for ‘selectors’ to farm, which they did, felling the few trees to build fences and houses. They and their sheep dogs quickly gobbled up the innumerable rat-kangaroos.
In the 1860s there was a drought which forced them to move away for 7 years. When they returned there was a forest coming up everywhere which every effort for 100 years failed to remove! They brought in huge traction engines from America and built vast sawmills, etc, but all their efforts failed and the forest grew. Eventually they declared it a National Park.
Just across the (Latrobe) Valley from us is the Baw Baw Plateau . I can see it out my study window as I type – still snow-capped today. (One of the best walks in the world. See Upper Yarra Track) The whole area is now the Baw Baw National Park (and I may not take my small Jack Russell dogs for a walk there, though I would never meet another person ever).
In 1914 the Long Tunnel gold mine at Walhalla had cleared every tree for nearly thirty miles around Walhalla – ie most of the ‘Park’. today. Back then it looked like the surface of the moon as innumerable miners had turned it completely upside-down. There was a road right along the top of the plateau and much of it was clear land for grazing bullocks to feed the miners.
After the gold mine closed (after WW1) the land was abandoned and regrew to forest. The Mountain Ash (Eucalyptus Regnans – the king of the eucalypts, and the tallest tree in the world – over 300 ‘ or 100 metres!) can grow at an astonishing rate. Trees which were seedlings after the 1939 fire were logged in the 1980s. Each single trunk was more than a log truck could carry!)
We used to hunt the whole area with hounds for sambar deer until the Park was declared in the early 1980s – well, after that actually! The government eventually chased us out with helicopters! Now I may not even take my Jack Russell, Spot for a walk there. Stuff and Nonsense!
It gets worse: I have watched a much larger area, the size of Victoria (100,000 square miles!) grow to be forest in Western NSW after having to be abandoned by farmers in a drought in the 1970s. I think you can see that these are very large changes, so perhaps you can understand why I view the very small changes implicit in ‘leave no trace’ to be the merest ‘butterfly effect’ fantasies.
Cheers, Steve. PS: I am going to move these two comments up into the main article as I think they add appreciably to it. Thanks.