Beautiful Lies: Population and environment in Australia.

Altman, Jon ; Hinkson, Melinda

Beautiful Lies: Population and environment in Australia

Tim Flannery

Black Inc. (Quarterly Essay 9) Melbourne, 2003, vii + 73 pp, ISBN 186395396

Reviewed by Jon Altman, Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, The Australian National University, Canberra <jon.altman@anu.edu.au> and Melinda Hinkson, School of Archaeology and Anthropology, The Australian National University, Canberra <melinda. hinkson@anu.edu.au>

On the surface, there are many aspects of Tim Flannery's engaging essay Beautiful Lies that have intuitive appeal. Australia does not have a coherent population policy and as a nation we have not yet reached a point of being able to have a mature debate on the topic. There is also no doubt that for over 200 years white colonists conveniently ignored the prior property rights of Indigenous Australians; that Indigenous ecological knowledge went unrecognised; and that the biodiversity loss and mammal extinctions in temperate Australia are probably unparalleled anywhere in the world. And yet we continue to clear land and wreck habitats, be among the world's worst polluters as measured by emission of greenhouse gases (while a non-ratifier of the Kyoto protocol), and so on. Flannery gives us many issues to think about, but none is fully explored, and the connections between them are not always convincingly or coherently established. Concerned to tell a history of Australia as a history constructed through a series of 'beautiful lies', it is ironic that Flannery himself produces some new ones--some beautiful, some not--in his telling. We draw attention to just a few of particular relevance to Australian Indigenous studies.

Flannery tells us that terra nullius was Australia's founding lie, and he is right, yet his interpretation of what this lie was about--that Australia was an empty land--is wrong. Australia was clearly populated. The High Court ruling of 1992 overturned terra nullius, the lie that Australia was land belonging to no one, a doctrine central to the particular colonising process that took place in Australia. This doctrine turned on the view that Aboriginal peoples were so inferior that they merely exploited the land, rather than managing it through consciously conceived natural resource practices. Flannery recognises that Aboriginal peoples had their own land management regimes, with customary use of fire as a central element, but confines his lauding of such practices to the precolonial past and the moment of first contact.

What comes through strongly in Flannery's essay is his commitment to Western science as the primary system of knowledge able to grapple with the environmental crisis of temperate Australia--although he simultaneously acknowledges that such science was complicit in causing environmental problems like those associated with the Snowy Scheme. He ignores, though, the fact that this Western science paradigm has historically worn its own ideological blinkers, failing to recognise many aspects of Indigenous ecological knowledge that continue to contribute to Australia's overall environmental wellbeing. This is most apparent in the north of the country, where Aboriginal peoples live on and manage their now legally restituted and growing Indigenous estate, a region increasingly recognised as containing Australia's most ecologically biodiverse landscapes.

Flannery is right to suggest that we misconstrue Australian history in seeing first contact as nothing more than a bloodbath. But it is naive idealism to take the practices of a few individuals as standing for a collective perspective towards a continental environment and its original inhabitants. Flannery's readings of the First Fleet diaries are highly selective. While these diaries certainly reveal incidents of attempted conciliation, moments of awe at the ingenuity of Aboriginal practices, and encounters marked by respect and mutual interest, they offered very little reason for hope that Black and White could coexist. Flannery's reading of first contact as a moment in which 'neither black nor white wielded absolute power' (p.16) left us gob-smacked! He hangs much on the 'humaneness' of Phillip, Tench and Dawes's engagements with Sydney's Aboriginal peoples and there is no doubt there is much that is compassionate, intelligent, perhaps even empathetic, in their writings. But none of this can transcend the single fundamental truth of first contact: Phillip et al were claiming the Australian continent on behalf of the British Crown. In so doing they were mindfully stealing territory from those who were already there. They were able to do so not on the basis of some imagined coexistence, but in the belief that the prior occupants were a less civilised, inferior people. This perspective on non-European peoples is the other truth (or beautiful lie?) of the Enlightenment approach that Flannery would have us embrace as a model for Australia's future!

An interesting story of first contact that Flannery does not recount, but which is of great relevance to the environmental history he wishes to revisit, is that of Tank Stream. The British decided to establish the first settlement at a place they named Sydney Cove because of its supply of fresh water, a stream that until then had provided the local Cadigal people with not only a perennial source of fresh water but also an abundant supply of fish and bird life. One of Phillip's first acts as governor was to pass the first environmental laws in Australia--he declared a narrow 'green belt' on either side of the stream, prohibiting the cutting of trees and the grazing of stock within this zone. Individuals found polluting the stream were in subsequent years threatened with 5 [pounds sterling] fines or even the demolition of their houses. The stream was excavated by the British to create a series of water storage tanks to supply the colony during the drought of 1790. But the purity of Tank Stream's water lasted just as long as Phillip's tenure as governor. After 1792, houses, pigsties and other structures expanded into the green belt. Despite attempts to enforce these laws by well-meaning subsequent authorities, by the 1820s the stream had become an open sewer.

While Phillip's environmental vision for Tank Stream is preserved in the historical record, it is clear that this vision was not embraced by the wider community. Here lies the nub of our disagreement with Flannery and his vision for Australia's remaking--no number of 'enlightened', 'humane', well-meaning individuals can transform a society's orientation. Social change will only come about through collective action and public education--action ultimately supported, and indeed enforced, by statutory frameworks and effective institutions.

As Flannery shifts, late in his essay, to the core of his argument, this polymath's grasp of political economy and public policy emerge as problematic. In polemically linking population growth and environmental degradation, he selectively appeals to science in a crude fashion. Australia's population, according to Flannery, is too high and its current growth rate unsustainable. Indeed, Flannery believes that zero migration after World War II might have had the nation at a more manageable current population of seven to eight million. In seeking to belittle the contributions of more recent migrants, Flannery gets extremist and seeks to even debunk the view that postwar migration was responsible for Australia's increasingly multicultural cuisine. Culinary diversity, he tell us, would have happened anyway with globalisation (p.23).

But when it comes to migration and the environment, it can somehow be good old Fortress Australia--Flannery is deluding himself if he believes that migration and globalisation can be conceived as independent processes. Moreover, what guarantees do we have that seven to eight million persons would not reek the environmental damage of 20 million? This could easily occur, for example, if eight million had 2.5 times the consumption rate of 20 million, a not unimaginable possibility going on current global patterns of excessive consumerism by the richest nations. Flannery asks the wrong questions here; rather than who should come or go from this continent, we should be asking how might we, as a multicultural society, change the way that we live?

Flannery is disappointing in his failure to address such tough public policy issues. In an Australia that will not even ratify Kyoto and will not countenance pricing some powerful industries, like coal and aluminium production, on a polluter-pays basis, and will not allocate adequate funding for natural resource management continent-wide, on and off the Indigenous estate, can we find the national political courage to address the need to repair the environmental damage wreaked upon temperate Australia? Will we stop the habitat and species loss caused by land clearing or will our federal system sit back and continue to acquiesce to States' rights, irrespective of national consequences? Strategically, should we even try to restore the damaged areas or should we instead focus our efforts on maintaining those parts of the continent that are ecologically intact and coincidentally now under Indigenous ownership?

Reducing migration is not the answer. New Australians may have better attitudes to both the first (oldest) Australians and the environment than older (colonist) Australians. Flannery realistically does not countenance deportation of those who pollute or who have wittingly or unwittingly damaged our biodiversity. Nor does the answer lie with his naive view that the individual has the power to bring about needed change. No, the answer must lie with society-wide attitudinal shifts. The answer must also lie with our regulatory regimes; our political system seems to be adept at delivering perverse outcomes, regulating the sustainable and avoiding regulation of the damaging. Political economy looms large here; the power of some sectors and industries clearly outweigh their net financial contribution to the national economy and, Landcare progress aside, who is monitoring these sectors and holding them accountable for past, present and future environmental damage?

We end with two comments. First, it is difficult to understand how Flannery differentiates the rugged individualism that opened up the rangelands to pastoralism and that constituted much of the labour supply for magnificent 'nation-building' engineering feats like the Snowy Scheme (with unintended environmental consequences) from the 'enlightened' individualism that will invest in a sound environmental future for Australia. Flannery fails to recognise that the same cult of individualism underpins the hyper-consumerism that has led to our current environmental woes. His 'manifesto for a better Australia' (pp 70-1) fails to come to terms with this fundamental contradiction.

Second, we note the need to give more careful focus to the long-term interactions between Indigenous Australians and the environment. In tropical Australia, where permitted or enabled, Indigenous peoples have maintained their patchy fire regimes informed by customary practice and this has resulted in the heterogeneous landscapes so vital to biodiversity maintenance. It is only now, when high-tech satellite imagery is finally providing the 'scientific' evidence of the ecological and sustainable benefits of such practices, that Western science is beginning to take notice. But such recognition is slow in coming--even in the aftermath of the devastating January 2003 bush fires that Western scientific approaches could not ameliorate, the fact that Indigenous perspectives might be instructive is still not fully grasped. What we now need is support and resourcing for what is shown to be working, informed by a mix of Indigenous ecological knowledge, Western science and social science, a new hybrid approach as a paradigm shift to address complex old and new environmental problems--not Flannery's nostalgic hankering for the Enlightenment.

NOTE

A version of this review was provided as a comment to Quarterly Essays and Dr Tim Flannery.