The Colonial Earth.(Review)

The Colonial Earth, by Tim Bonyhady; Melbourne University Press (Miegunyah), 2000, $54.95.

THE USUAL modern view of colonial Australians, according to Tim Bonyhady, is that they were antagonistic to the new land, exploiting it for all they were worth, impervious to its charms and true potential, and resentful of what they regarded, through British eyes, as its shortcomings. In his introduction to The Colonial Earth he quotes a number of historians to this effect, and declares his intention to write a corrective, to reveal in his book "that the environmental aesthetic [sic] is as deeply embedded in the culture as is resistance to putting environmental ideals into practice".

But is his first assertion true? When he quotes W.K. Hancock, writing in 1930, "The invaders hated trees", Bonyhady neglects to mention Hancock's next sentence, which begins, "The early Governors forbade them to clear the river-banks ...", clearly indicating colonial disagreement over the environment. When Bonyhady quotes Tim Flannery, writing in 1994 that in the nineteenth century there was "no concern at all about wastage of timber", he again neglects the next sentence, in which Flannery (somewhat contradictorily, it must be admitted) praises Australia's foresters, who "became Australia's first hands-on conservationists, a position they occupied for a century or more until the various national parks services were established".

Still, trying to rescue our forebears from calumny is a noble task, and Bonyhady takes it up with enthusiasm and diligence. In surveying the colonial period (he hopes to write a companion book on the twentieth century) Bonyhady looks at twelve episodes or aspects of the environmental story.

He begins on Norfolk Island, with the sad tale of the providence petrel. This pretty and inoffensive migratory bird, which had nested in its hundreds of thousands on the uninhabited island, became the chief source of food for the new penal settlement in 1790 before agriculture could be established. Then, in subsequent years, when the new farms began to yield a surplus, the multiplying pigs wandered over the island, destroying the bird's habitat and completing its local extermination by 1800.

Robert Ross, whom Phillip had appointed to take charge of the settlement, had remarked that Australia was "so very barren and forbidding ... in the whole world there is not a worse country", but on Norfolk Island enacted some of the world's first conservation laws. First he tried to restrict access to the petrels so they could continue to flourish and provide a source of emergency rations. Then, appalled by the barbarous slaughter of the birds by both convicts and marines, he forbade them from taking "Dogs, tools or Implements and destroying the Birds there Cruely and Wantenly".

Unfortunately for Australia, its flora and fauna were discovering what the Duke of Wellington discovered a few years later in Spain, what Theodore Dalrymple has chronicled for years in the Spectator and what the inhabitants of European soccer and tourist cities continue to discover: there are few peoples more savage than the dregs of the British urban working class. Australia was to receive more than its share of these terrifying people, and while the country generally, over time, had a civilising effect on them, their effect on the country they touched was often disastrous.