Depictions of European Settlers and the Landscape

  'We've golden soil and wealth for toil,

Our home is girt by sea;

Our land abounds in nature's gifts

Of beauty rich and rare.' - Advance Australia Fair

Anja Schwarz suggested in her article 'Mapping (Un-)Australian Identities' that geography is 'a topic "practically unavoidable" for Australian literature, due to the nation's colonial history. Initially, a main preoccupation of Australian writers was the process of 'coming to terms' with the new continent, as they had to 'unlearn' their preconceived ideas about the land in order to be able to speak of it in a way appropriate to their new surroundings.' (p16)

Australian literature has an interesting function, in that it can be seen as a reflection not just of Australian society, but as an indication of how we view ourselves as a nation. Literature has also, in part, formed our view of Australians as a nation. 

Schwarz suggests that literature ‘served to mythologise the land… The imaginary regime established in the late-nineteenth century by writers such as Banjo Patterson and Henry Lawson – of the land, of the bushman, of rural communities – remains hegemonic for literary conceptions of Australian identity until today.’ (p16)

Literature and artworks assist in indicating to us the varied and changing attitudes of European settlers and Anglo-Australians towards the land they colonised.

For early European settlers, Australia was a completely alien environment. 

Some envisioned the land as an earthly paradise – a land with an agreeable climate where European plants and livestock would surely flourish.

Other viewed the Australian landscape as frightening and harsh. The extremes of temperature, the risks of drought and bushfire, were unknown and unpredictable hazards, for which British agriculture had not prepared them. 

Drought-prone, with large areas of arid and barren land; Australia must have seemed a strange environment to early European settlers.

 ‘DOWN IN THEIR LUCK. A SKETCH ON THE SALT BUSH PLAINS.’ W.S. Calvert

http://www.slv.vic.gov.au/miscpics/gid/slv-pic-aab19683/1/mp006454

 

Later, as Australia moved towards federation, well-known Australian writers depicted a people shaped by their bush environment. The conditions may have been harsh, but ‘Aussie battlers’ would not have had this identity if not for the struggle of (white) man against nature.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s white Australians had come to appreciate a ‘sunburnt country/ A land of sweeping plains,’ – Dorothea Mackellar, My Country.

Whilst still knowing the backbreaking work and heartache of life on the land –

‘Her pitiless blue sky,
When sick at heart, around us,
We see the cattle die’ (Mackellar)

The Australian landscape shaped the identity of the descendants of European settlers, as it had shaped the lifestyles, identity and spiritual lives of the Aboriginal people.

European settlement, however, was to have a devastating impact on the Australian landscape.

Settlers, homesick for England, and unable to imagine existence without the necessities of their British flora and fauna - crops and livestock and domesticated animals - began to introduce them to Australia.  

Some species hitched rides on ships bound for Australia, and so were introduced unwittingly – others were very deliberate introductions:

Rabbits, Foxes, Cats, Cattle, Sheep, Weeds, and crops which later became weeds – all impacted the environment.

Large-scale clearing of land also altered the face of the continent. Not only this, but land clearing produced other, unforseen consequences – such as soil erosion and increased salinity.

These are all issues which most Australians now know about, though it may seem white Australians realised ‘too little, too late’.

A report from 1848 by the explorer Thomas Livingstone Mitchell, however, showed remarkable insight into the devastating effect settlers would have on the land.

Mitchell writes of Aboriginal land management, noting:

‘Fire, grass, kangaroos, and human inhabitants, seem all dependant on each other for existence in Australia.’ (p134)

Mitchell notes that kangaroos will leave areas where cattle graze – robbing the Aboriginal people of a vital food source. He also notes the effects a lack of understanding has already caused:

‘The squatters, it is true, have also been obliged to burn the old grass occasionally on their runs; but so little has this been understood by the Imperial Government that an order against the burning of grass was once sent out… Kangaroos are no longer to be seen there; the grass is choked by underwood; neither are there natives to burn the grass, nor is fire longer desirable there amongst the fences of the settler.’ (p134)

Although Mitchell may have been wrong about the ‘extirpation of the aborigines’; with incredible foresight, Mitchell perceives, not only that the Aborigines have their own, appropriate, land management practices; but that European agriculture cannot be introduced without disrupting the existing balance.

‘The occupation of the territory by the white race seems thus to involve, as an inevitable result, the extirpation of the aborigines; and it may well be pleaded, in extenuation of any adverse feelings these may show towards the white men, that these consequences, although so little considered by the intruders, must be obvious to the natives, with their usual acuteness, as soon as cattle enter on their territory.’ (p134)

References:

Mackellar, Dorothea, ‘My Country’ Official Dorothea Mackellar Website, 2003 Accessed 08.04.2011.

McCormick, Peter Dodds, ‘Advance Australia Fair’ Department of
Foreign Affairs and Trade, February 2001, Accessed 08.04.2011.

‘Thomas Livingstone Mitchell, explorer, writing ‘Of the Aborigines’ and their land management practices, while in search of a route from Sydney to the Gulf of Carpentaria, 1848.’ in Deborah Gare and David Ritter (eds), Making Australian History: Perspectives on the Past since 1788, Thomson, South Melbourne, 2008, p134.

Schwarz, Anja, ‘Mapping (Un-)Australian Identities: ‘Territorial Disputes’ in Christos Tsiolkas’s Loaded’ in Global Fragments: (Dis)Orientation in the New World Order. ANSEL Papers 10. Anke Bartels and Dirk Wiemann, eds. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007. pp12-28