Read the latest load of hot air on the urban academics saving threatened species by purchasing ‘flogged out Simpson desert cattle stations’; if you can concentrate on the words above the racket the chorus of angels is making: Old cattle stations now wildlife haven.
It’s yet another self-congratulatory article spouting on about how well the environment is going since ‘saved’ by environmentalists, and the rare species proliferating on the property. I’ve asked it before but it bears repeating (until the message gets through). If Ethubuka and Cravens Peak were so ‘flogged out’, ‘over grazed’, ‘degraded’, ‘badly managed’ etc etc – a veritable scene of absolute pastoral desecration – then how did they come to be ‘home to the richest reptile fauna of any arid region in the world’ just a few years later? How did these rare species come to be there? Did they arrive in spaceships from Mars, the instant Bush Heritage Australia took over the pastoral lease and those naughty cows were taken away? Or did Bush Heritage Australia re-introduce these ‘rare species’ back onto the property, themselves?
Neither.
These ‘rare species’ have inhabited the cattle station, alongside the extensively grazed cattle, ever since white settlement more than a century ago. It’s just that there hadn’t been anyone with a university degree, publicly funded equipment etc, and the free time, to travel around trapping and counting them.
Purchasing a property in an area of just a 6″ exceedingly variable average rainfall, after years of debilitating drought, then parading around after the best season recorded since white settlement, and attempting to claim that the flourishing plant and animal life has anything to do with the change in ownership and management – is laughably dishonest.
Would it be objective to photograph a cattle station after the best wet season on record, sell it to conservationists, then photograph it at the end of a long and severe drought period that will inevitably roll around, sooner or later, and claim that the dearth of vegetation and lowered native animal population was purely due to environmental mismanagement? Of course not! But hey it’s ok to do the reverse, because these people all have a university degree, so they know better than anyone else!
A thorough assessment of cattle stations in the same region as Ethabuka and Cravens Peak would undoubtedly reveal that a) the same ‘rare species’ are found in similar numbers on surrounding land, not managed by university-degree conservationists, and b) the surrounding land is also covered in thriving vegetation at present (at least, what hasn’t been burnt out by lightning strikes). The whole of central and eastern Australia has flourished over the last twelve months – regardless of who happens to be managing it.
But Bush Heritage Australia will hardly want to point out that land managed by pastoralists is just as ecologically healthy as the land owned by Bush Heritage…their funding will vaporise, as will public donations!
The same silly article quotes appalling extinction statistics for Australia…but fails to mention that the majority of these extinctions have occurred in the most closely settled parts of Australia. Not in central and northern remote areas, where no tree felling/land clearing or soil tillage has ever been undertaken; where there are few roads, buildings, fences and other man-made structures; and where domestic livestock are run at very low levels per square kilometre; and native plants and animals co-exist in harmony with extensively grazed livestock; and organic production was usual, long before it became fashionable.
If Bush Heritage Australia was serious about doing the utmost to conserve Australia’s most endangered flora and fauna, they’d leave remote areas alone – and the extremely knowledgeable and capable managers and owners, already in place, at no cost to taxpayers. Extensively grazed cattle country still has ‘rare species’ in residence and will continue to do so into the future. The smartest thing is to leave the experienced owners and managers of large, remote cattle stations to get on with the job they do best – efficiently managing the environment for future generations – more or less as they have always done. Instead of sinking money into remote areas, Bush Heritage Australia should be making better use of their limited funds by buying up slabs of land in and around our most closely settled areas, because this is where urban sprawl and increasing population density is causing the most environmental decimation. Sydney springs to mind, as does far north Queensland – from the Atherton Tablelands to Cairns, Port Douglas and Mission Beach.
The latter is one of the worst environmental disasters in recent times, that I’ve seen. Do Bush Heritage Australia own any land at Mission Beach? The very thing that attracted the new residents to the Mission Beach area is the first thing to go when they’re building their flash new house – rainforest is replaced with cement, lawns and other introduced species of plants. A large Woolworths supermarket sits out on the flat, surrounded by cleared paddocks – fringed in the distance by native bush. It’s a planning horror, as is Keith William’s memorial to environmental vandalism, Hinchinbrook ‘resort’ and marina, which appear to have fallen into disrepair, since cyclone Yasi.
I can just see all those people who have made donations to Bush Heritage Australia, sitting in their suburban backyards, feeling a warm glow of smug self satisfaction for having contributed to ‘such a worthy cause’. All the while completely oblivious to the fact that they are surrounded in their garden by introduced species of trees and plants, populated not by native birds, but feral species (such as blackbirds, starlings and sparrows). Plus wild and roaming domestic cats, European mice and rats, and perhaps foxes as well. But few if any native reptiles or marsupials. Oh but they’re helping to save the outback from those terrible pastoralists!
Conservation is the best example of the NIMBY syndrome in existence. Stuff fixing up our own backyard in Paddington, Redfern and Fitzroy – let’s interfere with central Australia instead.