EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Current resource policy is strongly conditioned by our perception of the past. It is therefore important to understand the natural and institutional constraints under which the development of Australia's resources has taken place. Previous generations pointed to the triumph of converting a brown, parched and impoverished land into a nation supporting millions of people. Pride was expressed at the feat of creating a nation producing and marketing twice as much food and raw materials as it required for its own needs. In the process, a standard of living was forged on a par with the world's leaders. To many, self congratulation over 200 years of achievement has turned to remorse about the costs involved. Visions of Australia's European settlers clearing the land, cutting down the forests, and introducing exotic flora and fauna, and disturbing the native ecology, have caused many to suffer feelings of guilt. It is folly to be smug about the past. But these feelings of guilt are surely misplaced. Mankind has benefited from the taming of the Australian wilderness.
In the early 1800s, natural endowments were abundant relative to human and physical capital Living standards were low. Often, in the very struggle for survival, the intrinsic values of the environment had a lower priority. By using Australia's abundance of land, mineral and timber resources, the graziers, gold miners and timber getters of the past were able to generate wealth to pass on to their grandchildren. Without this accumulation of physical capital and human knowledge it is doubtful that we would now be able to afford improvements in environmental quality or have the skills effectively to manage Australia's unique natural environment. In applying critical tests to the actions of previous generations, it is unwise to assume on their part the preferences we have today.
This chapter documents how the early development of Australia's abundant natural resources was consistent with the endowments, knowledge and market opportunities of the time. Environmental damage certainly occurred. Leaving the continent untouched by western civilisation meant leaving it in a form which could support no more than several hundred thousand souls living in poverty. Furthermore, in many cases any genuine damage resulted from an inadequate definition, or monitoring, of property rights; and from imperfect information, rather than from the process of development. The rapid depletion of early coastal fisheries is a prime example of inappropriate development caused by absence of property titles and open access. Part of the damage also resulted from ignorance of the nature of a new and unfamiliar environment. However, this ignorance was reflected as much in the governmental polices of the time as it was in the individual settlers themselves.
The chapter shows that certain government policies distorted market signals by subsidising infrastructure, biasing land use and contriving particular forms of settlement. These polices contributed to and exacerbated environmental damage. For example, closer settlement has been a dominant political goal in Australia since the mid nineteenth century. A large number of closer settlement and irrigation schemes were implemented without sufficient understanding or regard for environmental considerations. Soil degradation and salinity are two of the legacies of inappropriate land use which these schemes brought in their wake.
Environmental management over the past century has remained very much the province of governments in Australia, and regulation has been the favoured instrument of management, but the results of regulation have often been devastating. There are also an abundance of examples of ecologically sound private developments under properly designated property rights and covenants. But examination of the most effective mechanisms for allocating priorities between environmental preservation and productive activity has been neglected. This chapter addresses this neglect.
INTRODUCTION
Australia's historical record provides a vivid backdrop to our topic. Against this backdrop we can consider some of the forces and influences affecting patterns of resource use and environmental management. The firestick farming of the Aboriginals; the development of the early fishing, timber and pastoral industries; and the mining boom of the 1840s; are but some examples from a rich historical reservoir.
Mankind's transforming of the environment began, not with European settlement, but with Aboriginal communities. However, beginning with the first whalers and sealers, European settlement delivered a series of more rapid changes and developments in the Australian landscape and its ecosystems. Many have interpreted the historical record of European settlement as an indictment of "free" markets and "un-restrained" resource use. "Resource exploitation" is an invidious charge levied against the colonial settlers. This charge overlooks four important factors:
- the future opportunities created by earlier resource use;
- the importance of trade-offs between resource use and preservation;
- weaknesses in the specification of property rights to resources;
- inevitable information deficiencies.
In the rapidly growing international economy of the nineteenth century, Australia's settlers behaved similarly to other peoples. Resources were used in ways consistent with their relative scarcities. In the classical taxonomy of factors of production, Australia was well endowed with land but short of labour and capital. In the manner observed by Adam Smith with reference to England's North American colonies, the Australian colonies achieved prosperity by combining investment and the skills and energies of immigrants from the British Isles with the abundant resources provided by the natural environment. The increasing demands for raw materials and food generated by the industrialising countries complemented the increased supply potential the new continent could provide (Smith, 1958: 63).
Resource use rather than conservation provided the foundation for Australia's future prosperity. Increased prosperity generated increases in the capital stock of physical assets, infrastructure, and human knowledge. These in turn enabled resources to be used more effectively, and generated new opportunities and developments. Paradoxically, using resources ultimately meant consideration of resource conservation could be afforded. After a certain level of development has been achieved, and particularly when a society is substantially urbanised, the demand for the preservation of the natural environment tends to increase as the satisfaction of more immediate needs of food and shelter have been met.
As well as allowing more environmental services to be afforded, much development calls for a trade-off between preservation and use. In this respect, abundant resources are not valued as highly for their preservation properties as scarce ones. Resources like forests, which now have scarcity value, were regarded as obstacles to development when trees covered land required for farming. When the income stream from farming exceeded the preservation value of trees it was rational to dispose of trees, just as it may now be rational to conserve them. How much disturbance to the existing environment a society is prepared to tolerate involves trade-offs between different land use options, including preservation of the native environment. The cost of environmental preservation is the stream of income foregone by not choosing developmental options. Most people want to have both development and a pleasant environment, but it is probably true that in the early stages of settlement people have a greater preference for development and tend to see the natural environment as needing to be tamed to meet their immediate needs. After all, they have plenty of natural environment and many needs to be met.
The tendentious charge of 'exploitation' is an accurate description of some early resource based activities like: destruction of valuable stands of huon pine and red cedar, and the decimation of whale and seal populations. In these instances, however, excessive use resulted from inadequately defined or monitored property rights. Patterns of resource use must be considered in the context of who owns and monitors the resource. The definition and enforcement of property rights is a crucial element in environmental management. Commonly owned resources, such as fishing resources, will be over-used when there is open access to all. Rights to resources which are assigned, but poorly monitored, will also be poorly managed, as in the case of native forests.
From the beginning of European settlement, rights to most resources in Australia were vested in the Crown. By their decisions regarding the alienation of land and access to resources the Colonial governments played a major role in determining the course of resource use. These interventions often inadvertently encouraged less than optimal economic use of resources and were instrumental in bringing about environmental damage.
Australia's environment was alien to it's early European occupants. To many it was a harsh taskmaster. Few had the information necessary to optimally manage its various moods and vagaries. For example, the East Strezelecki ranges in South Gippsland were known as the "heartbreak hills" as settlers tried to come to terms with an environment unsuitable for farming, ^Wis-takes were made; but, with no prior knowledge, it was doubtful these could have been avoided. Not only individuals and markets failed -- a poor knowledge of Australia's ecology brought mistakes on the part of bureaucracies and governments too. Subsidised irrigation schemes have been a major contributor to problems of wetland salinity and the policy of closer settlement encouraged farming densities in excess of carrying capacities.
Unlike individual owners, governments do not have a personal stake in outcomes. Moreover, when the process of discovering the strengths and limitations of the land is independently conducted by individual farmers, the damage is likely to be far less extensive than if it follows some master plan. Experimentation leads to small mistakes and emulation of successful approaches. Major wholesale planning approaches contain the seed of potential large scale catastrophes.
Future opportunities, trade-offs, the specification of property rights and the importance of information, are major themes of this chapter. In a brief twenty pages it is obviously impossible to cover the depth and breadth of Australian economic history. Instead, we examine, in turn, the early history of major resource based industries and their environmental impacts. Where possible, some attempt is made to follow the chronological development of patterns of resource use. We start with the Aboriginal subsistence style land management, and the early whalers and sealers. We then trace the development of the early pastoral industry, the gold mining years and the move towards encouraging agriculture. Finally we consider the problems created by a rapidly growing urban population.
THE EARLY BEGINNINGS
The history of Australian resource management begins with the Aborigines. European settlers did not come to a natural environment untouched by human hands. For centuries the hunter-gatherer, Aboriginal societies had significantly modified Australian ecosystems through practices such as fire-stick farming and hunting.
The Aboriginals used the firestick as an essential aid to hunting, setting fire to scrub and grassland to flush out prey. The firestick was also a farming implement. Burnt-over land produced sweet, green shoots of grass and modified the vegetation in favour of grassland at the expense of scrub. It is unlikely that many parts of the Australian continent escaped regular burnings as part of the Aboriginals firestick husbandry. The grasslands and open woodlands, which were so attractive to the early European graziers, had been cleared of their scrub and forest cover as the result of the long period of environmental management by fire practised by the Aboriginals (Blainey, 1975: Chap 5).
Extensive modification of the environment by the Aboriginals supported little more than a primitive subsistence economy. The discovery of the great southern continent by the Europeans, in the late seventeenth century, heralded the beginning of a new pattern of resource use. Whereas the Aboriginal societies derived little more than subsistence, European efforts were directed towards producing surpluses to be sold in international markets and installing urban transport, and other infrastructure which also resulted in significant modification of the environment but produced a high standard of living for a much larger population.
WHALING AND SEALING
The earliest Australian exports came from the fisheries off the south-eastern coasts of the continent. The British government fostered whaling because it provided a good schooling for seamen and encouraged the building of strong ships suitable for long voyages. The convict fleet which arrived in Sydney in 1791 included five whalers which returned with cargoes of whale oil. Very few colonial investors had the capital to engage in the hunting of the deep sea sperm whales so most of the colonial whaling was confined to the black whalebone, or bay whale. These did not require ocean going ships, and which was fished from the Derwent estuary and Twofold Bay south of Sydney during the winter months when cows came into the sheltered waters to calve (Blainey, 1966: Chap 5). In 1809 Britain imposed a high protective duty against colonial oil, and until the early twenties British whalers dominated the trade until duties were removed. The great era of colonial whaling flourished for nearly two decades until the depression of the 1840s (Bach, 1982: 75).
Until 1835 whaling provided one of the most valuable exports of Australian produce. Sealskins were another product of the fisheries which were taken on the islands of Bass Strait and Kangaroo Island off the South Australian coast. As they came ashore to breed, the seals were clubbed and their skins taken. The slaughter of seals during their breeding season brought the rapid depletion of the resource and by the 1820s sealing was in decline. Although fisheries contributed significantly to the colonial economy, property rights were not defined and no quotas were set. Absence of property rights and other market mechanisms meant an absence of incentives to ensure the conservation of the resource. By the middle of the century commercial sealing grounds had been seriously depleted.
TIMBER FROM THE FORESTS
A similar lack of title and the absence of incentives to harvest rather than deplete were found in early timber gathering activities. One of the motivations in the choice of New South Wales as a convict settlement was the hope that Norfolk Island pine would prove to be a plentiful source of naval timber for Britain. Although this hope was not realised, timber was nevertheless essential for construction and maintenance in the settlement. It was also required for the repair of visiting ships and for construction in local boatyards. The authorities were on the look-out for useful stands of timber and explorers and settlers were encouraged to note and report on the character and availability of local timber supplies.
In 1795 Governor Hunter ordered that the King's mark be put on all trees which might have a use for building or naval purposes. He forbade the felling of timber on Crown Land which had not been marked out or allocated to individuals. The regulation also prohibited the cutting of trees, useful for naval purposes, on private land. In spite of heavy penalties for breaches of these orders, it seems that they had very little effect in curbing the illegal taking of timber (Williams, 1988: 124). Rights to the resource were defined but they could not be enforced.
The red cedar of the Hunter Valley and the coastal rainforest of New South Wales were highly valued, and the authorities seemed totally incapable of controlling cedar felling in the country areas. Gangs of cedar-cutters continually roamed along the coastal rivers looking for good stands and they formed the first settlements on the Richmond River in the north and at Kiama in the south (Bach, 1982: 121-2, 231). Exploitation by these roaming fellers was so thorough that the cedar stands of New South Wales were all but cut-out by the end of the 1860s. When the cedar was cut-out the timber fellers attention turned to the stands of hoop pine along the Tweed, Richmond and southern Queensland rivers (Williams, 1988: 124).
The other colonies fared little better. The highly regarded Huon Pine from around Macquarie Harbour on the remote south west coast of Tasmania was virtually cut-out by 1870 while in South Australia the stringybark forests in the Mount Lofty ranges were illegally felled. Timber-getters followed the land surveyors cutting out the best trees so that a selector, when he took up his land, might find it denuded of all valuable timber (Williams, 1988: 124).
In the beginning forests seemed to be an inexhaustible source of timber. The government was concerned to ensure supplies for their own needs and to raise revenue but, in spite of attempts at regulating the taking of timber, it lacked the resources to enforce the regulations, especially in the more remote areas. Farmers, on the other hand, saw forests as an impediment to their operations and the clearing of forests, in a community which earned its living from farming, was socially beneficial (Carron, 1985: 3).
As valued timber supplies dwindled, a greater premium was placed on conservation. This behaviour stemmed not from ecological motives but from perceptions of possible timber shortages. It lead the Colonial governments to pursue a policy of public management as well as Crown ownership of the resource. Many of the early Land Acts allowed for the setting aside of land for the preservation and growth of timber and in the last decades of the nineteenth century state ownership and management of forests became the prevalent pattern. For instance, in Victoria in 1873 over 600,000 acres had been set aside as state forests and by 1903 this had increased to almost five million acres (Dingle, 1984: 139). During these years every colony moved to some form of forest conservation by reserving state forests and setting up forestry departments to manage the resource. South Australia and New South Wales began reafforestation with exotic softwoods (Williams, 1988: 125).
The early years of the twentieth century saw the professionalisation of forestry in Australia. There were seven interstate conferences on forestry held in Australia between 1911 and 1924. A number of themes emerged from these conferences including a demand for advanced technical training, afforestation, reservation, significant forest cover in highland areas to promote reliable water conservation and erosion control, and fire monitoring and prevention measures (Powell, 1988: 160-8). However, little attention was paid to managing timber economically. Management practices borrowed heavily from European traditions which took no account of price or interest costs. Despite efforts at conservation practices, excessive emphasis on timber management for sustained yield contributed to the large operating deficits of the forests services and may have exacerbated later confrontations with environmentalists.
OPENING UP THE INTERIOR
The first settlements in New South Wales were established as gaols. As a prime administrative consideration was the security of the prison, the early governors were anxious not to allow the settlements to extend beyond the bounds of effective control. On the other hand, because they were so isolated, another important objective was to ensure that the settlements were as self-sufficient as possible in foodstuffs. Accordingly, free settlers and ex-convicts were given grants of land and the assistance of convict labour.
Land for farming and grazing was the most immediately useful natural resource and for the first three decades settlement was virtually confined to the Cumberland Plain, bounded on the east by the Pacific Ocean and to the west by the barrier of the Blue Mountains. When the mountain barrier was penetrated in 1813 it was neither scientific curiosity nor shortage of land which provided the incentive, but a temporary shortage of pasture due to drought and a caterpillar plague (Perry, 1963: 27).
The crossing of the Blue Mountains revealed the existence of extensive pastures and, in times of pasture shortage on the Cumberland Plain, Governor Macquarie allowed stock to be taken over the mountains for the duration of the crisis to obtain temporary relief. The area made available for grazing was strictly defined and stock owners were required to vacate the area at one month's notice. Permission for a more extensive temporary occupation of the "New Country" was granted by an 1820 order which recognised the growing pressure on the pastures of the Cumberland Plain and permitted pastoralists to take up runs in the south-western area of the Goulburn and Breadalbane Plains and around Bathurst.
In 1824 Governor Brisbane provided some security against trespass for these occupiers by issuing a "ticket of occupation" which provided exclusive grazing rights to a certain area but restricted the right to cut timber to what was required for the building of huts and stockyards (Perry, 1963: 34). In addition to providing some security from trespass, without actually alienating the land, tickets of occupation enabled immediate occupation without prior survey and did not pre-empt the future disposal of the land.
A shortage of surveyors meant that the colony was only crudely mapped in the 1820s. Nonetheless, the Colonial Office in London, anxious to see more control exercised over occupation, issued orders for the colony to be divided into counties, hundreds and parishes (in 1825). These orders also required the land to be valued preparatory for selling and the Colonial government therefore ceased issuing tickets of occupation and sought to specify areas which could be surveyed and valued quickly as limits of settlement. The limits were announced in 1826 and revised in 1829 when the nineteen counties were proclaimed (Perry, 1966: 45). In proclaiming the Limits to Settlement "the Government erected a huge non-trespass sign over the interior", to use the words of Stephen Roberts (Roberts, 1964: 4). It was a sign which was to be flagrantly ignored by pastoralists who streamed out beyond the Limits of Settlement and, stimulated by the growing demand for wool, "squatted" on runs which soon dotted the map from the plateau of New England in the north to the lush pastures of Australia Felix in the south and extended as far west as the banks of the Darling River.
Seemingly powerless to prevent squatting, Governor Bourke set about legitimatising grazing outside the Limits of Settlement. He recognised the reality that:
Not all the armies of England -- not a hundred thousand soldiers scattered through the bush -- could drive back our herds within the Nineteen Counties.
Nevertheless, he had difficulty in convincing his superiors in London (Roberts, 1968: 188).
Eventually Bourke prevailed and in 1836 the first Squatting Act was passed by the Legislative Council. This Act allowed stockmen to occupy Crown lands for the yearly payment of a ten pounds licence fee. This was amended in 1839 so that the squatter had to pay both a fixed annual licence fee and a tax on his stock. The proceeds were used to provide resources for the Land Commissioners to police the outer areas (Roberts, 1968: 189).
While in New South Wales, squatters were being enabled to occupy thousands of acres of land for a mere ten pounds (Roberts, 1964: 81-82), across the border, in South Australia, land was offered at a uniform price of one per acre. The colony of South Australia was founded on the Wakefieldian principles of systematic colonisation and concentration of settlement. The key to Wakefield's scheme was the "sufficient price" for land. Wakefield argued that land needed to be priced at a level which was high enough to prevent farmers from purchasing more land than they could profitably farm and to prevent immigrants from buying land in their first seven years so that these would instead provide a pool of labour. Immigration was to be funded from the proceeds of the land sales (Roberts, 1968: 83-89).
An inherent conflict developed between the two colonies over land policies (Pike, 1967: Chap. 3). In London, where the Wakefieldians had the ear of the Colonial Secretary, pressure was applied to force New South Wales to adopt policies more in line with Wakefieldian principles. This campaign finally lead to the proclamation of Earl Grey's Waste Lands Order-in-Council in October 1847. Grey imposed a uniform upset price for Crown land throughout the Colonies. He was opposed to alienating land below this price and also to annual tenure. The Order-in-Council introduced long leases for pastoralists with the right to purchase at the upset price at any time. One of the effect of this new policy was to allow true ownership by squatter farmers and to bring genuine incentives for long term custody.
PASTORALISM
The squatting system proved to be an appropriate arrangement for the development of the pastoral industry which by mid-century was by far the greatest source of Colonial exports.
The early pastoral industry was capital intensive, but required extensive tracts of land at nominal prices. The squatter's capital was invested in livestock and stores. It was only after the gold rushes and increased competition between pastoralists and settlers for the better lands in the south-east of the continent, that the pastoralists were forced, by a shortage of labour, to invest in substantial station improvements which raised the productivity of their more highly valued lands (Heathcote, 1965: 88-91).
Squatting on unoccupied Crown Lands meant bringing into production land with an opportunity cost of virtually zero. Many regard the squatting system as being a very flexible form of tenure because it enabled the land to be productively used while leaving options open for alternative, more intensive later use. At a time when the native environment was not well understood, the extensive grazing was less disruptive than more intensive land use, although the introduction of exotic animals was bound to cause dramatic changes in the native vegetation (Moore, 1962).
However, the absence of permanent tenure contributed to overgrazing and the associated problem of drought. Australia is a drought prone continent and this must be a prominent consideration in any environmental management scheme. Too often, in plans for closer settlement, drought has been regarded as exceptional. The fact is that drought is a regular and almost predictable occurrence.
It took years, often decades, of experience and observation for pastoralists and settlers to become acquainted with the impact of drought and flood on the carrying capacity of the land. Settlers often moved into an area on the basis of favourable explorers' reports only to learn the harsh reality that the good seasons are followed by the bad ones (Perry, 1966). Where land was not permanently vested, there were inadequate incentives to exercise caution in stock levels.
Moreover, bureaucrats in Departments of Lands offices drew lines on maps and planned closer settlement schemes which were often quite inappropriate for the local climatic conditions. The Warrego country straddling the central border between New South Wales and Queensland was a case in point. From the late 1840s this region had been occupied by graziers under pastoral leases. In 1884 the Queensland and New South- Wales governments passed legislation aimed at the subdivision of the larger pastoral properties in order to promote more intensive occupation and development of the plains.
This attempt to permanently settle "an industrious population on the public estate" failed because of unrealistic assessments of the carrying capacity of the area. The result was a deterioration in the native vegetation which reduced the carrying capacity of the Warrego country. The long drought of the 1890s took its toll on the native vegetation. The smaller graziers found their runs were overstocked. Perversely the provision of watering facilities added to the overstocking and rabbits exacerbated the problem. By 1901 it became clear to pastoralists that the stocking rate during drought was not limited by the supply of available water but by the availability of feed. The small grazier who lost his stock during drought usually had insufficient capital to replace it when the drought broke (Heathcote, 1965: Chap 6).
Graziers, no less than bureaucrats were capable of over-estimatmg the carrying capacities of native pastures. The practice of "flogging" runs bare was sometimes followed, no doubt on a wider scale than would otherwise have prevailed if tenure arrangements had been more secure. Cases of "flogging" a neighbours run were not unknown to the courts (Williams 1962).
The seven year drought which afflicted the Western Division of New South Wales from 1895 to 1902 not only forced home the realisation that long droughts were characteristic of inland Australia but also indicated that pastoralism was not a suitable occupation for small graziers lacking access to large financial resources. The survivors of this long drought were the larger farmers and pastoral companies which had the flexibility and financial resources to move stock between properties located over a wide area and to restock the properties when the drought broke. By avoiding gross over-stocking during drought the larger enterprise was able to manage the relationship between the pastoral activities and the arid environment more effectively so that edible vegetation was not replaced by inedible varieties (Cain, 1962).
Although pastoral lessees on the rich plains of the Riverina in New South Wales and the Western District in Victoria weee able to convert substantial portions of their leases into freehold title, the major part of the land in the more arid parts remained unalienated. As late as the mid-1960s, only a little more than 10% of the Australian land area had been alienated or was in process of alienation (Campbell, 1970: 172-173). The pastoral occupation of large areas of Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia is under leases which generally run from 25 to 40 years.
Retaining the land under Crown ownership keeps open the option of reassessing property sizes in the light of economic and technological changes. It does, however, remove much of the incentive for lessees to develop the properties.
The South Australian government had been keen to develop the pastoral potential of the Northern Territory. To this end it introduced a leasing system in 1890 which provided generous terms for the lessee. In relation to stocking, only one head of cattle per square mile was required within three years of the application for the lease and two heads within seven years. Rents were set at sixpence per square mile for the first seven years of a lease, one shilling for the second seven years while for the remainder of the 45 year lease the rent was to be fixed by valuation.
These low rents however were insufficient to generate the financial resources necessary for the proper servicing of the runs with communications, water boring, conservation and policing. Furthermore, the same rents applied over the whole area, failing to differentiate between land of lower and higher stock-carrying capacity or between varying distances from markets. The provisions relating to tenure and compensation for improvements were also unsatisfactory. The South Australian government was unable to effectively address the problems of management in an area where pastoral enterprise was extremely hazardous and effectively placed obstacles in the way of private enterprise attempting the task (Duncan, 1967: 116-122).
CONTROLLING EXOTIC VERMIN
While the pastoralists were still discovering the optimum levels of stocking intensity on the native pastures of the semi-arid interior, they had to face the devastation caused by advance of rabbits across New South Wales and Queensland during the 1880s. The effect of the rabbit infestation was to severely reduce the stock carrying capacity of the pastures. In the Western Division of New South Wales carrying capacity was reduced by about 50% between 1891 and 1911. The combination of maximum stocking intensity and the rabbit advance inflicted irreparable damage on the native pastures which left the country very susceptible to erosion (Fennessy, 1962: 228). Although governments had the power to adjust the terms of leases to arrest deterioration in vegetation or to prevent soil erosion, there is little evidence that the relevant departments had sufficient knowledge of the management of native vegetation to institute rational controls over grazing (Campbell, 1970: 182-183). A weakness of the leasehold system became evident in the Riverina in the 1880s when squatters faced the rabbit invasion from Victoria. Without secure tenure of the holdings and with no property rights in the improvements they constructed, squatters were in no position to invest in, say 100 miles of rabbit proof fencing at 50 per mile, when their lease could be withdrawn at short notice without compensation (Rolls, 1977: 146). Fencing would have reduced the impact of rabbits but, because of monitoring problems, there were limits to its effectiveness.
All governments in Australia have relied heavily on legislation to deal with the problem of vermin control. Following the recommendation of a 1889 Royal Commission in New South Wales, the principle of the obligation of the individual occupier for the destruction of noxious animals and plants became firmly established in Australia (Sawyer 1962: 243) The principle of "landowner onus" may have been firmly established, but that was no guarantee of effective enforcement. Often the enforcement agencies, like the Pastures Protection Boards which have had responsibility since 1902 for controlling rabbits in New South Wales, were so ignorant of the life history of rabbits as to be ineffective and their efforts achieved little more than the needless poisoning of native wildlife.
While governments passed legislation to force landholders to eradicate rabbits, unoccupied Crown Lands and railway rights-of-way were exempted and became infested with rabbits. Furthermore, while government agencies have tried to have farmers construct rabbit-proof fences, closer settlement schemes have been so surveyed that boundaries cross watercourses and other natural features which have rendered permanent netting fences virtually impossible to maintain (Rolls, 1977: 97). From time to time de-commercialisation, prohibiting the sale of the skins and flesh of wild rabbits, has been advocated and legislated. But the administrative and constitutional difficulties of widespread enforcement of de-commercialisation are considerable (Sawyer, 1962: 255-258). By and large, it has to be concluded that attempts to control pests by legislation have not been successful in Australia.
MINING
No sooner had squatters achieved security over the pastoral areas through Earl Grey in 1847 than the Australian colonies' experienced the bonanza of the gold rushes. The gold rushes were to have far reaching consequences, among which were: rapid population growth; a thorough technological transformation of the pastoral industry; universal manhood suffrage; expansion of infrastructure, in particular transport and communications; large influxes of British capital; and the stimulation of a diverse range of industry. Short term social disruption and environmental damage was a small price to pay for the long term benefits of the mining boom.
The gold rushes of the 'fifties in New South Wales and Victoria attracted a flood of immigrants from all over the world. In ten years the population increased from 400,000 to 1.1 million (Maddox and McLean, 1987: 10). This sudden influx of people created a demand for foodstuffs which encouraged pastoralists who had lost shepherds to the goldfields, to concentrate on producing meat for the mining population, while the demand for breadstuff's on the goldfields suddenly created a flourishing export market for South Australian wheat. At the same time developments overseas were opening up the prospects for Australian grain to enter the international wheat trade. The repeal of the corn laws in 1846 opened up the English market to cheaper foreign suppliers. The increase in the world's shipping capacity and the linking up of the continents by submarine cable together with the increasing dependence of European markets on overseas sources contributed to the development of international markets for foodstuffs.
Mining greatly increased the colonies' ability to attract overseas funds. Attitudes of British investors to Australia changed considerably. About two million per annum of capital was imported into Victoria and New South Wales between 1827 and 1850, compared to about 340,000 between 1827 and 1850 (Doran, 1984). The capital inflow provided the funds for the rapid development of the railways in the 1850s and 1860s and the extension of telegraph and communications from the 1860s to the 1900s. Funds also flowed into residential construction and the pastoral industry. Doran concludes that
Immediate dislocative effects proved transient and insignificant compared with the long term benefits (Doran 1984: 50).
Whereas the gold rushes in California were virtually unregulated, in Australia a degree of regulation was imposed through the insistence that every digger purchase a licence. Invoking a sixteenth century lawsuit, Governor FitzRoy pronounced the Crown's right to all gold found in New South Wales. These licences served two functions. They provided the government with money to police the goldfields, and were intended to discourage at least some of the would be diggers from joining the rushes. Furthermore, by restricting each lease to a surface area of eight feet square, the regulations increased and concentrated the population on the diggings thus exacerbating the environmental damage of mining (Blainey, 1963: 20-21, 32).
Despite mining operations being so widespread over the face of Australia during the nineteenth century, severe degradation of the environment was generally confined to the specific localities in which mining took place. In the case of alluvial gold mining in the 1850s in Victoria and New South Wales the environmental impact was intensified by the huge concentrations of population which were attracted to the diggings.
Mining operations made great demands on water and timber resources and miners were allowed to take control of these resources in their localities. The major environmental impacts of mining were therefore not directly related to the mines themselves.
Wooded areas in the vicinity of the minefields were clear-felled as miners scavenged for timber to cut into slabs to line their shafts or props to support tunnels. Bark was stripped from stringybark trees for roofing, walls and gutters. The trees were effectively ringbarked and, when dead, cut for fuel. In the 1840s timber in the vicinity of the copper mines at Kapunda, Burra and Wallaroo in South Australia was soon stripped and within a few years mallee was being hauled from 20 or 30 miles away to fuel the smelters which consumed up to 150 tons of wood daily. In the arid areas around Broken Hill and Coolgardie the denudation of the sparse timber was even more complete. Even in the heavily forested areas around Zeehan, Mt Lyell and Mt Bischoff in Tasmania the timber resources were depleted at an alarming rate (Williams, 1975: 122-23). So heavy was the demand for timber in the Victorian mines, that trees were cut in Tasmania and shipped across Bass Strait. The traffic in timber from the Otways in southern Victoria to the gold fields, prior to 1930, was so great that it used to be said that there was more Otways timber below ground than above it (Houghton, 1975: 37).
Lack of clear legislative specification regarding water rights for mining provided opportunists with the chance to build water races and sell the water to miners. This focused attention on the issue of appropriate water provision for mining communities. In Victoria in the 1860s, legislation was passed to more clearly define licences for races and reservoirs in order to preserve the rights of mining communities as a whole and also to provide subsidies to encourage the construction of water storage and reticulation systems by local authorities. This established the precedent for public ownership of key resources (Powell, 1975: 39).
To some extent the mining operations themselves were disruptive to the environment through excavation, the dumping of earth and tunnelling. Mullock heaps, often contaminated with mine or smelter residues, provided a rooting habitat foreign to most native species. Introduced species have been widely used to stabilise areas disturbed by mining. The same is true for coastal dunes damaged by sand mining. The noxious South African shrub, boneseed, has largely replaced the native coast wattle (Wace, 1985: 145). Sludge from mining operations sometimes blocked the natural drainage patterns exposing agricultural and residential land to inundation. In the north-east of Victoria hydraulic mining was introduced by Californian miners and caused the undermining of hillsides and the banks of streams, exposing the bed-rock. Deep sinking and tunnelling, which were introduced in Victoria as the alluvial gold ran out in the late 1850s and 1860s, disturbed local water tables and were responsible for large mullock heaps (Powell, 1975: 37-39).
Many of the effects of mining on the environment were only temporary. In time the cut-over forests and woodlands grew back to second and even third generation re-growth. While evidence of mining operations can still be seen in abandoned areas -- these tend to be localised effects which must be balanced against the long term benefits of early mining operations. It must also be recognised that the environmental impact of gold mining in the nineteenth century was much greater than modern open-cut mining. Reconstruction of the surface following mining has become standard practice and slopes are regraded and vegetation replanted with the advice of environmental scientists (Heathcote, 1975: 134). The pioneering regeneration of Broken Hill by the mining companies in the 1930s has been repeated at many mine sites throughout the continent with the consequence that the environment is now more suitable for human habitation than it was before mining (Kearns, 1982: 140). However, the costs of this form of rehabilitation should be balanced against its benefits.
ENCOURAGING AGRICULTURE
With the decline of alluvial mining from the 1860s, increasing numbers of ex-miners found themselves without a stake in the country. In a society where ownership of land seemed to be the path to sturdy independence they demanded that the land, so recently put into the hands of the pastoralists, be made available to them. These demands were reinforced by the power of the vote and the widespread belief at the time that small scale farmers were the salt of the earth in a democracy. This strong community belief in the virtues of small scale husbandry plus the burgeoning market opportunities, created pressures on government to establish a yeoman farming settlement (Heathcote, 1982: 108).
The first attempts to draft legislation to expropriate pastoral leasehold land and convert it into freehold for small farmers in the sixties failed. Pastoralists turned key sites like river frontages and water holes into freehold thus managing to retain control of their estates. However, legislative efforts, from the late 1870s on, did wrest the land from the pastoralists and hand it over to family farmers through the passing of Land Acts (Roberts, 1968: Chaps 19, 20). The legislation not only failed to recognise established property right conventions but, as is inevitable with much centralised decision making, it had unforeseen consequences.
A feature of these state sponsored closer settler schemes was that the subdivisions under particular acts were of uniform size, irrespective of the terrain, the quality of the soil, or the nature of vegetative cover. They also usually assumed that the farmer would make his living from cultivation rather than by grazing, except of course in the case of dairy farming. The drafters of legislation invariably sought to achieve maximum intensity of settlement as this met the bureaucrat's criterion for success -- the number of farmers settled in a given area. Intensification of settlement was also meant to lead to more capital investment and hence higher production and the conserving of costs in the provision of infrastructure. In many cases, however, settlement under the land legislation resulted in farmers being placed on inappropriately sized blocks for the location. In the course of time, the unsuccessful settlers moved on and their farms were incorporated into those of their more successful neighbours. The same process of aggregation of holdings also accommodated the need for larger holdings, especially in the wheat growing areas, as new technology increased the economically optimal acreage.
A consequence of the commitment by government to the societal goals of closer settlement was the obligation of government to provide support for settlers once they were on the ground. As settlement spread further from the coastal area, transport became a costly impediment. Governments were called upon to provide railway communication and, when settlement spread beyond twenty miles of the railhead, further extensions were called for. When yields fell or prices dropped, governments were expected to lower the rail freights.
As Powell notes, "The role of the state had been ambitiously proclaimed as creator of landed opportunities, arbiter of land quality, watchdog for the public interest, architect of a new society" (Powell, 1988: 17). In reality government intervention in the process of land settlement provided a crutch to environmentally and economically unviable settlement patterns. The experience of coming to terms with the Australian environment was a difficult one, but when governments either actively assisted settlers, or picked up the tab for costly mistakes and errors of judgement, the pain of adjustment was prolonged.
Not all government efforts to encourage the development of agriculture were counter productive. The establishment of the various agricultural and lands departments in the colonies assisted farmers in adapting to the environment. Lands department surveyors made assessments of the county at the margins of settlement which gave some indication of the productive use to which the country might be put. Perhaps the most famous of these assessments was that made by the South Australian Surveyor General, George Goyder, in the drought of 1865. Goyder's "Line of Rainfall" (which was in reality a vegetation line marking the southern boundary of the mallee, salt-bush and blue-bush country, but which was later found to coincide with the 12 inch isohyet), was used to demark the country suitable for agriculture from that suitable for grazing. Although with good seasons in the early 1870s agricultural settlement advanced beyond Goyder's Line, a decade later the wheat frontier had retreated back behind the fringes of the Mallee country (Meinig, 1963: 91-92; Price, 1966: 157).
Although the Mallee country was later to be conquered for grain farming, the work of Departments of Agriculture experimental stations op dry farming techniques together with the development of suitable crop varieties for particular localities helped make permanent cultivation of the semi-arid interior possible. And when cultivation took its toll in soil erosion, the government sponsored Soil Conservation Authorities providing the expertise to assist in tackling the problem.
Wind erosion had been a problem in the light rainfall areas of South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales since the early part of the twentieth century. The first blackout dust storm hit the Mallee in 1902 but it was a long time before official action was taken to combat the problem. A Soil Drift Act was passed in South Australia in 1923 and a Soil Conservation Committee thoroughly investigated the problem and reported in 1937. A Soil Conservation Service was established in New South Wales in 1938 while Victoria set up a Soil Conservation Board in 1940 (Dingle, 1984: 188, 245). These various soil conservation services largely performed an educative function by advising farmers on ways to combat the problems of erosion on their properties and generally raising community consciousness of the importance of soil conservation.
SOLDIER SETTLEMENT
Australia has always been a highly urbanised society, but while most Australians chose urban living for themselves, they tend to lament the fact that so few others chose the rural life. Closely settled rural communities were perceived as model environments in which to raise strong, independently-minded, loyal citizens. They were seen as offering a counterbalance to the corrupting influences of urban life and the artificial values of industrial society. It should not, therefore, be surprising that proposals to settle returning soldiers from the Great War on the land received public approval as a way of repaying the "debt of honour".
In spite of a wealth of previous experience with closer settlement, the administration of the soldier settlement schemes managed to ignore most of the lessons which could have been learnt from the past. Only Western Australia and Queensland had sufficient suitable areas of Crown lands to devote to soldier settlement. The other states had to resort to heavy government expenditure on land purchases.
It was not only the high costs of establishment borne by the settlers and the impact of low prices during the Depression which .were responsible for the failure of the scheme. Factors such as the poor location of farms, and inappropriately sized farms for particular localities, as well as the high capital debt burdens assumed by the settlers, and the unsuitability for farming of many of them -- all contributed to failure as they had to many earlier closer settlement schemes (Powell, 1988: 100-110).
IRRIGATION
Belief in the societal virtue of intensive cultivation, even in spite of the evidence that this is only rarely compatible with the Australian environment, accounts for the immense public support for irrigation schemes in Australia. The stark dryness of the Australian interior inspired the dream of arid areas transformed into green oases.
As early as 1835 Wakefield had suggested that irrigation would be necessary in South Australia to provide insurance against drought (Martin, 1955: 19). Demand for irrigation received some impetus in Victoria after the 1865 Land Act's success in enabling agricultural settlement on the Northern Plains. After a run of good seasons in the first half of the 1870s drought struck in 1876-77 and the settlers on the Northern Plains looked to the Government to assist them by providing irrigation facilities.
Irrigation came to be seen as the panacea which would realise the dream of a citizenry of sturdy yeomen farmers. Many schemes were proposed. Perhaps the most fantastic was the brain child of Mr Benjamin Dods who in 1871 issued a prospectus for the Grand Victorian North-Western Canal Company. This contained a proposal for a private company to construct a canal on land grant principles across northern Victoria and then south to the sea at Portland. The canal was to be not only for irrigation but also for navigation (Powell, 1989: 84-90).
Although not a feasible proposition, the Grand North-West Canal scheme captured the imagination of the public and helped fuel the fervour for irrigation which culminated in a series of reports on irrigation in the early years of the 1880s and the Royal Commission on Water Supply which reported in 1885 and 1886. So great was the interest in irrigation that nearly every year between 1880 and 1891 saw the publication of the report of one official enquiry or another (Martin, 1955: 26). Alfred Deakin, the Minister for Water supply in Victoria, undertook an extensive study of irrigation in the United States which was published as Irrigation in Western America.
Deakin encouraged the Chaffey brothers, who had pioneered successful irrigation colonies in California, to come to Australia where they established private colonies on land supplied by the government at Mildura in Victoria and Renmark in South Australia (Fogarty, 1967). Most of the recommendations of the Royal Commission on Water Supply were implemented in the Irrigation Act of 1886. The main provisions of this act were the nationalisation of water use rights, licensing of private diversions from the aqueduct, state construction of irrigation facilities and the authorisation of loans to the irrigation trusts (Powell, 1989: 112).
Perhaps the most significant aspect of the legislation was the nationalisation of water use rights. This did away with riparian rights which were inherited from England under common law and replaced it with state ownership of water use rights. The approach was later to be adopted by other Colonies and States. The irrigation trusts accumulated large debts to the Government and were abolished by the Water Act of 1905 and replaced by a central agency, the State Rivers and Water Supply Commission. A second feature of this legislation was the nationalisation of the banks and beds of all watercourses (Powell, 1989: 147).
Most of the irrigation schemes in Australia are located in the Murray Valley. The most significant irrigation area outside of Victoria is the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area in New South Wales which was officially opened in 1912 (Langford-Smith & Rutherford, 1966: 33). In more recent times a number of large scale irrigation schemes have been undertaken in Northern Australia, including the Ord River scheme in Western Australia and the Burdekin Falls Dam near Townsville in Queensland. Although such schemes may enhance the national pride of the citizens in the States where they are located, there seems to be little indication that the politically minded promoters of modern irrigation schemes have learnt much from the economic mistakes of their predecessors.
Keith Campbell observed that, "water and irrigation seem to bring out all that is irrational in man" (Campbell, 1980: 141). Perhaps one of the most irrational aspects of irrigation policy has been the under-pricing of water to farmers. The costs of dams and other headworks has been traditionally borne by the state rather than by the irrigators. This has not only led to the uneconomic use of water and raised unrealistic expectations about investment in irrigation compared with dry-land development, but also to a more profligate use of water which over time has contributed to the huge problem of salinity, particularly in the Murray Valley.
The prospect of converting the great arid expanses of inland Australia into blooming gardens has been one of the persistent dreams of Australians. This dream was accomplished with the construction of the Snowy Mountains Scheme in the immediate post-World-War II period. This scheme diverted the waters of the south flowing Snowy River northwards into the Murray and Murrumbidgee Rivers, but perhaps the grandest dream of all has been that of diverting water from the heavily watered eastern side of the Great Dividing Range in Northern Queensland west into the headwaters of the Thompson River which, as Cooper Creek, flows into Lake Eyre. First suggested by Dr J. Bradfield in the 1930s, this scheme is unlikely to be economically feasible, yet it is periodically resurrected, usually in election campaigns (Davidson, 1969: 227-230).
MANAGING THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT
A high degree of urbanisation is a notable characteristic of staple export economies. The production function of the export economy requires a concentration of economic activity around the ports to provide services like transport, stevedoring, ship chandlering and financial and insurance functions. In addition to the export services, importers established merchanting and fabricating establishments and the main port cities became the administrative centres for the colonies. The urban development associated with the port and administrative functions formed a nucleus which attracted manufacturing and numerous service industries to meet the needs of the urban population.
Concentrations of population give rise to problems of effluent disposal, both private and industrial. Access to water and air resources for waste disposal is difficult to restrict. The common pool characteristics of waste disposal require a level of government control so that overall limits can be imposed once congestion becomes a problem within these boundaries. Private sector initiatives can offer efficient waste disposal services. However, in Australia the tradition has generally been to solve these problems by regulation and by government provision of infrastructure and essential utilities. From the beginning, the control of settlement included waste disposal.
From the earliest settlement at Sydney Cove the authorities took measures to ensure a public water supply. This was achieved by deepening the river and excavating tanks in its sandstone bed. Thereafter land use was directed so as to preserve the Tank Stream from serious pollution and erosion and regulations were passed forbidding the felling of trees within fifty feet of the stream and fences and ditches were placed on each bank for further protection. In 1802 Governor King proclaimed that vigorous action would be taken against persons who discharged noxious effluents into the stream (Powell, 1975: 55).
As in other parts of the world, the growth of cities in Australia led to the imposition of regulations to control effluents and the construction of infrastructure to provide for the storage and reticulation of water and the carrying away of pollutants. Melbourne provides an example of the problems of managing a quickly growing urban environment. Melbourne grew very rapidly following the gold rushes of the 1850s and, although the centre of the city contained many fine public buildings and was well serviced, the areas adjacent to the rivers attracted heavy industries which discharged their wastes into the waterways without restriction (Dunstan, 1984: 136).
Concerns about sanitation and pollution tended to be ignored until either the accumulation of sewage, garbage and decomposing animal carcases became unbearably offensive, or there was a scare about epidemics. The usual response was to try to shift the problem into someone else's backyard. Garbage disposal was a problem and people who lived in low lying areas were likely to be the recipients of sewage and garbage from the higher areas. In 1854 anti-pollution legislation provided penalties for tanners and wool scourers who discharged effluent into the Yarra. This legislation met with bitter opposition from local businessmen who mounted a campaign to "unlock the Yarra for the peoples' factories" (Barret, 1971: 45, 72, 106). A full scale "environmental" debate ensued with the "developers" insisting that the law was an unwarranted attack on legitimate employment-generating industry. On the other side were those who insisted that the law did not go far enough, jeopardising the health of the citizens.
The dispersion of powers amongst various authorities; the Colonial government and the various municipal authorities; made it difficult to satisfactorily resolve conflicts of interest or to co-ordinate the provision of services like sewerage and water supply. The disposal of nightsoil became a pressing problem with the spread of the urban area. Manure depots on the fringes of settlement were established and in the 1860s night soil collected in the Fitzroy and Collingwood areas was emptied into the Yarra. As early as 1855 a special rate levied by municipalities for collection of night soil was suggested, although such a special rate was not made legal until 1890 (Barret, 1971: 72,79).
Lack of adequate sewage disposal and a contaminated water supply took a heavy toll on the health of the people of Melbourne over the four prosperous decades from the gold rushes of the fifties to the depression of the nineties. Melbourne's infants were decimated in periodic waves of enteric disorders, diphtheria, scarlet fever, measles and whooping cough for want of a basic infrastructure for water, drainage and sewage (Dunstan, 1984: 125).
Measures to provide a reticulated water supply did not always solve the problem of contaminated water. The Yan Yean system was turned on at the end of 1857 but the reticulation included street hydrants which let the air in. At times of low pressure they would allow in street matter, creating a health hazard. In addition the reticulated water supply encouraged many to illegally install water closets which added to the contamination of ground water and spilled over to the low lying areas (Dunstan, 1984: 138). Melbourne may have been a distinguished Victorian city but its most distinctive characteristic throughout the Victorian era was its smell. As the Age commented, "Stink has become quite a Melbourne institution" (Dunstan, 1984: 251). Yet, in spite of the dangers to health and the affront to sensibility, it was not until 1889 that the political will could be mustered to create the Metropolitan Board of Works, which was to undertake the construction of an efficient sewerage system and to attend to the problems of drainage and water supply.
CONCLUSION
Economic activity inevitably has an impact on the existing natural environment. While resources are abundant, productive management of the environment is a rational choice. The early development of Australia's fishing, timber, agricultural and mining resources, laid the foundation for her future prosperity. It was inevitable that in the early stages of settlement ignorance about the ecology and poorly defined property rights would result in some damage to the environment. But market forces, evolving systems of land tenure, and better information would have led to a greater emphasis on conservation and preservation as Australia developed. Nevertheless, from the earliest days of European settlement, governments undertook the major responsibility for the management of the environment in Australia.
Although the economic development of the continent was driven by market forces, governments have been reluctant to use market mechanisms in managing the environment. Overwhelmingly, regulation has been the preferred instrument for environmental management. This strong reliance on regulation has been attended by some unforeseen consequences.
Governments became heavily involved in the provision of infrastructure, and the political pressures often resulted in distortions in the uses of resources which actually contributed to environmental damage, rather than ameliorating it. The provision of irrigation water at considerably less than cost, for example, has massively contributed to the problems of salinity in the Murray Valley. Heavily subsidised rail freight rates have encouraged farming in fragile environments while unrealistic drought relief schemes have encouraged inappropriate stocking rates in low rainfall areas.
Closer settlement schemes were often devised with more regard to bureaucratic convenience than to the limitations of the environment. Regulations rarely took account of the differing nature of the land, and farm areas were often quite inappropriate to the region with the consequence that inappropriate land use ^suited in erosion problems. In other instances lack of adequate information regarding the potential of the environment led to bad judgements regarding the appropriate land use. Although in a jess regulated system these errors of judgement would still undoubtedly have been made, the inflexibility of the regulatory system compounded the mistakes and intensified the deleterious consequences.
Governments are rather inclined to seek solutions in regulations but are less enthusiastic about providing the resources to monitor and enforce the regulations. In some cases, as with regulations compelling landholders to exterminate vermin, the task of monitoring and enforcement is very difficult and almost impossible when government itself does not feel obliged to eradicate pests on Crown lands.
Evaluated from the stand-point of today's preference for conservation and preservation and today's superior knowledge of ecology and ecosystems, both markets and governments have failed to optimally manage environmental resources. However it is unlikely, given a similar information set and similar pressures to make a living from the land, that we would have acted differently. Market forces may have cut down forests, opened gold mines, and created environmental change. But they also created future opportunities for more efficient resource use and a higher standard of living which now enables choices towards conservation to be made. Rather than lament the past, it is more appropriate to ask what are the most effective mechanisms for managing the environment today? Given that both markets and governments fail, how we can learn from the lessons of the past and utilise the comparative advantage of each institution to balance the trade-off between productive use and preservation.
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