Acknowledgements
I have incurred several personal and scholarly debts in the writing of this book. First, however, I wish to acknowledge the Traditional Owners of Gariwerd, and pay my respects to their Elders, past and present.
When the notion of writing a book about Gariwerd lodged itself in my mind, I contacted CSIRO Publishing in Melbourne with the proposal and within a short time work was underway. John Manger and his colleagues have seen this book through from beginning to end with a great deal of understanding and patience, for which I am very grateful.
I am indebted to many people, books and ideas; where possible, I have noted these in the text. Djab wurrung Elder, Tim Chatfield, has many years of experience working with Gariwerd’s natural and cultural heritage, and I wish to thank him for taking the time to read over the completed book. In the early stages, Tom Griffiths at the Australian National University read over my proposal and offered advice that would shape the project to come. Several of the beautiful photographs that accompany the text are the work of Alistair Paton, and I thank him for his involvement in the book. I would like to thank Ben Gunn, Thomas Parkes and Margo Sietsma, who all shared their local knowledge and expertise. Ian D Clark has an encyclopedic knowledge of Gariwerd’s Indigenous history, and I thank him for his assistance. Thanks are due to Billy Griffiths for his thoughts on what to name a book such as this. Richard Broome, Judith Smart, and Jonathan Green all provided opportunities to publish some of my early Gariwerd research and writing. As work neared completion, I was invited to speak to the Centre for the Study of the Inland at La Trobe University, and I thank Katie Holmes for the opportunity and for steering a wonderful group of scholars dedicated to the environmental humanities.
I also express admiration and appreciation for the work of librarians and archivists across Australia who have, to a significant extent, made my work possible. I especially thank the Ballarat Library and its marvellous Australiana Research Room, a treasure trove for historians of the Central Highlands and Western District of Victoria, where I wrote the bulk of this book.
I wish to thank my mother and father for instilling in me a love of nature and books in equal parts, and my older sisters for tolerating me as their childhood travelling companion on numerous journeys through Australia’s wonderful parks and reserves. The Stephens family in Hamilton, as always, have been generous and supportive. From the day I pondered writing a new history of Gariwerd, a constant source of support has been my wife, Katie, who deserves special thanks for offering both encouragement and patience. This book is dedicated to our son, Harry, who I hope will one day blaze his own trail through the mountains.
In recent years, ecological changes on a global scale have forced us to rethink assumptions about the relationship between humans and nature and whether we are as separated from the natural world as we have sometimes thought. It seems clear now that a long-held belief in the distinctiveness of humans from nature was one defining factor in our interactions with the environment. Many came to believe that, even though we might variously exploit or preserve parts of nature, the history of humanity was essentially distinct from the history of the environment. Anthropogenic climate change has forcefully corrected this viewpoint. The now-obvious interconnectedness between humanity and the rest of the Earth has given even historians cause to reconsider their ideas about the past. Perhaps there was never a time when our history was not intricately connected to the environment.1
Australians are in a unique position to comprehend the interactions of the human and non-human world, including the vastly greater timescales of the latter. We live in a continent with a distinct, variable, and uncertain ecology that has demanded people adapt and innovate, and ours is a land with a markedly deep human history that encroaches into periods of the past often reserved for the non-human world. The first Australians witnessed and successfully responded to drastically shifting global climates and massive sea level changes and their associated regional ecological changes. Australia’s more recent past encompasses a concentrated period of tightly related ecological and cultural transformations. Understanding how this history has unfolded is important preparation for knowing how we might approach contemporary ecological crises.2
In this book, I explore issues such as these as they relate to one small patch of land in the south-east of the Australian continent – the Gariwerd mountains, also called the Grampians, and their surrounding plains in western Victoria. These mountains are a series of ranges running roughly north to south, sitting at the transition from the temperate south to the arid north, and are the south-western extremity of the Great Dividing Range. Gariwerd and its people have both experienced and caused vast environmental transformations over many thousands of years.
Home for me is upon the stony rises and volcanic hills nearer to Hamilton, to the west of Gariwerd, but the mountains down the road have always held an allure, as they have for many, many other people. This region has often seemed protected from the world outside, but there is evidence that the area has already become warmer and drier since the middle of the twentieth century. This trend is predicted to continue, and the region can expect temperature increases, more hot days and hot spells, less rainfall in autumn, winter and spring, more frequent and intense downpours, fewer frosts, and much harsher fire weather with longer fire seasons. Over the past century, the global surface air temperature has risen by one degree, and both the atmosphere and oceans have warmed. This changing climate is human-induced, through the release of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels; concentrations of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide are 40 per cent or more higher than when industrialisation began in Western countries. By around 2050, in a high emissions world, Ararat to the east of Gariwerd will have a climate more like Bathurst in New South Wales, while Horsham in the north will resemble something more like Echuca, near the state border in the north.
Other changes are already evident. Particularly in west, south and east of the mountains, average annual rainfall has decreased by between 100 mm and 300 mm since 1950, while average temperatures have increased by up to 0.8°C in the north-west and to up to 1.6°C in the south-east. Models suggest that, by 2030, the annual average temperature around Gariwerd will be 0.6–1.3°C higher, and by the year 2070 the projected warming is 1.1–3.1°C; these predictions depend in large part on whether future greenhouse gas emissions are low or high. Rainfall is expected to drop, too, by around 4 per cent by 2030, and 6–7 per cent by 2070. In the worst case, average annual rainfall in and around Gariwerd might decrease by up to 28 per cent in a high emissions scenario. Despite a trend of decreasing rainfall, it is likely that more of the rain that does fall will do so during extreme, flooding downpours. With an increase in hot days, there is also a predicted increase in very high and extreme fire danger days. None of these projections accounts for the impact of periodic droughts, which are predicted to increase in regularity and length over the twenty-first century and will exacerbate conditions.3 Increased numbers of major bushfires, combined with oscillations between flooding and longer periods of low rainfall, have already set the Gariwerd ecosystem on an unusual pattern of booms and busts. Research spanning the period from before to after fires in 2006, 2013 and 2014 has shown that Gariwerd is not as resilient as it was once thought, and as anthropogenic climate change is causing conditions to worsen, the system will struggle to recover at all from fire and drought.4
In a cruel twist, the recent fires that have so damaged the natural world of Gariwerd have also revealed more of its human history. Park rangers, bushwalkers, and local rock-climbers have come across numerous previously inaccessible Indigenous Australian rock art sites, adding to the many that are already known. In an age when Indigenous connections to the land are increasingly recognised both informally and formally, such as in native title agreements, some of the Gariwerd sites that have been newly documented further confirm a continuous and deep history of social, cultural and technological change over many thousands of years.5 The ranges have a long human history, extending much further back than the declaration of Grampians National Park in 1984, and considerably beyond European colonisation from the middle of the nineteenth century – important as that would become in the story of the mountains. For over 20 000 years of this history, humans have altered the environment and the environment has influenced humans. What I hope to achieve with this short book, therefore, is to tell a story from Gariwerd’s deep past to its more recent history, and to explore how the human and environmental parts of this story have interacted and shaped each other in myriad ways along the way.
Environment, society, and Gariwerd
Many scholars from many backgrounds across the sciences and humanities have been interested in landscapes such as Gariwerd for many different reasons. The research that has most informed my writing is in the field of environmental history, which might be neatly summarised as the study of environments, humans, and their interactions over time. The question that drives this book is, what is the nature of Gariwerd? I have taken three main approaches in attempting to answer this question. First, this book explains the environment of Gariwerd itself. Second, I describe and account for human interactions with the environment and explore how humans have changed the environment. Finally, I examine some more recent ways we have tended to think about Gariwerd: why the ranges are valuable, for what purpose, and to whom.
The first part of this book, chapter one, explains the biophysical environment of Gariwerd: its geology and landforms, its climate and water, its soils, its plant and animal communities, and how these have all changed over time. The mountains and soils, the sky and water, the birds and animals, are all, as one writer puts it, ‘first and foremost themselves, despite the many meanings we discover in them. We may move them around and impose our designs upon them. We may do our best to make them bend to our wills. But in the end they remain inscrutable, artefacts of the world we did not make whose meanings for themselves we can never finally know.’6 To tell their story, I have drawn upon the existing scientific literature on geology, climate, biology, and ecology. We begin with the geological formation and make-up of the ranges. This process took place over many hundreds of millions of years, during which the climate also underwent great changes. I focus here on climate changes over the past twenty millennia of human occupation, during the late Pleistocene and Holocene. In these parts of the book I have attempted to avoid technical and scientific language where more everyday words and phrases might suffice. As is the case for the remainder of the book, the imagined audience is wide.
The second approach to understanding the nature of Gariwerd is to focus on human interactions with, and impacts on, the environment; that is, how humans have made use of the landscape over time, how this has changed and why, and how this in turn has transformed the environment. This part of this book (chapters two to five) is the longest, because it deals with the social and economic history of Gariwerd and tries to relate the human story to environmental transformations. Connecting the mechanisms of nature to the workings of humanity – in the case of Gariwerd, a relationship of over 20 000 years – I have borrowed from archaeological research in the mountains, a decades-old pursuit that continues to yield findings as I write. From around 22 000 years before the present day, towards the end of the last ice age, the Djab wurrung and Jardwadjali people and their ancestors have been witness to great environmental changes: the retreat of Australia’s arid interior and the expansion of forests over Gariwerd; the volcanic eruptions that shaped so much of western Victoria’s destiny; and, the arrival of Europeans. It is primarily through European sources that we know about Victorian Aboriginal society at the time of contact. Knowledge of pre-contact society and culture has been limited by the disintegration of language groups, the dispossession from land, and the overall disruption of life that occurred in the middle of the nineteenth century. It has often been necessary to view these past Djab wurrung and Jardwadjali worlds through the imperfect eyes of the colonists. The picture is fragmentary at best, and there are many risks in attempting to reconstruct exhaustive accounts of pre-contact, pre-European Aboriginal society. Nevertheless, there is enough detail to explore a great deal of Indigenous biocultural and ecological knowledge and practices as they existed in the middle of the nineteenth century, and to gain a sense of how Gariwerd’s first people made use of and transformed the environment.
From the middle of the nineteenth century, a vast written record began to amass.7 From this material emerges questions not only of how humans have interacted with the Gariwerd environment, but also how economic, political, social and cultural currents of the day have shaped this relationship. A particularly important theme here is the effect of colonial expansion on the environment. The European pastoral invasion of the mid-nineteenth century signalled an abrupt change in the dominant ways in which people interacted with the environment of Gariwerd. After the arrival of Thomas Mitchell, Surveyor General of New South Wales, in the 1830s, Gariwerd’s story changed pace and tack as the region became integrated into vast global and imperial networks of agriculture, science and exploration. Djab wurrung and Jardwadjali people were dispossessed of their lands in and around Gariwerd, and their relationship to it was almost, but not entirely, severed, not without a great deal of tragedy and violence. Among other transformations, fire regimes were altered, species disappeared and new species were introduced, while the new land management practices were drastically different from the old, in turn changing the physical environment itself. From the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, new industries also emerged as ways to make use of Gariwerd’s natural resources: its rocks were mined, its timber harvested, and new agricultural and horticultural pursuits were introduced. Its waterways and drainage systems were drastically altered to serve the surrounding pastoral hinterland. Apart from those with economic interests in the ranges, there had always been an interest in Gariwerd from scientific and recreational points of view. These early collectors and travellers who traversed the mountains in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century contributed to a romantic vision of Gariwerd, describing the mountains, their wildlife and scenery as Victoria’s wonderland and nature’s garden. Despite this, the declaration of the Grampians National Park occurred relatively recently, towards the end of the twentieth century.
The third way of trying to understand the nature of Gariwerd and its history is to consider how people have thought about this landscape and its environment. This question is explored, to an extent, throughout most of the book – after all, how people have used and transformed the environment indicates something of the ways their attitudes, beliefs and values shape their interactions with nature. The final chapters of the book, chapters six and seven, focus more closely on how our understanding of Gariwerd has changed over the past century. In telling the story of this process, I focus on how different ideas about the mountains competed for dominance over this time. In the Gariwerd mountains, as was the case across many landscapes, forestry was for a long time understood as an attractive compromise between preservation and exploitation. As the currents of environmentalism swirled in the second half of the twentieth century, however, conservation eventually came to be the most important factor in how people thought about Gariwerd. A national park was declared in 1984, and intensive grazing, mining and forestry in the ranges came to an end soon thereafter.
Within a few years of the creation of the Grampians National Park, its colonial past emerged as a new and significant issue, and in some cases exposed deep fault lines in attitudes, values and beliefs about the mountains. Moves to restore Jardwadjali and Djab wurrung names to the ranges in the late 1980s at first polarised communities but have since gained more acceptance. In the spirit of these ongoing attempts to have Indigenous names restored to the mountains on maps and official documentation, I have tried to make use of these names throughout the book. This includes ‘Gariwerd’, although I have not altered instances of ‘the Grampians’ when they appear in source materials. A new appreciation for Gariwerd’s Indigenous past has emerged, and the ways in which its environment is used and managed is increasingly informed by Indigenous biocultural and ecological knowledge and practices. Management of the park has moved towards collaboration with Traditional Owners, while the process of legally recognising the rights of Gariwerd’s first people is underway.
Despite these changes in the way people have thought about the environment of Gariwerd, old habits die hard, and conflicts over the ranges – which are still variously understood as an Indigenous landscape, a site for conservation, an economic opportunity and a place for recreation – are still appearing. Furthermore, the environmental transformations set in motion in the middle of the nineteenth century are still with us, from the degradation of the surrounding plains to an increased bushfire risk in the mountains. Finally, as I note towards the end of the book, global ecological challenges that transcend all boundaries have forced a further reconsideration about the environmental future of the ranges.
It is through these different approaches – concerning the physical environment itself, human interactions with the natural world, and ways of thinking about the landscape – that I hope to give readers a sense of the overall nature of Gariwerd: its environment, its people, its pasts and its future. In a comparatively short book, however, it has been impossible to capture every detail of the history of Gariwerd. This is not a guidebook, atlas or encyclopedia, and some issues, events, and people will not appear in these pages. For those wanting to know more, full bibliographic details for my sources can be found in the endnotes to each chapter, and I have compiled a list of further reading and resources in a bibliography at the end of the book. In the chapters that follow, what I hope to convey, in any case, is a sense of the richness and depth of Gariwerd’s story, and to help readers understand why, for generations, we have been drawn to this remarkable landscape.
Endnotes
1.Bonneuil C, Fressoz J (2017) The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History, and Us. Verso, London.
2.Griffiths T (2015) Environmental history, Australian style. Australian Historical Studies 46(2), 157–173. doi:10.1080/1031461X.2015.1035289
3.Government of Victoria (2015) Climate-ready Victoria: Grampians. Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning, Melbourne.
4.Hale S, Nimmo DG, Cooke R, Holland G, James S, Stevens M, De Bondi N, et al. (2016) Fire and climatic extremes shape mammal distributions in a fire-prone landscape. Diversity and Distributions 22, 1127–1138. doi:10.1111/ddi.12471
5.Gunn RG, Goodes J (2018) Wartook Lookout 1 (WO-1) and the Gariwerd rock art sequence, Victoria. In Excavations, Surveys and Heritage Management in Victoria 7. (Eds C Spry, E Foley, D Frankel, S Lawrence, I Berelov and S Canning) pp. 7–11. La Trobe University, Melbourne; Gunn RG, Goodes J and Douglas L (pers. comm.).
6.Cronon W (1996) Introduction. In Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. (Ed. W Cronon) pp. 55–56. WW Norton, London.
7.This book uses the original units of measurement found in historic primary sources. Conversions are as follows: 1 acre = 0.4 hectares (ha), 1 mile = 1.6 kilometres (km), 1 yard = 0.9 metres (m).