Jim

“It’s colloquial wisdom that the wealth of colonial Australia was built off the sheep’s back, but it is seldom acknowledged that the vast natural grasslands graziers depended on had been culturally managed by Aboriginal people for more than 30,000 years.”

#firstnations #landmanagement #ecosystem #firestickfarming #biodiversity

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/dec/22/sheep-farmers-are-helping-save-tasmanias-native-grasslands-were-better-off-working-together

Sheep farmers are helping save Tasmania’s native grasslands: ‘We’re better off working together’

Critically endangered grasslands in Tasmania’s Midlands were being destroyed by agriculture, but an innovative partnership has protected the remaining ecosystem – and local farmers’ profits

The Guardian
Dec 30, 2024 at 11:33pmWeb
Show threadJoanna HolmanDec 31, 2024
@jimmy_mac888 there’s similar very cool work happening by farmers in northern Victoria on grasslands home to the extremely rare Plains Wanderer bird
Show threadJimDec 31, 2024
@joannaholman These types of partnerships need to happen more often and more broadly. I’ve seen some of Elizabeth Gould’s early pictorial records of the Plains Wanderer held in SLV. Such a fascinating bird. I hope the conservation efforts are working.
Show threadJoanna HolmanDec 31, 2024
@jimmy_mac888 they really are fascinating birds. They’ve got a very striking perpetually startled look and there’s no closely related bird to them anywhere in Australia. I work for one of the organisations involved in their conservation. I’m mostly Melbourne office based but fitting in a field visit to the north in spring to see the wildflowers and hopefully a plains wanderer is a high priority
Show threadLooking for explanations…Dec 31, 2024
@jimmy_mac888
And that Hooved animals have done enormous damage.
Show threadJimDec 31, 2024
@Susan60 Exactly. Early European explorers, like Thomas Mitchell in Western Victoria, describe how soft the tilled soil was after being worked by First Nations people when he first found it. In some places, their horses sank up to their fetlocks in dry, tilled soil. Within 10 years of grazing by sheep and cattle (and removal of the Aboriginal people who had worked the soil) it is described as hard and unforgiving.
Show threadLooking for explanations…Dec 31, 2024
@jimmy_mac888
Yes, those beautiful grasslands weren’t simply a gift from Nature to white farmers. They were a product of millennia of careful management, which we’ve managed to compact, erode, deplete and poison.