4 July

SBS has a great series right now looking at the fundamental shift in research on Aboriginal Australia. The recognition of a vastly more complex culture than we realised. Here’s a clip (whole series is on SBS catchup), showing one of the most counter-intuitive things. When Europeans arrived here, they saw what looked like a curated English great estate. Few trees, vast open and grassed plains - the whole thing looked like a Capability Brown landscape construction on an aristocratic estate. Because…it was. We often thought early settler paintings and descriptions just reflected their English biases, projected upon ‘the bush’. But we had it backwards. What we call the bush today is the destruction of that created landscape. A total mess. Have a look at the visualisation from soil sampling, how only in the past 200 years was there suddenly ‘the bush’. The civilisation we found here had created a continent-wide landscape garden. Very little of it has survived.