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Today (March 22) in Sydney a hand-selected assembly of no more than 150 ‘stakeholders’ will be letting the koalas of NSW know that they’re from the government and are here to help. If koala policy is a mess, which it is, expect it to become a good deal worse.
Vic Jurskis, who has written often at Quadrant Online about the follies and bad science which mark koala management policies, wasn’t on the invitation list, which tends confirm any suspicion that the Koala Summiteers have their findings typed and ready for the PR releases and sound bytes.
Koala populations explode, as Jurskis explains in his book, The Great Koala Scam: Green Propaganda, Junk Science, Government Waste, on the fresh, sweet growth that erupts after fire, doing so well they and effectively eat themselves out of house and home. Rather than fret that koala populations are shrinking — to the point of near-extinction, some would have you believe — what needs to be accepted is that their numbers fluctuate, are naturally low and that the species is not in any danger.
What is in danger is the timber industry, which will likely learn a vast swathe of the state’s forests is about to be declared out of bounds. The NSW Parks and Wildlife Service has made koalas its poster pets in a campaign against logging that has been running at least since 1988. Now the ultimate victory of bad policy is nigh.
Although not on the Koala Summit’s guest list, Vic did fill out the organisers’ online questionaire, a copy of which he kept. Those questions and his responses, reproduced below, might have enlivened and enlighted today’s meeting, which is, of course, why they weren’t wanted. — rf
____________________________
Here is my response to the bureaucrats. I didn’t answer their more inane questions.
Nominated stakeholder group
(options are ngo, private landholder, vet/carer, local council, Aboriginal rep, academic/researcher, business, policy maker, community, other)
Other – member of several ngos, private landholder and researcher
Do you think the goal of doubling the number of koalas in New South Wales by 2050 provides a sound foundation for the NSW Government’s approach to koala conservation into the future? If not, what do you think the goal should be?
No. The goal should be to reintroduce mild fire and reduce koalas to sustainable levels.
In your area of expertise, what gaps do you think there are in the Strategy?
Lack of appreciation of history and basic ecology
Are the current categories of strongholds, populations for immediate investment and populations to fill knowledge gaps the right ones for koala conservation? Are there other important koala populations that should be identified for conservation management?
No. No. There is a documented continuous population from the Hunter River to Victoria. The likely connection to Queensland is not as yet publicly documented.
How could a revised Strategy further empower Aboriginal communities? What, if any, are barriers in the current framework?
Aboriginal ecological knowledge of the koala appears to have been totally lost. As far as I’m aware no Aboriginal person has acknowledged its rare status and fragmented distribution at the time of European arrival, let alone the ecological basis for it.
How do you think the NSW Government can more effectively identify and protect climate refuges in a revised Strategy?
Koalas have repeatedly irrupted and then crashed in droughts. Low density populations have been unaffected. The idea of climate refuges is nonsense.
What support should the NSW Government provide to koala populations in areas we know will be subject to serious climate change impacts?
Restore healthy forests with reduced numbers and increased health and resilience.
How could a revised strategy support better adaptive responses to climate change?
By recognising historical and ecological realities and adapting management accordingly.
Do you think the combination of habitat acquisition, private land conservation, and habitat restoration is the right approach to protecting important koala habitat? What else should the NSW Government be doing to protect koala habitat?
No. Effective restoration of healthy and safe habitat with low numbers of koalas by using frequent mild burning.
How can landholders be better supported to protect, restore and enhance koala habitat on their land? What are the barriers?
By removing regulations preventing sustainable fire management. Current regulations.
What else can the NSW Government do to better mitigate vehicle strike?
Restore healthy forests with fewer koalas.
How could the NSW Government improve the koala translocation program to ensure conservation outcomes are met?
Translocation is a proven failure for both conservation and animal welfare. It does nothing to improve the health and viability of koalas at source or destination.
How can the NSW Government better protect koalas and their habitat in response to hazard reduction burning and bushfires?
By changing regulations to legalise and encourage frequent mild burning.
How can the NSW Government improve emergency coordination with koala carers, vets and other partner organisations during a bushfire or extreme weather event?
The priority during wildfires must be to control fires as quickly and safely as possible. Carers, vets and ‘other partners’ should be excluded from active firegrounds. Firefighters should receive routine instruction in euthanasia for badly injured animals of any species.
(Please note the development approval for Clarke Creek Windfarm in QLD, where koalas are also listed as an endangered species and clearing is not an emergency ‘event’, requires that seriously injured koalas should be killed by blunt force to the base of the skull.)
What do you see as the most critical knowledge gaps in understanding the distribution and relative abundance of koalas across New South Wales?
Lack of surveys using effective techniques such as sound recording. Lack of appreciation that low densities are natural and healthy.
What changes should be made to the koala research plan to ensure it delivers research that directly benefits koala conservation?
More research is unnecessary. Adaptive management is urgently required.
What data do you need to effectively carry out koala conservation work? What changes would you recommend to how the NSW Government manages koala data?
Data gathered using effective survey techniques should be reported objectively and transparently in a timely manner.
(Please note that results of effective surveys finding ‘new colonies’ in 2023 were reported via media releases, before the 35th anniversary koala summit was postponed. When Australian Rural and Regional News asked questions about these publicised surveys, they were advised that the results would not be available until a date which happened to be after the postponed ‘summit’.)
Do you have any other comments or feedback?
I note that participation in the Koala Summit is exclusively by invitation only and that ‘public consultation’ via this form closes after the Summit has delivered your pre-ordained outcomes. I suspect that the Great Koala National Park will be announced at the Summit or soon after, despite the incontrovertible scientific evidence that koalas are an irruptive species under no threat. Your proposed ‘conservation’ strategy will exacerbate the suffering of many thousands of koalas from disease, dog attacks, vehicle injuries, drought stress and megafires.
Thank you, vic jurskis. Your comments have been submitted.
Good grief! Truth and reality all at once. I imagine there are at least a dozen bureaucrats reaching for the smelling salts and stress leave after reading that response. Well done!
Thanks Ranald, but they aren’t worried about me. They control the system and the propaganda. Apart from millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money there are millions of dollars of donations going to increase the misery of the poor overcrowded animals instead of reinstating healthy and safe habitat for people and koalas and truly endangered animals whose habitat is being choked out by scrub and regularly incinerated.
Vic as an ex farmer I am only too aware of the shocking excuse our land management policies have come to at all government levels. Not one of those 3 levels have the faintest clue of balanced or responsible management.
Great job Vic.
Thank you for your diligence.
Keep fighting – never give up!!
Thank you Roger for the intro.
Thanks Narelle. You too!
Good on you Vic. In how many fields, eg climate, gender, etc, can ‘science’ be so resolutely corrupted or ignored?
Thanks Peter,
The long march has reached its destination. We effectively have no-one to vote for. Putin has to murder the opposition. Here they’ve joined the Climate Cult after trying to count potential votes. That ain’t leadership.
And we have a new name for censorship – Community Consultation (where opponents aren’t recognised as community).
Can only replies to comments here, but will have a try.
As a child I was surrounded by koalas and this continued until the 1990s – roughly until the save the koala movement started. Koala Park at Pennant Hills, NSW was full of them and they appeared healthy – at least to a four year old. Since then I have seen koalas hit by cars, taken to rehabilitation centres, returned to where the volunteers are told they were found, then a few weeks later found again, dead under a tree or hit by a car. I wonder why we children were always told that koalas should never eat new growth after a bushfire as it can poison them. There was a children’s book published that was all about that. This belief seems to have disappeared, no acknowledgement that it even existed. Show how little anyone knows about koalas.
My concerns are clamydia, development encroaching on their habitat, cars and dog attacks. Possibly in that order.
I also know that storming into a conference/meeting/etc, in a dishevelled state, wild hair and shouting,will not get you an invitation anywhere where the qualified and professionals gather.
I bet you are not a scientist.
ARyan
The koala park at Pennant Hills was established in 1930 with koalas imported from Queensland because they were supposed to be extinct in NSW after unsustainably high numbers crashed. Healthy koalas with chlamydia, not chlamydiosis, were still living, invisible, in naturally low densities in forests. Since greens interfered with sustainable fire management from the 1980s, koalas are in plagues again and invading suburbia. Disease, vehicle injuries and dog attacks are consequences and the “professionals” want to increase their numbers/suffering.
Hmmm, Indeed Peter. And for the man responsible more than any to shine a light on the Pascoe myths, you may wish to undertake some more independent research on Vic’s equally mythological assertions of prescient land management by Aboriginals utilising at all times, controlled fire (beside Vic claiming otherwise, this practice is now a ’cause du jour’ for the Green Left /Aboriginal Activist movement and within government environment bureaucracies who are now instituting teams of ‘cultural burning’ officers/practitioners. Of course such roles are only open to those identifying as one particular race). I am not overstating the case when I can report to you from the coal face that scientific expertise is being cast aside in favor of adopting mythological Aboriginal land practices in Government Environment departments in what is in effect a silent coup. The purported benefits of such practices are always asserted by proponents but never supported by hard facts. It doesn’t pass the pub test (how did Aboriginals control the fire they introduced into the landscape?) let alone a more detailed exploration of the facts . Lest you debunk one myth only to be roped in by another.
Thanks, Peter. We could cope with science when scientific methodologies were employed. When we are presented with ‘the science’ then we have reasons to doubt.
We do things right in QLD. The Labor government’s latest Olympic idea is to bull-doze a threatened kola habitat at Toohey Forest Park in Brisbane for an athletics stadium.
Flinders first explored the Koala Coast in 1799. Brisbane began in 1825. No-one saw koalas until they irrupted into plagues in the 1890s and crashed in 1902 during the Federation drought.
Having less Koalas over a broader area is not what Government’s and their environmentalists want to hear Vic, As I remarked on your previous articles, I’t’s all about town planning constraints, no matter the nutritional values.
Thanks Dallas, It’s much more than town planning. There’s a multimillion-dollar multinational Koala Industry profiting from the suffering of overcrowded, diseased koalas in filthy explosive scrubs.
Exactly Vic, a shameful and cruel way for those profiting from misery to make a dollar.
.
Please keep up your efforts to expose this.
Thanks Brian Boru,
As soon as they legislate The Great Koala National Park, native forestry in Australia will be on its deathbed. I don’t understand why the people most immediately affected play along with the political process instead of exposing the scam.
The only way we can have unnaturally high but sustainable numbers of koalas is by managing healthy regrowth forests with mild burning. Lock It Up and Let It Burn promotes plagues and disasters.
“The only way we can have unnaturally high but sustainable numbers of koalas is by managing healthy regrowth forests with mild burning. Lock It Up and Let It Burn promotes plagues and disasters.”
No doubt about that, IMHO. Just before the ‘Black Summer’ bushfire of 2019 my wife and I visited Cobargo, and then Mallacoota. The bush we drove through was a bomb just waiting to go off; and shortly after, it did.
According to pollen studies in the bed of Lake George, NSW carried out by the ANU palynologist Gurdip Singh, until about 110,000 years BP the dominant tree species were in the genus Casuarina, which are fire-averse pyrophobes. Then there was a rapid change in the SE Australian ecology in favour of eucalypts and acacias, which are both pyrophytes, or ‘fire-plants.’ These have tissues and shed leaves etc that are full of inflammable chemicals and are designed by Nature to burn. The advantage for them in this is that their competitor species get burnt out. The first members of the genus Casuarina that Europeans discovered were given the name of ‘River Oaks,’ because by then they grew only close to rivers, where they were least prone to damage by fires.
Accordingly, Singh put that fact down to the arrival of the first Aboriginals at 110,000 BP, with their ‘firestick farming,’ and which brought about that massive alteration in the Australian ecology. So, Vic Jurskis is right on the money here, IMHO.
So in effect the constant burning by Aboriginals introduced more and more fire adapted species leading to more and more fire prone ecologies requiring more and more burning to be ‘managed’. Round and round in circles we go. The great fantasy is that Aboriginals were able to at all times control the fire at a mild level once they introduced into the landscape and that it was done with prescient knowledge of its long term impacts- in the absence of any credible evidence of how they did this ( and anyone who has any experience with bushfires knows that once the fire has taken – which can happen within a minute -it is not easily put back in the bottle especially if you had no fire fighting equipment at your disposal, which Aboriginals most certainly did not)- it appears to have been achieved through magical thinking alone.
And for those who are captured by the climate crisis narrative- the amount of CO2 released by such burning regimes as proposed by Vic- which would require all susceptible landscapes to be blackened every couple of years at the most in an almost permanent or semi-permanent blackening of the landscape – would dwarf anything else contributed by human activity in Australia.
Citizen Kane, or whatever your real name is: “The great fantasy is that Aboriginals were able to at all times control the fire at a mild level once they introduced into the landscape and that it was done with prescient knowledge of its long term impacts- in the absence of any credible evidence of how they did this….” You appear to assume that I am a Pascoite. I am not. But I am a bushman, and have been so for as long as I can remember. I am also in the cattle business, and we keep the home paddock well eaten down. We also fire-proof our fence lines as best we can.
The Aborigines had no metals, and no pottery, such as they had in that region the Europeans call the ‘Near East.’ No draught animals either; they had previously killed and eaten out the only conceivable starter in those stakes, the Diprotodon: a sort of huge overgrown wombat. But they were none the less intelligent people, made maximum use of the resources and technology they had, and traded items such as tools made out of stone fit-for-purpose, over long distances. Read Geoffrey Blainey’s Triumph of the Nomads.
So they probably had plenty of experience of out-of-control fire, and no doubt handed this knowledge on in their songs and stories. Fires can also be well-managed up until a change in the wind direction rapidly puts them beyond control.
But plenty of fires start through natural cause: the main one being lighning strike. As one forester I know (who had done many a darg up in the lookout tower) put it to me: “you have a passing thunderstorm, then four days later all Hell breaks loose.”
I am sure that the Aborigines were aware of this too. One of their rules was, if you want to get rid of a species, burn when it’s in flower. And if you want to encourage it, burn when it’s in seed. Have used that one myself on our place.
Well said Ian,
Burning by Aboriginal people, then graziers and, later on, foresters, maintained/restored a safe landscape unlike the filthy scrub that’s taken over forests since wilderness enthusiasts have interfered.
When people first proliferated across Australia about 40K years ago, they exterminated some megafauna by burning out their browse. There’s no evidence of hunting/killing/butchering megafauna except for eating eggs of a big bird that disappeared. But emus survived because the new habitat suited them.
The fact that yourself and Vic cite burning a handful of hectares on your property as somehow analogous to the myth Vic is perpetuating shows how little you understand about landscape scale ecologies. For the changes in landscape wide ecologies to be influenced by fire, then the fires themselves have to be at a landscape scale of tens of thousands of hectares, not just 5 to 10 hectares here and there of even a few hundred hectares here or there – it would require thousands to ten of thousands of hectares to be burnt every handful of years. If you honestly believe that a handful of tribal Aboriginals could in any way control such fires then Pascoe’s farming and villages looks like a walk in the park. For readers who live on the eastern seaboard I encourage you to go to a vista in your local national park such as in the Blue Mountains and observe the ecology more or less as it was before Humans arrived in Australia then imagine that whole landscape as far as the eye could see ablaze every couple of years being managed by a handful of tribal Aboriginals. Because to alter landscapes you need landscape scale fires not just a few hectares down a slope here and a little patch in open woodland over there as Vic humorously described elsewhere. You require fire that is up hill and down dale and everything in between to end up with the fanciful world Vic is trying to have you make believe. And you need to do it every few years. Yes, Aboriginals used fire in the landscape, primarily as an aid to hunting, but as often as not it evolved into large conflagrations that they in no way could control and was at the mercy of prevailing weather -maybe it burnt for a few days and scorched a thousand hectares maybe for two weeks and 20 000 plus hectares. It is these fires that have altered Australia’s landscape at a landscape scale along with natural fire starts, not a little bit of mild cultural burning here and a little over there, pottering around under the canopy over a couple of hectares. Vic cannot even properly conceive of what it is that he is selling. Ian if you think a little potting around on you farm burning here or there in a landscape that has already largely been cleared of what was open forest where you live is somehow analogous to the landscape scale burning required to achieve landscape scale changes in dense forest in rugged terrain you may as well be a disciple of Pascoe, because Vic’s make believe world is equally fanciful. You may alter the last vestige of natural ecology on your little corner of the farm but you ain’t altering a whole ecology by doing so. Of course industrial scale farming has already done that in your neck of the woods. But then again you are a disciple on the alter of anthropogenic climate change alarmism so I shouldn’t be surprised. Vic will be holding you in contempt next week for that, but today it’s a pat on the back for fellow traveller in fake Aboriginal mythology.
Citizen, we all saw “the Blue Mountains ecology more or less as it was before Humans arrived in Australia” on TV during Black Summer. The world record half a million hectares Gospers Mountain megafire started from one lightning strike and incinerated the Wollemi Wilderness along with the suburbia around it. That was despite columns of fire engines and squadrons of water bombers.
When ‘ignorant Aborigines’ were living there and had fires burning 24/7, Sydney had three consecutive extreme fire seasons. At one stage, there were 3 days straight of searing northwesterlies and mid 40s temperatures. Masses of flying foxes and lorikeets dropped dead at Parramatta.
Blackfellas and whitefellas were living in bark humpies, but there were no disasters.
Silly buggers didn’t “understand about landscape scale ecologies”.
Like I’ve said before Vic, your cherry picked history and records would do Uncle Bruce proud. The fires in the Blue mountains are exactly what is part of the natural cycle of those dense forest ecologies after a period of drought. They would need to be permanently blackened to not pose a fire risk and they never harboured open woodlands and vast under canopy of grasslands in Wollemi or anywhere on the Eastern seaboard and escarpment – that is just part of your Pascoeesque fantasy from a Johnny come lately to Australia. To suggest Aboriginals had controlled Fires burning 24/ 7 at a landscape scale is now bordering on comical. They were simply the edge of large fire fronts burning in the distance that Settlers observed, often from sea, that didn’t extinguish themselves until dowsed with rain. To give but one anecdote as to how absurd that is – the 2013 Dunalley fire statutes from a single unextinguised stump first ignited open grassland and paddocks that a farmer had left smouldering. It had sat for a week through a number of days of rain. Then a 40 degree day with a 30 + knot NWester arrived – the fire grew to 20 000 hectares in an afternoon and single night wiping out the town of Dunalley and tearing right through the SE of Tasmania into the wet forests of the Tasman Peninsula. The greatest fuel explosion the fire had was when it ran into an extensive softwood plantation after which it turned into a firestorm creating its own conditions from which no vegetation or structure was safe. A late cold change overnight with damp conditions the next day was the only thing that could have ever controlled it and a dozen black feet sure as hell wouldn’t have helped. You really have no idea about wiidfire – and the more you contribute the more obvious that becomes.
And that anecdote is from first hand experience on the ground with many of my photos being utilised by news agencies at the time., Not some cock and Bull Reimagining of history and concocted Aboriginal mythology. The Mount Gospers fire became a conflagration after a back burn put in at the MacDonald river edge of the foreground broke containment lines due to a change in wind direction and intensity – exactly as would have occurred with Aboriginals on many an occasion in those dense forests.
CK: “If you honestly believe that a handful of tribal Aboriginals could in any way control such fires then Pascoe’s farming and villages looks like a walk in the park.”
According to ANU Professor Bill Gammage, author of ‘The Biggest Estate on Earth,’ there was a maximum Aboriginal Australian population pre-1788 of around 1 million. (Personal conversation with me, but very probably in the literature of Aboriginal history as well.) In regional Australia today, the are 7 million people. (https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/regional-population/latest-release ) The fact that the Aborigines had only ‘firestick farming,’ no domesticated animals save perhaps the dingo, no metals or technology dependent on such (eg metal tyres for wooden wheels) nor wheeled vehicles of even the most basic (eg wheelbarrow) kind, meant that there had to be limits on their population size, which they no doubt generally maintained. On the positive side of that, they were pretty-well free of virus and bacterial infectious disease pre-1788, as compared with the records elsewhere (eg the bubonic plague or ‘Black Death’ in Europe [1546-53] killed somewhere between 50% and 75% of the then population.) Total lack of urbanisation was no doubt a factor in this in Australia’s case.
One ANU medical researcher [of the John Curtin School] I heard lecture years ago said that if the world’s population could be set up in communities of 100,000 max, with time in quarantine required for those who wished to travel between them, all virus diseases could be eliminated completely.
Worth a try, surely. (Covid-19 IMHO was just a preview of what could be coming big-time some day in the near or distant future, given the scale of urbanisation now all over the planet.)
Outside the Springwood Railway Station, in the Blue Mountains, there are a couple of information panels featuring facsimiles of sketches done in that area. From memory, one sketch was dated 1814, during the construction of the Cox’s Road, and the other about 1830. Neither sketch showed any undergrowth at all, just tall straight trunked eucalypts. Are we to call that artistic license or a depiction of part of the Australia Felix that early explorers described?
Well said Stephen,
Explorers’ journals are full of clear descriptions and drawings of how things were under Aboriginal management. Wilderness enthusiasts, like Pascoe but at the other extreme, have to misrepresent their accounts to support their own case.
For example, William Lines’ misrepresentation of Michell’s writings cited by Rachael Kohn:
“Even the environmentalist dogma that Aborigines used fire in a rational and systematic way is countered by a detailed factual analysis by Jenny Silcock and colleagues of 4500 records of early explorers who found no evidence of such a thing”.
But Silcock et al wrote “Here, Mitchell noted that Aboriginal people made the most of hot winds “to burn as much as they could of the old grass, and a prickly weed which, being removed, would admit the growth of a green crop, on which the kangaroos come to feed” (18 May 1846).
And: “Mitchell noted a grassfire in central Queensland, writing that ‘the extensive burning by the natives. a work of considerable labour, was performed in dry weather’ ( 13 September 1846)
Thanks Ian,
The combined evidence from pollen and charcoal studies across Australia and beyond indicates that fire regimes and vegetation changed as aborigines proliferated around 40,000 years ago. They established new open grassy ecosystems that require constant maintenance by mild fire. A huge spike in charcoal deposition, unprecedented in 70,000 years, occurred after aboriginal burning was disrupted following European arrival.
Charcoal deposition declined after foresters reinstated landscape scale fire management from the 1960s. But green academics and ideologues have disrupted that since the 1980s and we’re back to a regime of much less frequent and much more severe fires. The experts use the Climate Cop-Out to cover their derrieres.
Town planning extends over all landscapes, including forested areas, in total.
The impression I get is that the relevant bureaucracies and complicit governments are creating an expectation that every tourist should be guaranteed to see a koala in the wild i.e in the pocket reserves adjacent to tourist hot spots.
When the natural range of koalas is one animal per hundred hectares that’s a little tricky to arrange.
Not tricky at all Stephen. There is virtually no healthy bush left. Koalas are in unnaturally high densities everywhere, especially around suburbia. That’s why there are koala hospitals all over the place.
The notion that ‘bush’ can only be ‘healthy’ (gotta love that anthropomorphism’) with the assistance of human intervention Aboriginal or European is a fallacy. Ask yourself this one basic question, was Australia’s natural ecologies in a permanent state of ‘unhealthiness’ (what ever that means) prior to the arrival of Aboriginals? And if not – why does it need human intervention to be ‘healthy’. Australian ecologies don’t need human introduced fire to be ‘healthy’. And where the confluence of fire prone climate and landscapes intersect – such as the northern savanna (as one example of many) that balance had already been struck by the pre-existing ecologies that were there prior to human arrival. Natural fire starts have played that role for far longer than humans ever have. Ecologies are what they are – and they sought themselves out to adapt to whatever is required to survive. If they accumulate large fuel loads then inevitably a natural fire will come through and clean them out – that is the negative feedback loop of nature at work. What needs to be managed is the risk that inevitable fire poses to humans – which does require strategic fuel reduction burns but not the scorched earth policy that Vic proposes. His view that only human managed ecologies can be ‘healthy’ is patently tainted by his Forestry perspective.and quite frankly presupposes that humans predate the rest of the natural world.
[CK: Sorry: This is where my comment above should have been posted, BUT SEE ALSO ‘ADDITION’:]: “If you honestly believe that a handful of tribal Aboriginals could in any way control such fires then Pascoe’s farming and villages looks like a walk in the park.”
According to ANU Professor Bill Gammage, author of ‘The Biggest Estate on Earth,’ there was a maximum Aboriginal Australian population pre-1788 of around 1 million. (Personal conversation with me, but very probably in the literature of Aboriginal history as well.) In regional Australia today, the are 7 million people. (https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/regional-population/latest-release ) The fact that the Aborigines had only ‘firestick farming,’ no domesticated animals save perhaps the dingo, no metals or technology dependent on such (eg metal tyres for wooden wheels) nor wheeled vehicles of even the most basic (eg wheelbarrow) kind, meant that there had to be limits on their population size, which they no doubt generally maintained. On the positive side of that, they were pretty-well free of virus and bacterial infectious disease pre-1788, as compared with the records elsewhere (eg the bubonic plague or ‘Black Death’ in Europe [1546-53] killed somewhere between 50% and 75% of the then population.) Total lack of urbanisation was no doubt a factor in this in Australia’s case.
One ANU medical researcher [of the John Curtin School] I heard lecture years ago said that if the world’s population could be set up in communities of 100,000 max, with time in quarantine required for those who wished to travel between them, all virus diseases could be eliminated completely.
Worth a try, surely. (Covid-19 IMHO was just a preview of what could be coming big-time some day in the near or distant future, given the scale of urbanisation now all over the planet.)
ADDITION: So, given no urbanisation, it seems to me to be quite credible that 100,000 people scattered in communities right through the pyrophytic forests of the continent could have managed fire quite successfully. And a tip: we bushies always carry a box of matches with us, particularly in hot, dry summers. So if we are threatened by any particular close fire, we just light a fresh fire or two (hundred) on our down-wind side, and then follow them along wherever they want to go.. The country burnt was going to burn anyway, but it gives us a large or small burnt-out patch of country which becomes our fire-break. This trick once saved my own life.
https://culturalburning.org.au/download/157/news-and-videos/4207/firestick-farming-in-victorian-forests.pdf
Yes Ian. The explorers explicitly described the condition of forests and their management by Aboriginal people. But the chapter linked by Mr. Kane excludes or misrepresents the historical info.. This quote near the end typifies the ‘scholarship’:
“On Black Thursday, February 6 1851, the colonial era was almost over, and the time when aboriginal burning would have had any significant ecological influence was long gone. This is especially so in forests, which at the time of white settlement contained large quantities of dead and rotting material, and in many cases dense understories.”
“At the time of white settlement” many of the forests didn’t exist. They were open woodlands. Those that existed were mostly open, healthy and safe and diverse. Explorers traversed them with bullock teams. Mountain ash was called blackbutt. Mitchell rode his horse to the top of Mt. Macedon thru blackbutt and blue gum forest with trees averaging 2 m diameter.
Koalas were rare and virtually invisible.
Wrong again Vic. Eucalyptus regnans was widely known as the mountain ash, due to the resemblance of its wood to that of the northern hemisphere ash (Fraxinus). Swamp gum is a name given to it in Tasmania, as well as stringy gum in northern Tasmania. Other common names include white mountain ash, giant ash, giant gum, stringy gum, and Tasmanian oak. Von Mueller called it the “Giant gum-tree” and “Spurious blackbutt” in his 1888 Key to the System of Victorian Plants. Mueller does not document why he utilised these common names in his Key, but it exists in no other botanical text. The term Blackbutt (a number of Eucalyptus tree species generally marked by their coarse bark that is naturally blackened ) was erroneously used in an image taken from 1903 at Mt Fatigue in Victoria. The spurious claim that this species was commonly referred to as Blackbutt is the work of none other than Vic himself, from a few years ago, who surprise, surprise when seeing online a photo taken in 1903 at Mt Fatigue in Victoria, for the first time claimed the name arose from the constant mild burns that had occurred around the base of the trees even though they populate the dark wet forests of Victorias steep mountain ranges. No one else has claimed this in the settlers and pioneer records. Vic, you really are starting to be on par with Pascoe for complete BS. Anything to push your fake Aboriginal mythology and scorched earth policy.
Of course, Ian if you wish to read another account of the dense forests of the eastern seaboard you could always read Blaxland’s account of himself, Lawson and Wentworth’s crossing of the Blue Mountains in 1813 which had proven impenetrable up until that time by previous attempts. Also you may note how the reproduction life cycle of mountain ash, as correctly noted in the article provided, would preclude the constant repeated use of Aboriginal fires in these forests as such a practice on a rotation of a handful of years (as would be required to create the mythological world Vic conjures) would destroy all saplings and lead to species extinction in less than a thousand years as the species average lifespan is about 400 -600 years.
Thank heavens Ian,
that green bureaucrats and academics and botanists have no jurisdiction over the common names of trees, assigned by explorers and settlers who lived and worked in the bush as you and i have.
Otherwise, much fairdinkum, commonsense knowledge of how things work, i.e. ecology, would have been lost.
Surveyor General Mitchell called what’s now known as mountain ash, blackbutt in 1836. A.W. Howitt explained how open grassy forests of blackbutt turned into dense scrubs around 1820 and in 1851 consequent to megafires after aboriginal burning was disrupted, firstly by smallpox and then by Europeans.
“Constant repeated use of Aboriginal fires in these forests as such a practice on a rotation of a handful of years” maintained blackbutt forests. That’s why the trees had black butts.
Except Major Thomas Mitchell’s four separate explorations never intersected with the mountain ash forests of eastern Victoria or anywhere else that is part of their limited natural distribution (Tasmania – Far South NSW). Not even close. There are at least 20 separate Eucalypts species that have been ascribed the common name Blackbutt. The species Mitchell likely encountered was Eucalyptus pilularis, which can grow to 70m. I encourage you to keep contributing here Vic as every contribution you make goes one step further in exposing the intellectual fraud you seek to perpetrate.
Ian, thank goodness the actual truth isn’t solely confined to first generation blow ins who overstate their local insight and knowledge.
And Mountain Ash has never grown in open grassy forests as AW Howitt apparently explained.( of course referring to another species of Eucalyptus referred to as blackbutt) It requires wet cool climate and fertile soils on the eastern and southern escarpments of Victoria’s East. – that’s why they call iEucalyptus regnans ‘mountain ash’ To suggest otherwise is yet another exposure of the fraud you seek to perpetrate.
On 30 September 1836, Mitchell rode his horse from the north to the top of Mt. Macedon (60 km NW of Melbourne) thru blackbutt [Eucalyptus regnans] and blue gum [E. globulus] forest with trees averaging 2 m diameter. He was apparently too ignorant to realise that he had no right to call them blackbutt and the silly trees didn’t know they weren’t supposed to be there.
They weren’t there because they only exist on the southern aspects of the Mt Macedonian range.to the east and south of Mt Macedon itself towards Riddels creek. Mitchell’s approach from the North was through Dry Sclerphylly forests. The facts can be so inconvenient sometimes Vic – just like Uncle Bruce.
The entry from Mitchell of 30SEP1836 in regards to ascending Mt Macedon reads as follows in its entirety:
ASCEND MOUNT MACEDON.
I ascended without having been obliged to alight from my horse, and I found that the summit was very spacious, being covered towards the south with tree-ferns, and the musk-plant grew in great luxuriance. I saw also many other plants found at the Illawarra, on the eastern coast of the colony of New South Wales. The summit was full of wombat holes and, unlike that side by which I had ascended, it was covered with the dead trunks of enormous trees in all stages of decay [these are the Mountain Ash].
Not a single mention of Aboriginal fires or their impact.
The subsequent entry discusses the view to Port Phillip Bay in the far distance without any recourse to Aboriginal fires and the previous entry from the base of the Mountain discussing the impact of what Mitchell describes as having been a passing hurricane in the not too distant past and its impacts upon the trees with many broken limbs.
The connection to Aboriginal burning in these forests are entirely a figment of your Pascoesque imagination and desire to rewrite History and the facts.
Not “in its entirety” Mr. Kane. You left out:
Neither had this been but a partial tempest, for to the very base of the mountain the same effects were visible. The trees on its side were of a much grander character than those in the forest, and consisted principally of black-butt and blue-gum eucalypti, measuring from six to eight feet in diameter. The rock was syenite, so weathered as to resemble sandstone. I ascended without …
Which was from the previous entry I mentioned talking about the wind damaged vegetation at the base of the range in dry sclerophyll forest. The Blackbutt referred to is not Mountain ash that’s just a figment of your imagination as is any connection to Aboriginal burning practices which are not mentioned at all over preceding days or the subsequent days that Mitchell was in that vicinity. The whole suggestion that Mitchelll documented Aboriginal Burning in these forests is an entirely concocted fraud on your behalf.
So Mitchell was never in mountain ash forest, but when he was, he saw Euc. pilularis 500km outside its natural range and erroneously called it black-butt. You quoted his observation in its entirety but the reference to blackbutt was in your previous discussion of a storm where it wasn’t. My suggestion that Mitchell documented Aboriginal burning at Mt. Macedon (which I never made) was “an entirely concocted fraud”. Thank you, Mr. Kane. I’ve had enough.
Well what was the point of referencing Mitchell if it wasn’t an attempt to support your mythological contention that Aboriginals managed the dense forests of the Eastern seaboard and ranges with constant landscape scale fires – where this conversation started. The problem with supposed bushman parlance and using common names like Blackbutt is that it’s used to describe over 20 different species and one man’s Blackbutt is another man’s Stringybark – especially back in the time of Mitchell when Australian flora was still in the process of being properly catalogued. Scientific rigour matters (thanks to the enlightenment) and frankly Vic you lack that intellectual rigour which is probably why they are not interested in inviting you to this Symposium.
Howitt (1890)
E. amygdalina. – This is the most variable, and at the same time, naturally most wide spread of the Gippsland eucalypts.
I have observed the following well-marked and constant varieties:– …
(f) (or E. regnans).– This Eucalypt, though possessing a specific title, belongs to E. amygdalina, and is less removed from the typical form than the varieties I have designated (d) and (e). Under its common name of black-butt it is found in the western part of Gippsland on the Mesozoic carbonaceous formations, where it especially flourishes. It reaches 300ft. [91m] in height, and according to the statements of some observers to 400ft. and above that height.
Mitchell (1839)
The trees on its [Mt. Macedon’s] side were of a much grander character than those in the forest, and consisted principally of black-butt and blue-gum eucalypti, measuring from six to eight feet [two metres] in diameter.
Lets be Crystal Clear here Vic, Howitt’s 1890 work is just plain wrong. Eucalyptus regnans is not a variety of Tasmanian Black Peppermint (Eucalyptus amygdalina), nor is the common name of Blackbutt he describes to it correct – hence von Muellers earlier work (1871 & 1882) that labels it ‘Spurious Blackbutt’). Nor does it or has it ever grown in open grassy woodlands as he and you assert. Nor does it grow on the Northern and western slopes of Mt Macedon range as it is incompatible to the conditions it requires. Nor can Mitchell’s colloqiual use of “blackbutt’ be ascribed definitively to any species, while his use of correct taxonomic nomenclature for Bluegum in the same sentence gives no doubt that the large trees he references here are the Bluegums (a species he would have been familiar with from the Sydney basin). However, the “enormous’ trees with the tell-tale dead crown so common in Eucalytptus regnans can be seen from the summit off to the south and east. Nor is there any evidence to Mitchell of regular controlled landscape scale fires in these forests conducted by Aboriginals just as there had not been to any other overland explorer to pass the dense eastern seaboard and ranges forests. Nor could such a regime have been conducted in Mountain ash forests as it would have killed off the species along with many similar species that grow in the same wet forest ecologies which are not fire adapted, do not regrow from lignotubers and require seed cycles that would be completely disrupted and destroyed by the fire regimes you misrepresent. Lets face it, on every measure of proper scientific scrutiny you are just plain wrong, yet just like Pascoe you still seek to perpetrate your false narrative. Reread the supplied link I provided above and you may actually learn something about the Australian bush and Australian Aboriginals.
Thanks Vic, good piece.
I’m from the bush in North Qld and my Grandfather and Granduncle roamed the outbck pretty much from the time they arrived in January 1889 until they were two of the pioneer sugar growers on the southern side of the Lower Burdekin River in 1912, having to clear the land first and live in tents for a few years building their houses, this after trying coffee growing on the Atherton Tableland.
There were never any Koalas in that bush to speak of. As a boy I saw one in an Ironbark and Dad had to point it out to me. Of course humans had to alter the natural bush, that in itself is natural, and your book The Great Koala Scam covers it nicely. I’ve spread a few copies around to friends and relatives.
Thanks Peter,
Most of us working in the bush saw hardly any koalas. That was when it was healthy and open and you could see a long way. Now that most of the bush is locked up and turning into scrub, overcrowded koalas are moving into suburbia. And the Koala Industry tells us they’re endangered. So many people have short memories or just will not see.
Your East Koala issue is slight compared with what we have to put up with in the West. Tanya Pilbersek actually had legislation drafted that would require anyone driving from say Perth to Karratha (Pilbara) to do so at a speed not exceeding 40 kmh once in the remote regions, yes, you read that correctly. Apparently it was rescinded, but the mere fact it was proposed has to be a special kind of depravity by those who came up with it. The Pilbara is where a big slab of our GDP comes from. The 40kmh might save a few skippies but would have a major impact on our economy.
https://culturalburning.org.au/download/157/news-and-videos/4207/firestick-farming-in-victorian-forests.pdf
Mitchell rode his horse to the top of Mt. Macedon (60 km NW of Melbourne) thru blackbutt [Eucalyptus regnans] and blue gum [E. globulus] forest with trees averaging 2 m diameter.
I live surrounded by the “Bongil Bongil” National Park, which was created by the NSW Carr Labor government in order to curry favour among the greening demographics on the NSW Mid-North Coast. The Park was “created” by excising the eastern portion of the Pine Creek State Forest, and includes areas of “high conservation value”, such as extensive Flooded Gum plantations that were originally designed to feed a pulp mill that never eventuated. Apart from removing any trace of the forestry industry, the NPWS has done bugger-all. Where once it is said that a horse could be galloped through the forest of few but large trees, it is now choked with vegetation from ground to canopy, all primed for a megafire! When it was the PCSF, a permit could be obtained to gather firewood, though I would use it to drag out bush poles that remained after a logging operation. It is hard to realise any benefit from the conversion of a State Forest to that of National Park, other than the political. There used to be Koalas heard and occasionally seen, but, after “Nationalising” the forest, there was a massive influx of Dingoes and Wild Dogs, and goodbye Koalas! Ditto the Wallabies that were ubiquitous. Don’t know if there were too many Koalas before, but I haven’t heard or seen a Koala for a few years now. Was it just a coincidence that the Dingoes arrived after the National Park was declared, or was that a project to create bio-diversity? Anyway, the NPWS conducted a poisoning and trapping campaign, and now there’s no more Dingoes, Koalas or Wallabies.
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Now, the local group “Friends of Pine Creek” are actively demonstrating and campaigning to have the remainder of the Pine Creek State Forest added to the proposed “Great Koala National Park”! These areas of State Forest once provided an economic benefit to the local and statewide population, from sawmills to shipbuilding, and there even was a plywood plant at Coffs Harbour. Story has it that the plant provided coachwood plywood used to build Mosquito fighter/bombers in WW2. The only economic benefit from the “Great Koala National Park” would be the harvesting of Koala pelts from the irrupting population, if they are all not all carbonised by wildfire first.
Thanks cbattle1,
Bongil Bongil was ‘saved’ for koalas after research found that there were 3 times more koalas in regrowth and plantations than in unlogged forest. Irruptions of koalas feed irruptions of dingoes, wild dogs and carpet snakes. Koalas are virtually invisible in forests unless they are in unsustainably high numbers.
NSW bureaucrats have data from effective surveys with sound recorders showing that koala numbers on north coast continued to increase through black summer fires. GKNP is BS
So Vic reckons there is too many Koalas in Bongil Bongil NP, you say they are all gone – between you you don’t know whether they are coming or going.
The facts are;
1. Flooded gums are endemic to the wet forests of Bongil Bongil NP, being on a spur that projects off the Rainforests of the Dorrigo escarpment and is found all around the foot hills of the Coffs Harbour region. This is why it was targeted for forestry. The only time theses forests where so sparse as to be able to ‘ride a horse’ through it at speed without barely encountering a tree is after forestry had clear felled large coupes.
2. The most recent survey of Koalas in Bongil Bongil NP (October 2023) found 37 Koalas in an area of 42 square kilometres – that is over a square kilometre for every individual.
3. While Vic claims that is an irruptive species gone rogue, for you that number indicates there scarcity – of course neither of you are right.
But hey, don’t let facts get in the way of your Pascoesque rants and fantasies.
Bongil Bongil NP comprises dense regrowth and plantations with unnaturally high densities of koalas which are virtually invisible. Sound recording surveys are the most effective method of detecting koalas and estimating their numbers in dense forests. The most reliable recent estimate from Bongil Bongil was one koala per ten hectares in 2020. That’s ten times the natural density of koalas in healthy mature forests.
So in Vic’s Pascoesque world 2020 sound recordings, which he has single handedly determined are the best way of determining Koala populations despite no training or experience in Zoology or undertaking Koala surveys, delegitimise the most recent survey data of 2023 which utilised multiple methodologies includng sound recordings and physical sightings. Go figure.. Anything to bend reality in favour of myth. Bruce Pascoe move over, Vic Jurkis is in town!
As the size of Bongil Bongil NP is 4200 ha, your 2022 quoted figures of 1 koala per 10 hectares would equate to 420 Koalas in Bongil Bongil NP. Oh Dear Vic, no wonder you weren’t invited along – science requires at least a close approximation to actual facts.
yes. the peer -reviewed and published data for Bongil Bongil indicate 1 koala per 10 hectares in 2020. Where are the sound recording data for 2023 published Mr. Kane?
Where are the 2023 sound recording data for Bongil Bongil published Mr Kane?
Just throughout local newspapers to begin with;
https://www.newsofthearea.com.au/surveys-show-healthy-koala-population-in-bongil-bongil.
Results demonstrate a stable population that is demonstrating neither a marked decrease or increase in numbers since the survey commenced over a decade ago with 2016 recording a peak in numbers of 39 compared to the most recent results of October 2023 of 37.
Yep! NOT “multiple methodologies including sound recordings” as you asserted Mr. Kane. 37 koalas ‘found’ in “the wet forests of Bongil Bongil NP” using ineffective survey methods supports results of effective surveys in 2020 indicating unnaturally high densities. So does the observation of chlamydiosis. Koalas in naturally low densities have chlamydia but not the disease.
Multiple methodologies were used including audio recording and visual sightings. And since when was an audio recording (that could easily come from the same animal spuriously deemed as two or more separate individuals) judged better than a physical sighting.
Now where is your rock-solid data for 420 Koalas in Bongil Bongil NP?
NO. your ‘evidence’: “groups walk 1.5 kilometre tracks and return, while stopping at designated ‘audio points’ to play a male koala mating call then listen for responses”. Effective scientific surveys reveal 10 X the density:
https://www.publish.csiro.au/WR/WR21072
‘Effective scientific surveys reveal 10 X the density.’
The study you quote found the following;
1. Independent estimates of koala density at our study areas varied from a minimum of 0.02 male koalas ha−1 to 0.32 ha−1. (that is previous surveys utilising alternate methodologies of the areas selected in this study)
2. Acoustic arrays and the spatial count method yielded plausible estimates of male koala density, which, when converted to total koalas (assuming 1:1 sex ratio), were mostly equivalent to independent estimates previously derived for each site. (so not 10x greater but equivalent to previous studies meaning the alternate methodologies yielded the same results)
3. The greatest discrepancy occurred where the acoustic estimate was larger (although within the bounds of uncertainty) than the independent mark–recapture estimate at a fragmented, high koala-density site. Therefore as part of the authors conclusions
4. Caution is needed when applying models to higher-density populations where home ranges overlap extensively and calls are evenly spread across the array. In other words this methodology is subject to recording the same animal multiple times and ascribing it to a separate individual.
The above again demonstrates your Pascoesque propensity to twist and misrepresent the evidence and facts to fit your slash and burn agenda.
You can’t even interpret the science correctly let alone represent it. You humorously describe yourself with the self-imposed title of an ‘Ecological Historian’, which is not a title any other institution or entity has bestowed upon you (so Bruce Pascoe) and for which you have no formal training or education. You are not an Ecologist, Not a Botanist, Not a Zoologist, Not a Historian, Not an Anthropologist – you are just a former logger. No shame in that – but an ‘Ecological Historian’ it maketh not.
Now, once more – where is the rock solid evidence for 420 Koalas in Bongil Bongil NP – which is your previous claim.
Put up or shut up.
The only scam here is you!
Yes the scientific paper provides an estimate of 1 koala per 10 hectares at Bongil Bongil from acoustic surveys, which is comparable with scientific estimates from the spotlight surveys after a large correction factor is applied for restricted survey area (total of 15 ha) and poor visibility within that small area – correction factor of 3X. The ‘citizen science’ promoted in the newspaper stories that u r spruiking is junk science.
I did help my friend, logging contractor Greg Flint, by spending a couple of days felling some trees in thinning of hoop pine plantations near Urbenville. And I’ve cut plenty of firewood in the bush, but that hardly qualifies me as a logger. Rather than shame, the truly endangered species of logger has justifiable pride in their previously sustainable industry, before Wilderness Warriors took charge.
No, the results of the scientific paper estimate a spectrum of population densities specific to the spatially restricted areas captured by the siting of the acoustic arrays. It finds these to largely correlate with previous surveys utilising sighting methodologies along with tag and release surveys. The authors note that their methodology cannot definitively account for false positive results for separate individuals (therefore overestimating) as there is no possible way through audio recording to definitively rule out the same animal being registered as a separate individual. They do not claim their methodology is superior to the alternate methodologies of physical sighting and/or capture and release only that it may provide a ‘plausible estimate’. The rest is just your self-imposed extrapolations with no science to support it.
‘The ‘citizen science’ promoted in the newspaper stories that u r spruiking is junk science.’
Well then, I guess we have just had an accurate appraisal of your own work – which could not be described as anything more than ‘Citizen Science’ (even that would be generous given you do not conduct any primary research of your own).
The peer-reviewed scientific estimate of 1 koala per 10 ha for Bongil Bongil, published in Wildlife Research was based on effective survey of 600 ha compared to ineffective survey of 15 ha by spotlight which was wrongly extrapolated in the newspaper article to a total population of 37 koalas in 4200 ha.
No the NPWS annual survey utilises the same array of 1.5km transects throughout Bongil Bongil NP (standard survey practice for all kinds of flora and fauna species) each year to find that populations are stable utilising the ‘hard’ evidence of sighting and registering individual animals. The acoustic survey merely records Koala bellows – that is the only evidence it collects. It then extrapolates and estimates a number based on the number of bellows it records – which is a methodology that will always be compromised and confounded by the imprecise manner by which a multiple of bellows is ascribed to an individual animal or a multiple of animals – this data becomes especially confounded by temporal separation from even hour to hour, whereby which animal is heard can never be accurately determined as the same from previous hours or another animal.
Yes 1.5 km X their assumed 100m wide survey corridor = 15 ha. Survey repeated 5 times each year = reported 37 koalas in 4,200 ha in 2023. Rather amusing. Average number per survey for 2023 was 7 koalas. If they were all in 15 ha of surveyed transects that would be 1 koala per 2 ha. Seems that was reduced fifty-fold by “registering” individual animals in the spotlight. Not science.
There is a multiple of different transects which are completed. Reproducibility is a foundational cornerstone of good science.
It doesn’t matter how much you seek to misrepresent all the data, which is not really motivated by an interest in the welfare of Koalas or anything else for that matter, (but always about a commercial forestry agenda of if its standing for which koalas are just an annoyance which get in the way), you have lost the argument Vic. Both here and everywhere else. It does not matter who is in government in NSW the GKNP will go ahead irrespective – signed, sealed, delivered – game over!
Yep! u can’t reproduce the same story in two successive comments Mr Kane.
The Great Koala Park will go ahead, despite the real data, as koalas continue to increase and increasingly suffer diseases, vehicle hits, dog attacks etc.. No science involved.
Ha that is funny coming from a bloke who claimed that his flag ship study demonstrated numbers 10x greater than hitherto recorded when all they did was used flawed methodology to produce a ‘plausible estimate’ (their words ) that was the equivalent of previous population studies using the alternate methodologies you rubbish. I wouldn’t be too quick to claim ‘the science’ if I were you Vic. Unless, of course we are talking about the ‘science’ that has has led to no remnant natural ecologies in Lithuania, only degraded monoculture plantation forests and the subsequent extinction of the Brown Bear..Is that the ‘science’ you mean Vic?