More trouble with trees

The trouble with trees is that extreme green ideologues are attempting to rewrite history to 'prove' that there were more trees on the grazing areas of NSW than there actually were when the white man arrived. One example will suffice to reveal how loose these 'scientists' are with the truth.

A background paper prepared for the Native Vegetation Advisory Council (which is behind the NSW Government's land clearing regime) claims the plains around Bathurst were not the open grasslands that so many explorers and visitors remarked up, buit were forested to an average of 10 trees per acre. They quote explorer George Evans to substantiate this figure. However Evans actually said, of the O'Connell Plains, that "the timber around is thinly scattered. I do not suppose there are more than ten gum trees on an acre”. He put the upper limit as 10 trees per acre which describes a grassy woodland, not a forest in which "tree densities varied from 2-59 with an average close to 30 trees per hectare." Looseness with the facts is fraud when it comes to history.

The problem with their evidence starts with where they got it from. They did not use the primary source - Evans's journal. They used a much less accurate secondary source: Their reference for the quote is from the publication Forest and woodland cover in the Central Western Region of New South Wales prior to European settlement (Croft, M., Goldney, D., & Cardale, S. (1997).

Now I am a trained historian and taught the Philosophy and Practice of History at the University of New England with Maureen Purcell in the 1970s. Any undergraduate student can tell you two things: 1. You must get as close to the original source as possible to gain an accurate interpretation of historical facts. 2. You must interpret historical reports in context to understand the meanings historical figures put upon the words they used.

In this case the authors dismiss all the first hand reports of open grassy woodlands that became forested once the aborignines were prevented from burning as wrongly interpreted or based on selective reporting (because pastures was what they were looking for). The reliability of the historical record is critical here because the clearing of trees that took place in later decades on these grasslands was either an assault on forests (which means farmers gtoday should be prevented from cleearing regrfowth and let their pasture lands be taken over by 'woody weeds' in the form fo eucalyts) or it was to a great extent reestablishing the grassy "plains" that the observers there at the time reported they saw.

The true historical record supports the view that much of the land ew now farm was not forest when it was first settled by white. It was perennial grassland with scattered timber. And it is this condition we regenerative farmers are seeking to restore.