Still more trouble with trees

Tim Flannery – no slouch in greenie circles – first posited the theory that Aboriginal ‘firestick’ farming had created vast, thinly-timbered grassy woodlands to attract kangaroo, and that the cessation of the burning changed the tree cover dramatically. He quotes botanist William Carron’s description of Queensland's Tam O’Shanter Point in 1848, saying the stretch between the beach and the swamp ‘was principally covered with long grass..’ When Dr Flannery visited the spot while writing The Future Eaters, he said, “Today the vegetation is dense rainforest with emergent eucalypts.”
Sir Joseph Banks, sailing with Cook in 1770, observed the land around Bulli near Wollongong and described it as an open woodland. Tim Flannery reports the same place is today thick rainforest and eucalypts.
Those greenie 'scientists' who would rewrite history and claim these areas were originally forest when white man arrived attacked Tim Flannery’s views. But he saw through their loose use of historical fact: “One of the first lessons a scientist learns is not to rely upon secondary sources, but to examine original materials.” A direct rebuff of their failure to use correct scientific method.
Australia was not carpeted with dense forest and undergrowth when white settlers arived. Much of the area now used for pasture was already pasture, maintained by Aboriginal use of fire. To claim Australian agricultural lands should be turned over to forest is based on historic revisionism not usually associated with democracies, but popular in the Societ Union and other dictatorships. Shades of Big Brother in Orwell’s “1984”.