Advance Australia green

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 19: Re-imagining Australia
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by James Woodford

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James Woodford's biography and other articles by this writer

On October 1, 1988, at Bibbenluke near Cooma in the Snowy Mountains, a feral fish was declared an Australian and a blow was struck against environmental republicanism. A citizenship certificate had been taken – probably from the local shire council – and 124 years after it was introduced, the trout was unofficially naturalised.

The fish was represented by a member of the Cooma Trout Acclimatisation Association, who swore an oath on its behalf to the Queen and to acclimatisation societies.

The bizarre event was followed five years later by a failed attempt from a member of the New South Wales Parliament to have trout recognised as a native species of the Snowy Mountains.

Acclimatisation societies, sponsored by state governments, still legally release many millions of trout fingerlings into high country streams. This is done despite evidence that the fish, known to some disparagingly as ‘spotted carp', are voracious predators of native species – in particular, endangered frogs.

Many of us like to think of acclimatisation as a form of historical madness that held our ancestors in such a grip that they released rabbits, foxes, cats, countless weeds and the cane toad without considering the existing ecology of Australia. But it is still with us – though, as Dr Alison Gates, a human geographer then at the University of Sydney, points out in her recent doctoral dissertation, now it is called something else: ‘Acclimatisation is at its essence essentially gardening with plants and animals ... In reality the practice of acclimatisation continues at a variety of scales. Formal acclimatisation is practised in the freshwater streams of New South Wales by those societies specifically formed for the management of the trout fishery. Informal acclimatisation is an Australian national pastime, although we call it gardening and we pay for our specimens at the nursery.'

In the mid-nineteenth century, there was even a newspaper specifically dedicated to acclimatisation – called the Yeoman and Australian Acclimatiser. ‘A modern version might as well be Burke's Backyard Magazine which appears to envision gardens that blend the "best" of the native species with the "best" of the exotics,' argues Gates, who is now at the University of Wollongong.

She cites native wild food plant expert and anti-weed advocate Tim Low's comment that the ‘real acclimatisers today are the pasture scientists in the CSIRO and state agriculture departments': ‘In this way, there exists government sponsored acclimatisation that is not related to an acclimatisation society.'

No doubt those at the trout naturalisation ceremony consider themselves patriotic Australians. But how patriotic is it when your actions vandalise a continent's ecology? There must be more to being a republican than getting rid of the Queen.

In the current political climate, to be an environmental republican – or even simply patriotic about Australian ecology – is seen by some as traitorous. How often do you hear the sneer ‘extreme green'? Surely those like Richard Flanagan and Geoffrey Cousins, and the thousands of less high-profile Australians who stood up for Tasmanian forests, are the real patriots?

Mateship and larrikinism are important but elusive intangibles, slippery as ghosts and prone to misuse by politicians. A vast ecosystem is real – full of animals and trees so exquisite that no artist can conjure their full glory.

We have become patriotic about things that are not real.

The trout naturalisation ceremony is just one of dozens of strange incidents of acclimatisation uncovered by Alison Gates. Her work charts the bafflement of Europeans as they struggled to come to terms with unique Australian seasons, fauna and flora. Gates points out that, at first glance, naturalising a feral fish may seem offensive: ‘It is an interesting idea that if humans can be naturalised to a country, animals should be afforded the same right.'

This ‘interesting idea' goes to the heart of a fundamental question: what is it to be an Australian? Are we republicans only when we change our Constitution?

All around us there are countless examples of how republicanism, as it is now understood, is about everything except the actual place. We are patriotic to an Australia created in our own image rather than the terra australis that exists.

Patriotism is defined by horses running down high country mountains, swagmen stuffing sheep into rucksacks and a hydro-electric scheme that diverts nearly all the water from one of the nation's most spectacular rivers. The water robbed from the iconic Snowy River is then sent west to irrigate crops that originated on the other side of the world. At the root mass of our cultural identity there are sheep, dammed rivers and horses.

Until recently, Tasmania was known as the Apple Isle, while in the mountains behind the apple orchards, the biggest flowering plants on Earth were felled to feed an insatiable paper industry. Victoria was the Garden State, Queensland home of the Big Pineapple and sugar cane. We transplanted the northern hemisphere on to an Australian scalp: it's little wonder it produced a toupee.