One hundred years of environmental crisis

Abstract

Exactly a hundred years before this conference, in August 1900, a Royal Commission was appointed which 'deserves a prominent, if not defining, place in Australian environmental history' (Quinn 1995). This paper explores the social, political and environmental context of this very significant inquiry. Beginning with six edited extracts from the Commission's transcript of evidence, the paper reflects upon the enduring relevance of the inquiry today. It describes the nature of European occupation of the western lands of New South Wales in the 1860s and 70s — a period when there appeared no physical limit to pastoral expansion — and then summarises the environmental crisis of the final 20 years of the century. Nineteenth-century debates about land reform were dominated by the class struggle between squatters and selectors and by the imperative to occupy, for strategic and moral purposes, what were regarded as vacant lands. The 1901 Royal Commission gave early voice to environmental arguments for occupation, and not just cultural ones, and there was a recognition that European settlers had disrupted earlier, Aboriginal systems of habitation and management and tipped the land into an escalating instability. Legislators began to argue that the land needed people as much as people needed the land. The paper concludes with the reflection that it is not just the formality of a centenary that makes us want to listen carefully to the voices unearthed by the 1901 Royal Commission. Science is now more integrative of the social and humanist perspective than it was in the middle of the 20th century; it is more receptive to the testimony of people living on and working the land, and more eager to enter into a dialogue with them and their history.