Ledgar, Richard --- "European Erosion" [1987] AboriginalLawB 40; (1987) 1(27) Aboriginal Law Bulletin 10

• European Erosion

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European Erosion

by Richard Ledgar

Pastoral expansion was one of the main driving forces for European movement into northern Australia. Its subsequent affect on the Aboriginal people has been told in many books and films which detail the clashes and eventual use of Aboriginal cheap labour for the pastoral industry. However this part of Australian history evokes the mythology of hardy drovers on the stock routes. The stories of the cattle drives are about to be re-lived in a Bicentennial project. Nothing is being said however of the massive destruction of land that this non-Aboriginal land use has caused.

Richard Ledgar is a former agronomist with the Northern Land Council. but now acts in a consultant basis when needed. His recently completed major study of the impact of pastoralism on Northern Australia details its massive costs through the degradation on the land. The pastoral industry is a powerful political unit in the Northern Territory which is antagonistic to land rights and Aboriginal aspirations for access, control and management of land. The traditional basis for this power is related to the supposed economic benefits of the industry to the Territory. But in Richard Ledgar's study the basis of this economic benefit is neatly exposed as one with many costs.

The following is an extract from a Land Rights News, Vol 2 No 2, March 1987, titled 'Erosion kills the country'.

In the and region of the Northern Territory a staggering 203,000 sq. km, was identified in 1975 as requiring some sort of mechanical treatment in order to restore the land to a stable condition. This massive amount of degradation has been caused by pastoral activity in less than 100 years.

In the non-arid zone the picture is not much better with 58,000 sq. km requiring treatment out of 180,000 sq. km that is used by the pastoral industry.

Introduced animals have devastated native animal populations. Seed eating bird populations have declined because cattle and other introduced animals have damaged their habitats and changed the species composition of the rangeland. Numerous small animals are now extinct or highly endangered for the same reasons.

The most tragic aspect of the degradation of the land is that it is being caused by the people who claim to hold the best interests of the land at heart. Pastoralists are destroying the land on which their industry is founded.

The pastoral industry has been able to continue to degrade the land by hiding behind the myth that pastoralism is still as important now, as it was in the early days of the non-Aboriginal occupation of Australia.

Pastoralism is not the economically important industry that Northern Territory politicians would have us believe. It experiences huge fluctuations in gross income and contributes about 10 per cent to the economy of the Northern Territory. If the cost of repairing the land is going to continue to be borne by the taxpayer then the pastoral industry costs the people of the Northern Territory and Australia more than it contributes.