Professor Marcia Langton - Why Do You Want to Create Divisions Within Australia? — Dark Emu Exposed

A Tweet on 21/1/2020 that appears to be by Professor Marcia Langton is sadly an example of just what we don’t need if we are to build positive relationships with all Australians during this year of Reconcilliation. It falls into that miserable genre of, “Pre-colonial Australia, Always Good – Colonial Australia, Always Bad”.

Professor Langton offers no science or evidence to back up her claims. It is just another opportunity to put the boot into Australian farmers and pass all the blame onto them for one particular dust storm.

Dust storms have been occurring in Australia for millennia, well before the Colonials arrived with their modern, European farming techniques. The Science says that yes, poor farming techniques, overgrazing and pests such as rabbits, can exacerbate the frequency and severity of dust storms but, within the Australian context, the biggest drivers of dust storms are changes to, and loss of, vegetation, and severe drought.

If we were to play Professor Langton’s ‘blame game’, and try to divide Australians like she does, we could provide evidence that quite legitimately supports the claim that,

“during colonial and modern times, soil loss by dust storms has been 2 – 20 times lower than when the land was solely under the custodianship of Aboriginal people.”

During two particular periods, some 3-5000 years ago and 20,000 years ago, the quantity of top-soil lost as dust storms was some 2 to 20 times higher than at present. That is, during a time when the continent was under the sole custodianship of Aboriginal people, top-soil losses were very much higher.

Researchers in Queensland and Canada have generated the following graph, showing the amount of wind-borne dust falling as grams/m2/year on a test area on North Stradbroke Island over the millennia. The amount of ancient dust was determined by measuring the layers of dust built up in core samples taken from the island’s natural sand profile. The graph clearly shows two ancient, pre-colonial periods when dust storms were very much more significant than recent times.

Fig 1 : Sedimentation Rates (Ie: Sediments deposited by Dust Storms) on North Stradbroke Island during Aboriginal times.

Fig 2: The Southeast Australian Dust Transport Pathway

The “Southeast Dust Transport Pathway” has for millennia picked up dust generated from within what Professor Bruce Pascoe describes in his book, Dark Emu, as the “Aboriginal Grain Belt”. Professor Pascoe says this area had extensive, pre-Colonial, Aboriginal grain cropping ‘farms’, ‘villages’ and ‘towns’, where Aboriginal ‘farmers’ built dams, altered the course of rivers, sowed and irrigated crops and tilled the land.

Given that Professor Langton blames modern Australian land practices for a current dust storm, are we to ‘blame’ the traditional custodians of the land, Aboriginal ‘farmers’, and their ‘farming’ practices for the absolutely massive amounts of top-soil losses caused by dust storms that occurred around 3-5000 years, and 20,000 years ago?

Professor Pascoe claims the Aborigines used stone ‘hoes’, or Bogan picks to ‘cultivate’ and ‘till’ the soil of inland Australia in ‘vast grain cropping estates’. Did this ‘farming’ break-up and expose the soil surface to allow huge top-soil losses in dust storms during periods of severe drought?

And could the “fire-stick” farming employed by the Aborigines over millennia have led to great changes in the covering vegetation of Australia, causing an exposure of more of the ground to soil erosion by wind? As Professor Langton has said,

“…we would all do well to learn from the cold-fire burning and scrub clearing practices Aboriginal people have perfected over millions [sic] of years, and have been so beautifully and painstakingly explained by Bill Gammage in his great book, The Biggest Estate on Earth.”

(The Professor may have exaggerated the length of time that Aboriginal people were in Australia, but why let a few facts get in the way of a good story!- Editor)

So, is Professor Langton the right person to appoint to senior Government funded roles in bringing Australia together and truth-telling during the Reconciliation and Constitutional Change process? We don’t think so, if this divisive, political Tweet is anything to go by. It just looks like a cheap political shot at Australia’s farmers, some of whom we note are Aboriginal.

To paraphrase the Professor’s own Tweet*,

“Our chance for Reconciliation has been disappearing in Tweet storms because of irresponsible, vitriolic tweets & utter disregard for building goodwill between all Australians”

Come on Professor Langton, all Australians, including Aboriginal Australians who are proud of their wonderful hunter-gatherer heritage, beseech you to stop being divisive and show some leadership and maturity in pulling Australians together in this most important of years.

We note that the Prof has been described by political correspondent, Michelle Grattan, as a “sometimes inflammatory tweeter”, to which we at Dark Emu Exposed can attest, after being at the receiving end of some of the Prof’s, in our opinion, quite vitriolic outbursts (now since sensibly deleted from Twitter by the Prof or her staff).

Reference 1 : Hamish A. McGowan, Lynda M. Petherick & Balz S. Kamber, Aeolian sedimentation and climate variability during the late Quaternary in southeast Queensland, Australia, Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 265 (2008) 171–181.

Reference 2 : Parsons, K, Not all droughts are equal: understanding the climate drivers of wind erosion (ENSO, SAM and IOD) . Thesis, Griffith University, School of Environment, 2017-08

FOOTNOTES :

The scientific consensus suggests that the principal drivers of dust storms generated in the southeast of the Australian continent are prolonged drought and climate variability. It is true that poor farm practices, overstocking, pests (rabbits) and land clearing have been damaging to the land in the past, but Australian farmers and governments are now leading the world in developing improved, dry-land farming and pastoral techniques that greatly reduce the incidence and severity of agriculture-related dust storms.

Even if there was absolutely no farming in Australia, severe dust storms would still occur, especially during periods of prolonged drought.

This close correlation between prolonged drought and the frequency and severity of dust storms has been studied and recorded for the years, 1858 to 2014, a period of rapid expansion of modern farming and pastoralism within Australia.

Dust Storms, classed as Dust Event Days (DED) show a correlation with periods of drought in Australia - generally there are more Dust Storms during periods of drought. If ‘colonial land exploitation,’ as Prof Langton reasons, was the main driver of … — Dust Storms, classed as Dust Event Days (DED) show a correlation with periods of drought in Australia - generally there are more Dust Storms during periods of drought. If ‘colonial land exploitation,’ as Prof Langton reasons, was the main driver of Dust Storms, then we should see an ever increasing upward curve of DED’s since 1858, as more land was opened up to agriculture and pastoralism. But what we observe is that, despite the massive increase in farmed and grazed land in Australia since the 1940’s, the number and frequency of DED’s seems to be stable or even dropping.- *Reference 2*.

If, as Professor Langton claims,

“Our top soil has been disappearing in dust storms because of irresponsible land-clearing, grazing & utter disregard for the natural environment”

then dust storm frequency & severity would be expected to be correlated to those practices and show an enormous increase since 1858, given that Colonial and Modern Australian farming has increased massively since 1858. But what does the science show? - That dust storms (and top-soil loss) have not increased markedly and are closely correlated with periods of drought.