Reconciling Nature and Culture in a Global Context? - Rainforest ...

Reconciling Nature and Culture in a Global Context?Lessons from the World Heritage ListTo support this assertion, the nomination relies upon the 1986 report commissioned by theAustralian Heritage Commission, and two articles identified in the appended bibliography;one by the anthropologist Norman Tindale on the ‘Prehistory of the Aborigines’, and one bythe palaeobotanist Peter Kershaw on ‘Aboriginal burning during the last twoglacial / interglacial cycles’. The Rainforest Conservation Society of Queensland (RCSQ)report itself provides three pages of information on the ‘history of Aboriginal occupation’ ofthe region (1986: 39-41), summarising archaeological findings at the time and providingsome information about ‘Aboriginal prehistorical legends’.Based on the material of the primary linguist for the region, R. M. W. Dixon, local Aboriginal‘mythology’ is identified in this report as an “unparalleled human record of events dating backto the Pleistocene era” (RCSQ 1986: 40). Further evidence of the long history of Aboriginaluse of the region is provided by palynological research, which suggests human occupation ofthe Atherton Tableland from at least 40,000 to 45,000 years ago “when a huge increase incharcoal deposits coincides with major replacement of rainforest by fire-adapted Eucalyptus”(ibid: 39). While this evidence could be read as an instance of culture challenging nature andcreating environmental imbalances, in the nomination document the contraction of theregion’s rainforests is depicted in terms of “a series of dramatic changes of climate”(DASETT 1987: 27). In this scenario, Aboriginal environmental impacts in the Pleistoceneperiod are solely understood in terms of wider natural processes and outcomes. Theimplication from this subordination of culture to nature is that Aborigines, like some floralspecies, are “examples of ancient taxa that survived and persist as relicts within theAustralian wet tropics today” (DASETT 1987: 27). While the palynological evidence points toconsiderable human modification of the environment, and prior Aboriginal occupation of drysclerophyll ecosystems, preliminary archaeological evidence for the “origins of Aboriginalrainforest culture” (ibid: 39) only dates from 6300 BP. Whether using palynological orarchaeological evidence as the baseline, an Aboriginal presence in the region is detectableonly by reference to deeper “charcoal deposits” (RCSQ 1986: 39) or radio-carbon datedrefuse.In many ways, these scientific deliberations (and disappearing acts) conform to a moreromanticised view of Aboriginal people as the original conservationists, living in harmony withnature and ‘leaving nothing but footprints’ on the Australian landscape (see Sackett 1991;Pannell 1996; Kuper 2003). As this summary indicates, in the RCSQ report ‘Aboriginalpeople of the rainforests’, their ‘oral traditions’, and occupation patterns are inextricablyintertwined with the formation of some of the key features identified in the nominationdocument as ‘areas of exceptional natural beauty’ or as ‘important and significant naturalhabitats’. This conflation of cultural and natural history is highlighted by the fact that thesereferences to ‘Aboriginal history’ in this influential report appear in the chapter entitled‘Description and Inventory of the Natural Features’. Presented as the most recent phase inthe ‘natural history’ of the region, the section on the ‘history of Aboriginal occupation’ thuslogically appears in the closing pages of the chapter, preceded by the sections on hydrology,geomorphology, vegetation types, flora and fauna. In both the nomination document and thekey study outlining the ‘outstanding universal significance’ of the region, Aboriginal peopleand culture are firmly placed within the realm of nature and are viewed, along with thetropical forests themselves, as a ‘relict’ of ‘natural’ evolutionary processes. Indeed, in thenomination document, the ‘wet tropics’ are said to ‘preserve’ the world’s only example of‘Aboriginal rainforest culture’ (see DASETT 1987: 19; RCSQ 1986: 78-79). The depiction ofAboriginal people as purely ‘natural subjects’ is certainly not what the Traditional Owners ofthe Wet Tropics have in mind when they state that they “do not distinguish between natureand culture”. As Schlosser points out, all too often in environmental disputes Indigenouspeople are either “erased from nature or collapsed in it” (2006: 5). This idea of Indigenouspeople as ‘natural subjects’ strongly resonates with nineteenth century depictions ofAborigines and the region’s environment.11