Byron Bay Writers' Festival 2003
This week Byron-based author Larry Buttrose reviews Tim Flannery's controversial thoughts on our interaction with the Australian landscape.
 Controversial author Tim Flannery will be at the Byron Bay Writers Festival
Beautiful Lies – Population and Environment in Australia
By Tim Flannery
Reviewed by Larry Buttrose
Towards the end of his provocative and superbly crafted essay Beautiful Lies – Population and Environment in Australia, (Quarterly Essay 9) author and thinker Tim Flannery reveals that the quote "beautiful lies" came from Mark Twain after he visited Australia, because it was Twain's belief that was what Australian history was made up of – beautiful lies, romantic falsehoods.
Tim Flannery says the first and foremost lie was Terra Nullius, the notion Eddie Mabo famously and successfully challenged, that this was an empty land when the First Fleet dropped anchor. Flannery writes eloquently of the first contact between the new arrivals and the indigenous Eora people, and how much of the spirit of 18th Century Enlightenment informed those first few years with mutual respect between the races. It wasn't until the colonists began annexing land to grow food that the real troubles began, and they have persisted until today.
As the European settlers fanned out across the landscape, taking their ecologically unsuited and unsustainable farming practices with them, the nation was beset with a massive wave of species exterminations. These, Flannery argues, came not so much from the colony's first imported exotic fauna, the cat (cat-lovers will be pleased to hear he largely exonerates them of species decimation) as from foxes, rabbits – and sheep. In terms of extinctions, he argues, sheep were enemy number one. And while the nation's fortunes rode so confidently on the sheep's back for so long, the price in denuding the landscape and destroying habitat was horrific.
His essay is punchy with assertions which might surprise many readers. For instance he sweeps aside animal liberationist opposition to the culling of kangaroos, saying many species are under no threat and are in fact a sustainable food resource. He says pretty much the same thing about whaling. This was the part that predictably troubled me, as he advocated the hunting of smaller-brained whales. The problem for me is we know that whales are intelligent, gentle creatures – and who are we to conduct cranial and virtual IQ tests on them to determine whether they live or die? Far better, for this reader, that they be left in peace to sing their songs of the deeps. He is also critical of the "save the forests" movement, saying too much money and energy have been devoted to it, to the detriment of what he sees as our core environmental problems – water supply, salinity, air quality, and biodiversity.
Mind you, here I was left wondering how can we protect biodiversity if we continue to log old growth forests?
Greenhouse he sees as almost more crucial than any other issue, and despite the fact that Flannery sees Kyoto as only a tiny, faltering first step, he predicts: "The refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol will almost certainly, in time, be remembered as the greatest failure of the Howard Government – Tampa, detention camps and Iraq notwithstanding."
For Flannery, the Snowy River Scheme is another beautiful lie, a realisation of the grand colonial dream of turning the rivers backward and making the dead heart bloom. Unfortunately it has resulted in the near-destruction of the Snowy River. Meanwhile the Murray-Darling, and many other river systems, are being overtaxed, and are being turned into little more than salty sewers.
This brings Flannery to another lie – populate or perish. He quotes author and researcher Dr Barney Foran as having calculated that Australia could live sustainably if we all reduced our consumption by 60 per cent – or, taken the other way, that at current levels of demand our continent can sustainably support a population of just eight million. Which is why he argues for the development of a federal population policy and, again contentiously, for a reduction in immigration. It's time to stop lying to ourselves about how lucky this country is, Flannery is saying, and to start to live in it as it really is, a fragile ecosystem with very limited arable land. But we consume blindly on, and the lies go on, and where is the beauty of that?
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