The continent, Australia was once covered from coast to coast in verdant forest. As attested by the fossil record.

And like forests everywhere acted to recharge rain-bearing clouds when moisture was delivered from monsoonal rains or east or west coast lows.

Lakes that are now little more than permanent salt pans, were once permanent and overflowing freshwater lakes flushed routinely with abundant rainfall.

Most of the arid interior was created by the routine burning of the landscape as an assist in hunting.

Cool fires? Because a fire is not a raging firestorm! Doesn't make it cool. Each endless repeated mosaic burning produces results, baked earth that progressively becomes more and more impervious to rainfall and to the point in Australia, where former recharge mechanism looked after the country. Were burnt out of existence along with almost all the non-fire-tolerant flora and fauna.

And with each burn over thousands of years rare and unreplaceable trace elements were lifted skyward and over the oceans to be forever lost to the landscape.

One doesn't look after a mother by repeatedly burning her, except where such errant belief is brainwashed into the believer, from birth.

And as demonstrated by abusive little, never ever questioned, but defended to the death as good land practise management, when the opposite has been proved!

I know, I'm a heretic for saying what I've said. Nonetheless, this land was basically buggered, long before Whitey settled on it. There's not a black way or a white way, just the right way.

Is desertification reversible? YES IT IS!
Alan B.

Aborigines changed vegetation and exterminated megafauna with the firestick, but they didn't create the deserts. Natural climate change did that. They were living and fowling and fishing on the lakes that are now saltpans. It wasn't rainforest. They changed the vegetation on Atherton Tablelands with fire, and rainforest reinvaded most of it tens of thousands of years later, after it got too wet to burn. Blackfellas lived in the deserts for tens of thousands of years where whitefellas couldn't survive.

When whitefellas disrupted Aboriginal burning, nutrients accumulated, eucalypts died and scrub boomed. That's why we have megafires that destroy the environment. Blackfellas didn't need boots, overalls, hardhats, fire engines and waterbombers cos they had commonsense and mildfire.

What entitles you to brand me a fool and then call me abusive?

they had common sense and mild fire.
Little,
Cheers for that, I've been advocating for a cold burn behind my place for ages but the dumb crap bureaucrats won't allow it. Anyhow, got the local Fire Chief's ear a couple of weeks ago & they came around & did a cold burn. Really tidied up the scrub & no fuel left for the dry season.
The Chief's an ordinary bloke, no Uni degrees thank God !

Thanks individual,
He must be my vintage. Most authorities don't know how to do mild burns anymore. They light lines around perimeters, from bottom of slopes, across wind, instead of spots from top down, into the wind. Hot burns are hazard production burns.

I liked this article because I think it asks some really pertinent questions about what makes one a native of this country, or any country really. And also what claims previous civilisations might have on one those that have succeeded them by conquest or settlement.

While I wasn't born here, some of my forebears go back to the early 1800s, and as someone who was brought here by my parents, I don't feel that I owe anything to people who might have been dispossessed. Because that would mean my dispossession, and surely that would be wrong as well.

Most of us don't have somewhere else we could be said to be native to, and the whole concept of someone being native to anywhere brings to mind the eco-fascist views of the Christchurch shooter - that somehow different races belong to different continents.

It's pretty irrational to think that a species that came out of Africa maybe 80,000 years ago, and colonised the world, and even space, belongs anywhere in particular. Just as irrational as to think that certain technologies (like say fire-stick farming) are somehow particular to one group, but not another.

Aborigine, wrongly written with a capital 'A
ttbn,
I always thought an Australian aboriginal was an Aborigine. Aboriginals are original inhabitants of any country/area.