In his landmark book The Biggest Estate on Earth, historian Bill Gammage argues that before the arrival of white settlers, the whole Australian continent was a manicured cultural landscape, shaped and maintained by precise, deliberate and repeated fires. In Aboriginal hands, fire made the entire country ‘beautiful and comfortable’, and so Australia was one vast ‘estate’, a giant ‘park’, a series of ‘farms without fences’. These words imply that Aboriginal rights to land are closely tied to universal fire regimes. Gammage’s book has been well-received and celebrated. But it has also polarised debates on fire regimes, especially the extent to which fire really did shape every corner of the continent, and the related assertion that contemporary ecologies are the result of the cessation of fire since 1788. This paper integrates ethnographic history and archaeology with geography, soil science and ecology in order to set Gammage’s model against a particular ecological zone – the dense Riverflat Forests that once lined Dyarubbin, the Hawkesbury-Nepean River in New South Wales, Australia. Dyarubbin was occupied by Aboriginal people for perhaps 50,000 years, and from 1794 it became the site of the first major settler farming frontier. Paying attention to the local and the particular, this paper asks: was this fiercely contested country a tidy mosaic of open forests, water and grasslands created by cultural fire? Was Aboriginal burning here extensive or limited? What aspects of human and ecological history might be obscured by the universalising model in which cultural fire dominates above all other factors? Did the Aboriginal landscape in turn shape the settler one, and what were the consequences for land and people? On November 17 1822, the young Methodist minister Ralph Mansfield was up early, preaching God’s word among the settlers and convicts on the Nepean at Castlereagh and Emu Plains. But his journey back to Richmond was more like a ride through the gates of hell. A furnace wind blasted horse and rider, the sun beat down, its ‘burning rays without a single cloud to mitigate their violence’. Across the river, the sclerophyll forests of the Blue Mountains were ablaze. The Forthcoming in Environment and History. © 2017 The White Horse Press www.whpress.co.uk 2 sky was full of billowing smoke ‘rolling from the mountains, which from the natives having set fire to the grass and underwood, were in flames to a vast extent’. Poor Mansfield wrote later that it was ‘the most laborious and exhausting day I ever spent’. There are two things to note here: first, the fire lit by ‘the natives’ was burning in the forests in the Blue Mountains, and not on the flats and terraces along the Nepean River below. And second, Mansfield assumed the fire was Aboriginal burning. Settlers were evidently accustomed to Aboriginal people burning the bush, and they appear to have been unfazed by it – even, as in this case, two decades after white settlement. In some places, settlers in colonial Australia noted not only Aboriginal burning, but links between Aboriginal people, fire, vegetation and animals. Settlers themselves had to learn fast, because, as a landmass held in the thrall of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), Australia is a continent of fire. Its dominant ecologies emerged in tandem with fire: thus, fire is not exceptional but integral to much of Australia’s scleromorphic vegetation. But knowledge of Aboriginal burning later slipped from public memory and was not rediscovered until the 1960s, when archaeologists and anthropologists began to write about ‘firestick farming’ and Aboriginal people’s use of fire as a tool to manage the landscape. This 1 Ralph Mansfield, Journal, entry for 17 Nov. 1822, in John Thomas Bigge, Report of the Commissioner of Inquiry on the Colony of New South Wales, Appendices, Bonwick Transcripts, Box 52, 1308, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales [hereafter ML]. 2 This evidence has been used to argue, incorrectly, that Aboriginal people were still burning on the long-farmed river bank at Castlereagh in 1822, see James L. Kohen, The Darug and their neighbours: The traditional Aboriginal owners of the Sydney region (Sydney: Darug Link and Blacktown and District Historical Society, 1993), p. 27. See also Sydney Gazette [hereafter SG], 31 Mar. 1805. 3 John Hunter, An Historical Journal of Events at Sydney and at Sea 1787-179...with further accounts by Governor Arthur Phillip and Lieutenant P. G. King, edited by John Bach (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1968 [f.p. 1793]), pp. 43, 55; James Atkinson, An Account of the State of Agriculture and Grazing in New South Wales (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1975 [f.p. 1826]), p. 21; Thomas Mitchell, Journal of an Expedition into Tropical Australia in Search of a Route from Sydney to the Gulf of Carpentaria (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1848), pp. 412, 413; Mary Gilmore, Old Days, Old Ways: A Book of Recollections (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1963 [f.p. 1934]), p. 153; Stephen Pyne, Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia (Washington: University of Washington Press, 1998 [f.p. 1991]). See also Tom Griffiths, Forests of Ash: An Environmental History (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 5-6; Tim Flannery, The Future Eaters: An ecological history of the Australasian lands and people (Sydney: Reed New Holland, 1998), pp. 81, 282, 283. Forthcoming in Environment and History. © 2017 The White Horse Press www.whpress.co.uk 3 was radical thinking at a time when popular ideas about Aboriginal people still revolved around tropes of a ‘timeless’, unchanging ‘stone age’ people who made no impact on the land at all, who were, in fact, themselves part of nature. So that word ‘farming’ was deliberate. It asserted an equivalence between Aboriginal and settler land-use, in European terms. It thus challenged the founding colonial doctrine of terra nullius, the belief, dating back to the reports of James Cook and Joseph Banks from the Endeavour’s visit to the east coast of Australia in 1770, that Aboriginal people did not ‘use’ the land and therefore did not own it. The other startling implication of ‘firestick farming’ was that Australian landscapes were not ‘natural’ at all, but cultural: they were created and managed by Aboriginal people. Bill Gammage’s landmark book The Biggest Estate on Earth reasserts the earlier arguments in a dramatic meta-narrative of cultural fire which refashioned the entire Australian continent. It is a national story, and a kind of parable. Presenting what he calls a ‘tsunami’ of evidence, mainly from the diaries of nineteenth century explorers, as well as numerous paintings by early colonial artists, Gammage portrays the pre-invasion Australian landscape as a series of mosaics of water, open forests and grasslands. In this vision, every centimetre of this 7.7 million square kilometre continent was a manicured cultural landscape, shaped and maintained by precise, deliberate and repeated fires. ‘There was no wilderness, no terra nullius’ he writes elsewhere, ‘in that sense no nature, because all was as people made it or allowed it to be’. He goes further still, binding ecology and theology together in a cosmology reaching back into deep time. Aboriginal fire regimes, he asserts, were a fixed religious/spiritual and legal code, practised across the entire 4 Rhys Jones, ‘Firestick farming’, Australian Natural History, 16 (1969): 224-48; Norman Tindale, The Aboriginal Tribes of Australia (Canberra: ANU Press, 1974); Sylvia Hallam, Fire and Hearth: A Study of Aboriginal Usage and European Usurpation in south-western Australia (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1979); Flannery, The Future Eaters; Pyne, Burning Bush; David Horton argues against fire-stick farming in The Pure State of Nature (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2000). 5 Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2011); Bill Gammage, ‘Plain facts: Tasmania under Aboriginal management’, Landscape Research 33 (2008): 252. Forthcoming in Environment and History. © 2017 The White Horse Press www.whpress.co.uk 4 continent for over 60,000 years, a law Aboriginal people were utterly compelled to follow. They ‘risked their souls’ to uphold this Law. Gammage’s spiritual, unifying narrative has won wide admiration, praise and prizes. He exhorts white Australians to acknowledge their ecological sins and strive for redemption by learning the lessons of Aboriginal management. These appeals have struck chords in a society facing the onset of climate change and the ravages of other environmental disasters, and also, as historian Graeme Davison writes, ‘re-reading their landscape...for evidence of its deep history’. The book is also a clarion call for reconciliation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians – one which must begin with recognition and ultimate emulation of Aboriginal people’s spiritual links with the land and their deep understanding of its management. But the critical response has been vigorous too. Gammage’s book, particularly his robust critique of scientists and their work, has polarised debate on the extent and impacts of Aboriginal fire, and driven a wedge between scholars in the humanities and those in the sciences. A palaeoecological study by Scott Mooney et al combined 223 studies of charcoal deposits from across Australia, dating from the last 70,000 years, but found no discernible link between the arrival of humans and the amount of burning on the Australian continent. Ecologist Ron Hateley’s The Victorian Bush predated Gammage’s book by a year, but effectively laid the groundwork for its critique by pointing out the huge variety in landscapes and vegetation communities in Victoria, and just how much of the explorers’ and settlers’ evidence had been generalised across time and space in fire-stick farming literature. When contextualised, the 6 Gammage, Biggest Estate, 126

中文翻译：

---

森林火灾？探索澳大利亚第一边疆的人类生态史

历史学家 Bill Gammage 在他的里程碑式著作《地球上最大的庄园》中指出，在白人定居者到来之前，整个澳大利亚大陆是一片修剪整齐的文化景观，由精确、蓄意和反复的火灾塑造和维护。在原住民手中，火让整个国家“美丽而舒适”，因此澳大利亚是一个巨大的“庄园”，一个巨大的“公园”，一系列“没有围栏的农场”。这些话暗示土著人的土地权利与普遍的火灾制度密切相关。Gammage 的书广受好评和赞誉。但它也引发了关于火灾制度的争论，尤其是火灾确实在多大程度上影响了大陆的每个角落，以及当代生态是自 1788 年以来停火的结果的相关断言。本文将人种学历史和考古学与地理学、土壤科学和生态学相结合，以建立 Gammage 模型针对特定生态区 - 曾经在澳大利亚新南威尔士州的 Hawkesbury-Nepean 河 Dyarubbin 沿岸的茂密河滩森林。Dyarubbin 被原住民占领了大约 50,000 年，从 1794 年开始，它成为第一个主要定居者农业前沿的所在地。本文着眼于地方性和特殊性，问：这个竞争激烈的国家是否是一片整齐的开阔森林，文化之火造就的水草？原住民在这里焚烧是广泛还是有限？人类历史和生态历史的哪些方面可能会被文化之火高于所有其他因素的普遍化模型所掩盖？原住民景观是否反过来塑造了定居者，对土地和人民有什么后果？1822 年 11 月 17 日，年轻的卫理公会牧师拉尔夫·曼斯菲尔德 (Ralph Mansfield) 早早起床，在卡斯尔雷 (Castlereagh) 和鸸鹋平原 (Emu Plains) 的尼皮安 (Nepean) 的定居者和罪犯中宣讲上帝的话语。但他回到里士满的旅程更像是穿越地狱之门。一阵炉风吹过马匹和骑手，太阳下山了，它“燃烧的光线没有一朵云来减轻他们的暴力”。河对岸，蓝山的硬叶林正在燃烧。即将到来的环境和历史。© 2017 The White Horse Press www.whpress.co.uk 2 天空弥漫着滚滚浓烟，“山上冒出滚滚浓烟，当地人放火烧草地和林下，火势很大”。可怜的曼斯菲尔德后来写道，这是“我度过的最辛苦和最累的一天”。这里有两件事需要注意：首先，“当地人”点燃的火是在蓝山的森林里燃烧，而不是在下面尼皮恩河沿岸的平地和梯田上燃烧。其次，曼斯菲尔德假设火灾是原住民燃烧的。定居者显然已经习惯了土著人焚烧灌木丛，他们似乎对此并不担心——即使在这种情况下，白人定居二十年后也是如此。在某些地方，殖民澳大利亚的定居者不仅注意到原住民焚烧，而是原住民、火、植被和动物之间的联系。定居者自己必须快速学习，因为作为受厄尔尼诺南方涛动 (ENSO) 影响的陆地，澳大利亚是一片火海大陆。它的主要生态与火一起出现：因此，火并不是例外，而是澳大利亚大部分硬质植被的组成部分。但是，土著人焚烧的知识后来从公众记忆中消失了，直到 1960 年代才被重新发现，当时考古学家和人类学家开始撰写有关“火棒农业”和土著人使用火作为管理景观的工具的文章。1 Ralph Mansfield, Journal, entry for 17 Nov. 1822, in John Thomas Bigge, 新南威尔士殖民地调查专员报告，附录，Bonwick Transcripts，Box 52, 1308, Mitchell Library, 新南威尔士州立图书馆 [以下简称 ML]。2 这一证据被错误地用来论证 1822 年土著人仍在卡斯尔雷长期耕种的河岸上焚烧，参见 James L. Kohen，The Darug 和他们的邻居：悉尼地区的传统土著所有者（悉尼：Darug Link 和 Blacktown 和地区历史协会，1993 年），p。27. 另见悉尼公报 [以下简称 SG]，1805 年 3 月 31 日。3 约翰·亨特，1787-179 年悉尼和海上事件的历史杂志......以及亚瑟·菲利普总督和 PG King 中尉的进一步说明，由编辑John Bach（悉尼：Angus 和 Robertson，1968 [fp 1793]），第 43、55 页；James Atkinson，《新南威尔士州农业和放牧状况说明》（悉尼：悉尼大学出版社，1975 年 [fp 1826]），第 3 页。21; 托马斯·米切尔 澳大利亚热带探险日志，寻找从悉尼到卡奔塔利亚湾的路线（伦敦：朗文、布朗、格林和朗曼，1848 年），第 412、413 页；Mary Gilmore，旧时光，旧方式：回忆之书（悉尼：安格斯和罗伯逊，1963 年 [fp 1934]），第 3 页。153; Stephen Pyne, Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia（华盛顿：华盛顿大学出版社，1998 [fp 1991]）。另见 Tom Griffiths, Forests of Ash: An Environmental History（墨尔本：剑桥大学出版社，2001 年），第 5-6 页；Tim Flannery，《未来食客：澳大利亚土地和人民的生态史》（悉尼：Reed New Holland，1998 年），第 81、282、283 页。即将出版的《环境与历史》。© 2017 白马出版社 www.whpress.co. uk 3 在当时关于土著人的流行观念仍然围绕着“永恒的”、不变的“石器时代”的人的比喻进行，他们对这片土地根本没有任何影响，实际上他们自己是大自然的一部分. 所以“耕种”这个词是故意的。它断言了原住民和定居者土地使用之间的等同性，用欧洲术语来说。因此，它挑战了无主地的创始殖民学说，这种信念可以追溯到 1770 年奋进号访问澳大利亚东海岸时詹姆斯库克和约瑟夫班克斯的报告，即土著人没有“使用”这片土地，因此没有拥有它。“火棒农业”的另一个令人吃惊的含义是，澳大利亚的风景根本不是“自然”的，而是文化的：它们是由原住民创造和管理的。Bill Gammage 具有里程碑意义的著作《地球上最大的庄园》以戏剧性的元叙事方式重申了早先的论点，该叙事重新塑造了整个澳大利亚大陆。这是一个民族故事，也是一种寓言。Gammage 展示了他所谓的“海啸”证据，主要来自 19 世纪探险家的日记，以及早期殖民艺术家的众多画作，将入侵前的澳大利亚风景描绘成一系列由水、开阔森林和草原组成的马赛克. 在这个愿景中，这片 770 万平方公里大陆的每一厘米都是精心修剪的文化景观，由精确、蓄意和反复的火灾塑造和维护。“没有荒野，没有无主之地”，他在别处写道，“从这个意义上说，没有自然，因为一切都是人们创造的或允许的”。他更进一步，将生态学和神学结合在一个宇宙学中，可以追溯到更深的时间。他断言，原住民火灾制度是一种固定的宗教/精神和法律规范，在整个 4 Rhys Jones 中实行，“Firestick 农业”，澳大利亚自然历史，16 (1969)：224-48；Norman Tindale，澳大利亚土著部落（堪培拉：澳大利亚国立大学出版社，1974 年）；Sylvia Hallam，《火与壁炉：澳大利亚西南部土著使用和欧洲篡夺的研究》（堪培拉：澳大利亚土著研究所，1979 年）；弗兰纳里，未来食客；派恩，燃烧的布什；David Horton 在 The Pure State of Nature 中反对火棒农业（悉尼：Allen & Unwin，2000 年）。5 Bill Gammage，地球上最大的庄园：土著人如何造就澳大利亚（悉尼：Allen & Unwin，2011 年）；Bill Gammage，“简单的事实：Tasmania under Aboriginal management', Landscape Research 33 (2008): 252。即将出版的环境和历史。© 2017 The White Horse Press www.whpress.co.uk 4 大陆 60,000 多年以来，原住民完全被迫遵守的一项法律。他们“冒着生命危险”维护这项法律。Gammage 的精神、统一的叙事赢得了广泛的钦佩、赞美和奖品。他劝告澳大利亚白人承认他们的生态罪恶，并通过学习土著管理的教训来争取救赎。这些呼吁在一个面临气候变化开始和其他环境灾难肆虐的社会中引起了共鸣，而且正如历史学家格雷姆戴维森所写，“重新阅读他们的风景......以证明其深厚的历史”。这本书也是澳大利亚原住民和非原住民之间和解的号角——必须从承认和最终效仿原住民与土地的精神联系以及他们对土地管理的深刻理解开始。但批评的反应也很激烈。Gammage 的书，尤其是他对科学家及其工作的强烈批评，使关于原住民火灾的范围和影响的辩论两极分化，并在人文学者和科学学者之间产生了分歧。Scott Mooney 等人的一项古生态研究结合了澳大利亚各地 223 项对过去 70,000 年的木炭矿床的研究，但发现人类的到来与澳大利亚大陆的燃烧量之间没有明显的联系。生态学家 Ron Hateley 的 The Victorian Bush 比 Gammage 的书早了一年，但通过指出维多利亚景观和植被群落的巨大多样性，以及有多少探险者和定居者的证据已经被概括，有效地为其批评奠定了基础跨越时空的火棒农耕文学。在上下文中，6 Gammage, Biggest Estate, 126