2002 HERITAGE LECTURE
  BY PROFESSOR TIM FLANNERY

The Environment's Role in Shaping Australian Culture

National Trust Heritage Lecture presented by Professor Tim Flannery
on 23rd April, 2002 at the National Trust's S H Ervin Gallery

Could I begin by just saying how very pleased I am to be here this evening, to be asked to give this address. The National Trust is an astonishing organisation it seems to me because it is community based and because it has achieved so very much on behalf of all Australians but particularly the people of New South Wales.

And although you pride yourself on conserving heritage and that's a vital part of what the Trust does, to me it does something that's a little bit deeper as well. Anyone who visits any of your properties or has anything to do with you I'm sure comes away with a greater understanding of where we came from and what we are as Australians - sort of the undertext if you want of this process.

Conserving heritage just for the sake of conserving it may be something people would argue about but conserving heritage as a tool to help us really understand at a very deep level our roots our origins, the challenges and changes that Australia has seen over the last several centuries is I think something no one can argue with as a great achievement for the people, and a very important one.

So anyway I'm delighted to be here for those reasons. I guess I'm also a little bit surprised to be asked to talk to the National Trust. When I gave the Australia Day Address, the Sixth Australia Day Address, earlier this year I rather rashly perhaps made some suggestions about planting more native trees and less exotic ones and I woke up the next morning to the Sydney Morning Herald front page screaming 'Flannery Attacks Aussie Backyard'. I thought maybe they'd exchanged their senior editor with the National Enquirer or something but anyway it didn't quite catch the spirit of what I said quite rightly and I suspect that people interested in heritage and protecting heritage gardens may not necessarily want to hear from me after that.

But needless to say I'm not going to turn up in a robber's mask with an axe in hand chopping down any exotic tree on any property many of you might happen to love and clearly there is a role for historic gardens I think and for non-native plants in people's gardens.

The point I was trying to make in that Australia Day Address really is that when we come to looking at the overall landscaping of our cities or individual choices in our gardens it's as well to consider native species beacuse they're living vital parts of our ecosystem and support birds, insects and other organisms that form part of the richness of the environment that we all enjoy.So anyway I'm glad that people overlooked that screaming banner in the Sydney Morning Herald which perhaps is best forgotten.

What I said I'd talk about this evening is the environment's role in shaping Australian culture. But I'd like to really look at that issue from a very broad perspective, from a global perspective actually, of all of the settlers' societies of the world and then come down to the particular of Australia.

I'm becoming more and more fascinated as time goes on with these settler societies, with the people that left Europe over the last five hundred years to settle on some distant part of the planet and what happened to them after they settled there.

The regions that they were able to settle successfully poses a dilemma. Why are some parts of the world much more amenable to European settlement than others? And why also have the results been so very different in some ways? Broadly similar, yes we could all say, but very different in many ways as well.

I guess that if you look at any movement of people or any sort of living organisms around the planet, if that particular culture or that particular group of people meet with favourable conditions they'll go through a trajectory, a series of changes that ultimately end up changing them to a new culture, something that's different from the culture they were drawn from.

And its that trajectory that shaped us as Australians and all of the settler societies around the world and the trajectory is partly related to the nature of the place they came to but also to other factors.

I suppose the most important of those other factors is a thing that biologists call the 'founder effect'. I have to think of a better name for it one day. The 'founder effect' really is about what those original founders were like because any people or any individuals of any species that come into a new environment are not entirely representative of the group they were drawn from.

So in Australia's case we happened to get convicts rather than landed gentry or anything else. The Americans, at least up in New England, happened to get Puritans and so on and so on. And that 'founder effect' has a big influence I think arguably. We can all think about aspects of Australian or American society that people, at least in terms of folk wisdom, put down to that 'founder effect.'

I guess its funny when you look at that in some detail. I remember talking to the American historian Bernard Bailyn about the 'founder effect' and the fact that Australia was settled by convicts and America not and I was expecting the normal knock on the head about how much more noble the Americans are than we Australians are but Bernard pointed out to me that in fact part of America had been settled by convicts, that Georgia in the south had been settled by convicts just before in fact Australia was founded, modern Australia was founded, in 1788.

But he added with a wry grin on his face that there was a difference. He said in those early days of transportation across the Atlantic from England to North America convicts were sent out from the prisons to the docks and they were then chosen by ships' captains who'd take their convicts across the Atlantic and then sell them as endentured labourers at the other end. So, Bernard Bailyn said, you can imagine the sort of process going on with the Ship's captain saying 'what were you put away for?' 'Debt. Stealing a loaf of bread.' 'Alright, on board the ship'. 'What were you in for?' 'Fooling around with a sheep.' You'd imagine he'd be left behind. It would be a bit harder to sell at the other end.

So he said the American convicts were of a better quality he felt than the Australian convicts as a result of that. We got the government mandated job lot here in Australia whereas the Americans got some sort of sorting process to get rid of perhaps some of the more dubious elements.

Anyway, that idea of a 'founder effect' is clearly a very important aspect in terms of building new societies. That's something I'll return to a little bit later on.

'Release' is the other great thing that happens. If a group of organisms comes into a new environment and finds it favourable they'll often go through a period of what's called 'ecological release'. You can imagine humans going through social release as well.

So cane toads in Australia, for example, were bigger and fatter and meaner arguably than the cane toads of Central America for the first few decades after they were released because there was just an absolute abundance of food for those animals. And, until they reached the limit of that food, they were healthier, larger, more robust and bred more rapidly than the original population they were drawn from.

The same is true, for example, with Red Deer in New Zealand. We've measured Red Deer in New Zealand within a century of their release and they were bigger, fatter, healthier and reproducing more rapidly than the Red Deer of England that they were drawn from.

The same is true of human societies. You've only got to think as far as the American soil frontier which opened up in about 1613 and that carried on for three centuries. The Americans were released in a sense from the constraints of Europe by this massive windfall that was their own. And it wasn't just the soil in that case. It was the American Bison, other windfalls of resources that fell to the Americans that really allowed them to experience a period of what I call 'ecological' and 'social release".

You've got people from a small constrained society where they may have a small piece of land, if they have any at all. Where they had to pay taxes. Where they're subdued within a power hierarchy come to this new land and experiencing this stupendous release which of course doesn't last forever. It only lasts for as long as there are resources there for the taking.

In the case of the United States however that period of 'release' had profound influence because the continent is so vast and because this resource base is so very rich that that particular period of release in the American soil frontier lasted for about three centuries, from around about 1620 to around about 1920.

Its curious to me that that's about how long it took horses to colonise America after the Spanish introduced them and horses are kind of in a scientific sense roughly the same size as people. We're both large warm blooded mammals and its rather curious that the American pioneer and the horse took about the same time to expand their limits, I guess, through the continent.

The reason the American frontier of course had such a profound influence on contemporary American society is that American social structures were codified during that frontier period. So the American Revolution, the body of the Constitution, those things which really in a sense fossilised relationships between people, the State and different organs of say justice, government and religion. They were essentially crystallised at that moment in time and remained in that particular shape. But that crystallisation happened really, if you want, in the broth of a frontier society, in a society experiencing this profound frontier release.

So 'release' can be very important. I'll come back to Australia later about that but the Australian frontier was nothing like the American frontier. The period of release experienced by Australians was several orders of magnitude smaller than that experienced in North America.

The final part of that trajectory that I mentioned earlier from founder effects through to release and then to something else is a period of adaptation. And when you think about us adapting to conditions it's true only in the sense that you adapt to adversity. You adapt to challenges. When you're released on to a frontier you're not adapting. You may be shedding the remnants of Europe but you're not actually adapting to local conditions.

So with the North Americans experiencing a soil frontier, they certainly became very un-European. Lots of the European culture was lost and simplified as people spread further from authority, further from sources of education and even religious instruction. Their European(ness) was stripped from them, but they weren't adapting necessarily to place. You adapt to adversity.

The story of Australian society I'd argue is largely about adaptation to adversity, to difficult conditions. We could suggest in a strict sense that Americans are yet to adapt to the conditions of America. So are they truly American people or are they simply a non-European people who happen to be living in America?

It's interesting to me to watch the political situation in North America as it develops. This last election in the US was fought really over that very issue I'd argue. There was a very significant proportion of American society that won the election, (I don't know whether they won the election, they won power) that look at the frontier as still being bountiful and open.

The people that want to mine oil, for example, in Northern Alaska, whose energy policy is basically a frontier policy. That there's just more resources out there. The sooner you use them the better off we'll all be, because its endless, it's space perhaps it's another vast and eternal frontier, the people who still want to experience 'release' as against another group of Americans who see that there are constraints looming on the horizon and who wish to adapt to conditions. Perhaps the first generation of Americans to actually voice that at such a significant political level and to say that the time has come to adapt, to live within the constraints that North America offers. And perhaps to become the first truly North American generation, I would argue.

I just talk about America there to give you that sense that there's a trajectory that we're all following and that different people are experiencing that trajectory in different ways.

So what happens once that trajectory is worked through? Again just to wander somewhat outside Australia briefly. The oldest of the Northern European settlement settler societies are the Dutch-derived people of the Cape which became South Africa. And I took a particular interest in those people because they're several hundred years in advance of anyone else. At least a century perhaps more in terms of their trajectory, the time they've been in South Africa and they are also people whose connections to Europe as they went further and further inland became even more tenuous.

You can read about those people as they were in the days of Jan van Riebeeck, in the early days of the Cape. And then we sort of lose sight of them because the Cape becomes less exotic and people write less about it and these people are moving further inland.

The next time you really get a good picture of them is during the British administration when the British re-encounter them, if you will, in the 1820s. And what's absolutely striking to me, reading through these historical documents, is that you see these people as real Europeans when they first arrive at the Cape. They are really Europeans expressing European views, dealing with the landscape in European ways, describing it in European ways.

Its quite extraordinary to read some of these early accounts. I remember one account of a Dutchman who climbed Table Mountain and said he lost his purse on the way up. His purse was like a backback. He had his lunch and he said it was stolen by these people. He said there were two kinds of people in South Africa. He said one of them were the Hottentots that we know all about, people who say 'hottentot' as they dance up and down.

And he said the other of these people who lived high on Table Mountain that looked rather old and grizzled and who speak an unintelligible language and who stole my purse with my lunch in it. And you realise after a while that he's talking about baboons and this person from Europe who is from the Netherlands had no idea that there's anything in the world like the monkey. He'd simply taken this European mind view that the nearest thing that he could think of was a person. And he describes this quite literally as another race of human beings.

So, very European people. By the time we meet them in the 1820s though they are utterly transformed. They're speaking, yes, a European language - Afrikaans. They're reading the Bible as they always did and to them in their own minds that defines them as European, as different from the people of South Africa. That's what they hold onto as their European heritage. But when you look at the way they're living, they're living like Africans.

They're practising transhumance agriculture. No one in Europe is doing that sort of thing. No one in the Low Countries anyway at that time. They've invented a new way of living where they drive their sheep into the mountains to graze in the Summer, back down to the flats in the Winter. Moving, becoming semi-nomadic, they're living like Hottentots.

In terms of their ecological niche space they have become genuinely African and they don't realise it themselves. To them they're still European. They read the Bible. They speak a European language. But to the British who are coming to see them, they're encountering a people who have been profoundly transformed.

So that to me was a very interesting situation to look at because we're there looking at that great cycle from 'founder' effect to 'release', 'adaptation', over the longest period that any European colonial society offers us in terms of beginning to look at that change.

So where does Australia sit at the moment in our 214 years into the great experiment of adaptation or being out of Europe I guess? How do we sit in terms of that theoretical structure that I just presented to you?

In order to understand that properly we need to have some understanding of the Australian environment and again look at that in a global context.

The settlers that went to the Americas, to a lesser extent certainly to the Cape, the settlers that went to New Zealand and other regions really found a land that, while it was different in many ways from Europe, really responded in rather similar ways to the European colonisation. They found a land that wasn't that different particularly, I'd argue - the Americans.

In Australia when the Europeans came here this was the last of the continents to be settled. It took until 1788 to settle Australia and the settlement was only done through a vast government bureaucracy and a vast government subsidy that lasted for many decades.

So it was a hard place to start colonising. Australia was the smallest, the flattest and the most isolated of the world's continents and it has the strangest and most distinctive climate, soils and flora and fauna of any of the continents colonised by the Europeans.

I'd like to just run through a little bit about soils and climate and isolation. I apologise to those who have heard it before. It's a recurring theme in my talks but I think it is very very important that we understand some of the basics.

Australian soils are just extraordinarily infertile by world standards and the reason for that is that our soils are basically fossil soils. There's been very little significant soil creation in Australia over the last ninety million years.

There's several ways that you can make soil. Volcanic eruptions are a great way of making new soil because lava is poured out from the bowels of the earth rich in various kinds of minerals. It then breaks down and forms fresh new soil full of minerals, the kind of things that plants like to grow on. If you want to see what volcanic eruptions can do for soils then I recommend Bali, a holiday in Bali. That's an extraordinary place. Just go through a road cutting in Bali and look at the depth of rich soil that exists there and the incredible fertility of that place.

Australia has some recent volcanic soils and really they are its only substantial new soils. They exist in an archipelago along the east coast of Australia from Victoria's western district up to the Atherton Tablelands and in all I guess they comprise about 1.5 % of Australia's soils.

I'd like to map Australia's grand old mansions against that soil bank because I reckon there'd be a fairly high concordance between the grandest of the old colonial establishments, at least the ones that are still existing in some sort, and that particular soil type.

Certainly in Western Victoria - you know Malcolm Fraser was lucky that his ancestors settled on top of a volcano. That's how he got to be Prime Minister I suspect, in my view, was that wealth that was in that soil.

But the same is true up and down the coast, because its important. But as soon as you get away from the coast and from that soil type you start seeing a very marked drop off in terms of biological productivity and fertility and a concurrent diminution of human wealth, at least sustained human wealth.

But just to return to soil formation. Mountains are another great way to make soils. The Himalaya Mountain Range is a fairly recent mountain range perhaps some twenty to thirty million years old. The soils of northern India have resulted and their incredible human population densities and animal densities that are found in that region result from tectonic activity. Mountains go up, rain erodes them and creates new soils, that's how it works.

This Great Dividing Range of ours is a most peculiar place. It was formed ninety million years ago and it was formed when New Zealand and New Caledonia broke away from Australia, sailed back into the Pacific, and took some of the good scenery with them and those Kiwis and other things. Anyway, we won't dwell on that.

But the mountain range formed in a most peculiar way. It formed by the earth basically just gently buckling up. So our mountain range is strange in shape. It's been very poor at grounding new soils because it hasn't eroded very well. It's this dome-shaped structure. Lake George on the way to Canberra is right on the summit of the range. Cooma airstrip's on the summit of the range. Its a flat mountain range. Its been eroded somewhat in places like the Blue Mountains but the soil banks that have been created from that erosion are very very limited in extent. A couple of tens of metres over fifty million years and rather old, many of them by now,as well and exhausted.

Ice ages are another great way to make soils and Australia had a miserable ice age. The reason soils are made in ice ages is that glaciers are just great at grinding up rock. I never really understood what ice ages could do until I lived in North America for twelve months and had a look at that northern part of the continent. Its phenomenal, I mean you can see a rock four miles long, an isolated rock four miles long, that's two thirds the size of Uluru, Ayres Rock, that's been rafted by ice and put in place just fifteen thousand years ago.

I discovered that North America was covered in 18.5 million square kilometres of ice just fifteen thousand years ago. That's one and a half times as much ice as exists in Antarctica today. Just on one North American ice sheet there was enough water frozen into that ice sheet to lower sea level world-wide by seventy-four metres. Just the power of that ice sheet in terms of destroying mountrain ranges, grinding them up, creating new soils, is just unimaginable to me, it's just prodigous. American agricultural wealth and north Asian agricultural wealth was largely built on ice age-created soils.

During the ice age in Australia we had one glacier on the mainland, on the top of Mt Kosciusko (we could have had the Winter Olympics fifteen-thousand years ago!) - we had fifty square kilometres of glacier but that glacier basically melted without creating significant soils, at least no one's farming, whatever it did create on top of Mt Kosciusko.

So different effects - the point I'm trying to make is that this place has very, very infertile soils which have sat out under the sun and rain for tens of millions of years and been leached of al their minerals, all of their nutrients, over time. It's a very, very harsh environment for anyone who wants to do agriculture or animal husbandry to make a living - it's one of the defining features of Australia and it's something that our people, our colonial Australians, have had to slowly come to terms with over the last two centuries.

Climate has also proved to be very different in Australia to what you see in the northern hemisphere. Seasonality is all-important in the northern hemisphere - it really allows agriculture to happen in the way it does. People know that if they store their harvest, then it only has to last a certain amount of time. They know it will only be a couple of weeks till Spring's going to come in the northern hemisphere, and with spring comes biotic activity. And these ecosystems are quite extraordinary in the northern hemisphere in the way that they reconstitute themselves in spring. In winter the place is an Arctic desert - it really is - there's white stuff on the ground, all these trees without leaves sticking up, you know it really does look absolutely abysmal.

I remember waking up in February in Boston thinking "I haven't heard a fly or seen an ant for some months now", and it's disturbing to the Australian mind not to have seen that sort of life. But within a few weeks, the place absolutely transforms itself - the trees burst into this greenery - it's a sort of luminous greenery to Australian eyes - it almost hurts your eyes, it's so bright.

Tropical birds fly out from Central America to populate this newly-created tropical environment. Insects that have lain dormant, their eggs have lain dormant over winter, become present in vast profusion. It's as if this tropical ecosytem reconstitutes itself and of course people and their agricultural land are part of that, that renewal, that's when you plant, that's when the crops grow, and through the winter you exist off the surplus.

Australia isn't like that - here, particularly in the eastern two-thirds of the continent - biological productivity really isn't dictated by our seasons, although we do have seasons obviously in places like Sydney.

It's dictated by rainfall and rainfall is dictated by the southern oscillation - the El Niño - and that brings drought and flood to Australia in a two to eight year long cycle. You will know that here in Sydney if you've got a lawn to mow you don't need to mow it just in Spring, you need to mow it after it rains and that's the southern oscillation.

To people from the northern hemisphere that's really a difficult thing to comprehend. So between infertile soils and this very erratic climate, those early settlers came to Australia and tried to make a living and between these two factors I think we discovered in our history that the frontier, the bounty this continent offered was limited indeed. And we're still trying to come to terms I feel with those two great factors.

Historically, Australian land holdings have just been far too smalI. They've been conceived on the European scale and you see amalgamation of farms now into larger and larger units as people try to get to some economically viable scale for their work.

In terms of climate, we still pay our bank debts quarterly or half-yearly or annually - a system that makes absolutely no sense in Australia.

The reason that people pay their debts annually in Europe is that their productivity is annual - it's like you get your pay cheque and you pay your debts.

In Australia you get your pay cheque when the drought breaks, when you get a good year. Why the banks can't understand that and develop a system that is truly based on productivity is one of the great mysteries that we must come to terms with in Australia.

The final factor I'd really like to talk about is that of isolation and uniqueness in terms of the Australian environment. As I said, Australia is the most isolated of the continents. For forty-five million years this place has been separate to the rest of the world and over that time it's drifted northwards - from a position adjacent to Antarctica it's drifted across the southern ocean into its current latitudes.

And one of the most significant effects of that drift has been that it has roughly kept pace with the deteriorating global climate. So over the last fifty million years the world has basically got colder. If you could have visited Canada or North America fifty million years ago, you would have found a tropical rainforest ... of this dreamland with lemurs, goannas and tropical animals in the trees.

Today I fear it's Arctic tundra; it's buried in the environment. If you visited parts of Australia fifty million years ago, for example if you visited Adelaide fifty million years ago you would have found flora pretty much identical to that which is found in the Daintree River area of Queensland today; nothing like that exists in Adelaide now. They still have the same problem, they have the same flora, the same sort of floristic sites, and that's due in part to that northward drift and the fact that Australia has roughly kept place by moving to warmer latitudes and general global climate deterioration.

The significance of this is that animals and plants have been able to evolve in place without being threatened with extinction - the great climatic changes haven't just swept away old forms in Australia. Things have remained and evolved in place over many millions of years.

One of the best examples of that you can think of is the Wollemi Pine - that thing is ancient - it's been growing there since the Jurassic, you know a hundred and thirty million years ago. It's still found just a hundred kilometres out of Sydney, admittedly in a smaller area but still able to survive in the same region. It's a heritage of that drift north.

The whole of the Sydney sandstone flora is pretty telling of that too. This is one of the one of the world's great biodiverse floristic provinces - there are about fifteen hundred flowering plants within one hundred and fifty kilometres of Sydney. Some of them have incredibly small distributions. There's one species of grevillea for example that's found largely on the car park, I believe it's of the Ba'hai Temple, in Terrey Hills.

So it's a tiny distribution for a number of plant species that have existed there for a very, very long time. And of course European settlement patterns threatened that sort of timeless occupation of the land because humans can produce such large changes in the landscape.

Of course the Europeans weren't the first people to come to Australia. There was a group of people who arrived here much, much earlier - at least forty-five thousand years earlier - the ancestors of the Aboriginal people - and when they came to Australia they found a very different environment.

Forty-five thousand years ago, (they could have come to Australia forty-six thousand years ago) - you would have found a land filled with giant marsupials, animals that looked perhaps a bit like a rhinoceros or hippopotomas but marsupials, many many more kinds of kangaroos than exist today, including some giant short-faced kinds, giant wombats, goannas seven metres long which would have weighed perhaps a ton, very very different fauna.

Within a few thousand years of the Aboriginal people arriving, that old fauna was swept away and basically the Australia that we know today was created. I'd argue that that change was due to human impacts. That when Aboriginal people came to Australia they were no better really at it - they were not really adapted to Australian conditions is what I'm trying to say.They would have gone through the same trajectory that Europeans have experienced over the last two centuries.

No organism has that sort of precedence I think of coming to a new environment and knowing exactly what to do to be sustainable - it just doesn't happen and we all have to learn by our mistakes and learn as we go on and I believe Aboriginal people went through that phase forty-five thousand years ago.

The result though was the creation of what we call Australia - largely the spread of eucalypts for example, the role of fire in the Australian environment - these are things that resulted as far as we can tell from that early human settlement.

That period of Aboriginal occupation is so incredibly long by human time scale and had such a profound influence on the Australian environment, that I'd argue that none of us really treat it with the seriousness that it deserves. If you do accept those arguments that Australia has been first created as we know it but then curated, crafted by Aboriginal fire use, by hunting and just by land management over forty-five thousand years, you could see that the removal of that influence, the removal of that influence, that management would by itself have catastrophic effects.

So I would argue that even if Europeans didn't arrive here two hundred and fourteen years ago, but that Aboriginal people had suffered some catastrophe that removed them from the land, we would have seen enormous changes in Australia, many of which I think we see today. They would have been the same - what I'm saying that not everything that has happened in Australia since 1788 in terms of environmental change has been due to the Europeans, a lot of it has been due to the fact that Aboriginal people have been prevented from managing the country as they did for forty-five thousand years.

The loss of biodiversity in places like the Royal National Park I'd argue are due more to the loss of Aboriginal fire management than to anything Europeans have done, and that National Park has lost its grey kanagaroos, its koalas, its greater gliders, its platypus - it's lost a whole series of species through time, and I think it's due to that lack of Aboriginal management.

There is no sort of steady state for environment - they keep changing all the time, it's not like it's just wilderness out there. The environment is rebounding from events that happened two hundred years ago. There are still trees that were growing and were reproductive at times when there were only Aboriginal people in this land so environments are changing dramatically, they are resulting from the accumulation of history, and that Aboriginal component in the accumulation of history, is a very, very important element I think - it has to be in our thinking about how we come to terms with the nature of this continent and how we ourselves become, if you want, the truly Australian people.

It's funny that for the first couple of centuries, when I think about the Australians for the first perhaps hundred and fifty years here anyway, the great majority of us didn't see ourselves as adapting to Australian conditions - there were different kinds of mind processes in place.

One very strong theme in Australian history was that we would just remake Australia in the European image and would do it by building grand homesteads that were very much like the places we were used to at home. We would introduce animals that were European and plants that were European in an attempt to remake this continent in our own European image.

And people did that even with animals that they knew were pests, things like starlings and foxes which were big problems in the old country, and brought them to Australia perhaps because they were homesick, perhaps because they were trying to remake Australia in a European image.

That attempt to remake Australia as another Europe has been a terrible failure and has brought with it great cost to the Australian environment and was ultimately doomed to failure anyway because you can't recreate Australian soils as European soils, you can't recreate its climate as European climate.

But even those who didn't want necessarily to recreate Europe in Australia felt that they themselves would go home some day and I know my parents spoke about going home to Great Britain as a natural thing. They didn't see this place as home and when you don't see the place you live in as home it's like renting - there's some pretty terrible damage to the real estate and you don't get a guilty conscience about it because you don't really own it - it doesn't have to sustain you forever and you take quite a different view of it.

And along with that sense of going home came another thread I'd say in our consciousness which was really that of seeing changes that the landscape of Australia was making to Australians and reacting very negatively to it.

If you read accounts of nineteenth-century Australia, you see these people migrating from Britain, living very much as if they had been educated in Britain in the enlightenment, being exposed to a very rich cultural life, coming to this wild continent and seeing the continent as a land, if not second-rate, then perhaps just outright degenerate.

You know, this was a place where the monotremes, the platypus and things that were supposedly mammals still laid eggs. And what do you make of those Aboriginals, those black native savages that seem to have barely ascended the first rung on the human hierarchy of the nineteenth-century mind.

This is the way they viewed Australia as being a primitive backward place and there was a real fear that it was the land itself exerting this primitive backwardness. And as those people saw their children (the currency lads and lasses as they were called) grow up bare-footed, uneducated in the English sense but intensely at home in the Australian bush they saw that degeneration at work and they feared it, and when they went back to the United Kingdom, wherever they'd come from, and discovered that they were colonials, realised just colonials no longer British but colonials, they realised that Australia was working some sort of magic on them, it was transforming in ways they didn't like.

And yet looking back on it today I think we can see that transformation as being the beginning of a very long process that will ultimately create a truly Australian people and a truly Australian society. At the heart of that process has to be a sense of environmental sustainability because without that, without the sense that we can live here in the long term, we'll have the mind-set of renters not owners of property.

Most of us realise there is nowhere else to go to now, there is no other home, this is it and yet we're not living here sustainably. If you look at what's happening in terms of salination, destruction of Australian soils, of global climate change which is admittedly a much bigger problem than just the national one, but a little bit our stance in terms of Kyoto protocols and with the immense threat that global climate change poses to Australia.

Look at different land practices, look even at our love of these exotic trees that don't necessarily support native birds and butterflies and other insects. We'd have to say that we're not living sustainably in Australia.

Ultimately we'll run out of accumulated capital if we don't change the way we do business here. So there I think are the challenges for us today - how we gain that sense of genuine Australian-ness? How do we come to terms with environmental sustainability? How will our culture adapt to be shaped by the Australian environment?

Clearly some advances have been made there, in a sense Australian mateship I see as the very first significant modification of our culture to come to terms with Australian conditions.

You know mateship is there because this is such a tough country, if we don't stand together and share things through the worst of times we just won't survive. Aboriginal cultures have very, very similar practices embedded in them that helped Aboriginal people survive through that forty-five thousand years.

There are many new changes happening today. Australia now is really part of a truly global society and in no part of Australia is that more true than here in Sydney. This really is a place that's exposed to the world and therefore is not entirely dependent I'd argue on the native ground of Australia to provide its sustenance, but nevertheless is dependent on Australia for things like its water, clean air and those sort of things.

So I guess I tried to sum up in my mind what this general view of Australia and its position might mean to a group like the National Trust and I can see that there's a bit of a danger that many people might look at the European heritage that the Trust is charged with caring for and see that as part of an imperfect Australia if you want, a period in time when people were less in tune with nature here when they were being more damaging.

They may see the Trust perhaps as part of history in a way rather than part of the future. And I think that is a very unfair assessment of the situation.

As I said in the beginning of this talk, it seems to me that the National Trust has an enormously important role in informing us where we've come from and what we are, and perhaps it's by turning that particular lens to interpretation, to education in the areas that are involved with that, that this organisation can perhaps fend off some of those potential challenges.

But anyway that's something very much for your organisation in due time and not for me to talk about. I think I'll close there and take questions if we still have time.