Institute of Advanced Studies

Deserts, prophets and savage scarlet hills: ecology, resilience and global change

by Dr Libby Robin, Australian National University and National Museum of Australia, Canberra

In the 1890s, Henry Lawson suggested that farming ‘mongrel country’ might forge a positive Australian identity.

In 1939, as the world was about to enter the second great war of the twentieth century, AD Hope wrote his poem Australia. In it he linked ‘savage scarlet hills’ and Australia’s national creative spirit. This theme was picked up in 1972 by Geoffrey Serle, who took the title for his cultural history of the Australian creative imagination, From Deserts the Prophets Come, from Hope’s poem.  In each of these studies, the Australian desert is a metaphor, a way to consider national distinctiveness. The desert outback was a crucible for a national creative spirit. The creativity, however, was nurtured in the cities of the coast, not out on ‘the dying earth’.

In this talk, I want to consider more precisely the imagination generated by the desert in the ecological understandings of arid Australia. As part of a project that explores the way place can shape science, I trace the history of scientific work in the Australian arid zone in the second half of the twentieth century. Rangeland ecology emerged as a force around the time Serle’s great cultural history was written in the early 1970s. A more recent notion, Desert Knowledge, builds on rangeland ecology and other forms of knowledge, all of them embedded in place, and uses these knowledges to maintain communities in remote areas, to enable people to live among the savage scarlet hills, not to retreat from them to other places.

Our new post-national, indeed, global era provides a very different context for examining the knowledge of place. Ecology itself has moved onto the broadest possible canvas, the whole planet. Nonetheless, it is possible to trace a history of ideas that links place-based insights drawn from the Australian desert with western science’s current conceptions of global environmental change.