The century of extraction (the taking, in order)

The Sunshine Coast you can drive across today is not a natural landscape with people added on top. It is a landscape people made, unmade and partly remade, and almost every view records what was done to get it. Set against the deep time the rest of these guides are measured in, the whole European period is the camera-click at the end. Yet into that single click, after a custodianship tens of thousands of years deep, came a short, violent century of extraction. That century, usefully, was orderly. It took the most valuable things first, so the sequence of the taking still lies legible in the ground.

The cedar went almost immediately, because it was worth the most. Red cedar was the “red gold” of the colonial cabinet trade, and it grows scattered singly through the scrub rather than in stands, so the cedar-getters had to hunt the whole forest to find it. They did, ranging ahead of nearly all other settlement, floating the giants out downstream on the floods, until in a few decades they had cut out nearly every mature tree in the district. (The tree’s own story is told in the red cedar guide.) The hoop-pine loggers followed them in. And then came the clearing proper, for a reason that decided everything else: the scrub stood on the richest soil on the coast, the deep red basalt of the range, and once the timber was gone that earth was the prize. The felling and burning that followed went fast. Within a single working life the great scrub of the Blackall Range went from a closed forest thousands of years old to a scatter of steep-gully remnants, its red soil handed to dairy paddocks, small crops and townships, one of the swiftest and most complete conversions of a whole ecosystem in the region’s history.

Then the lowlands, the forests and the sea, each in its turn. The fertile floodplains were cleared and, above all, drained: dug through with channels and turned to cane and pasture on the confident assumption that a drained swamp was an improved one. The open eucalypt forests were thinned, grazed and logged. Offshore, the humpback whales were hunted along this coast almost to nothing, a whaling station working on nearby Moreton Island into the early 1960s. And in the estuaries the native shellfish reefs were dredged and harvested out of existence so thoroughly, more than ninety per cent gone by the early 1900s, that we forgot they had ever been there.

The living animals of the land were mined as surely as the trees, and none more brutally than the koala, which in the early twentieth century was a commodity, killed in vast numbers for its dense fur and sold under other names to buyers who would not knowingly wear a koala. Queensland was the trade’s last stronghold, and it ended in one notorious spasm. In 1927 the state declared an open season lasting a single month. The figures deserve care, because the true number is the larger one. Around six hundred thousand skins were sold. But sold is not the same as killed, and once the spoiled, the unsold and the orphaned young are counted, perhaps eight hundred thousand animals died in the episode still remembered as “Black August.” That is a koala killed somewhere in the state roughly every three seconds, around the clock, for thirty-one days. The brush-tailed possums went the same way, in their millions, for the same trade, the forests emptied of their animals even as the axe emptied them of their trees.

The public outrage that followed Black August helped finish the fur trade and pushed the koala toward protection, but the animal never regained its old abundance, and that is the pattern of the century: it did not so much end as get reined in. Extraction was only half the upheaval. The other half was addition, a new cast of imported players, and that story belongs to the things we let loose. But the taking left its own signature, dated and specific. A green range with rainforest surviving only in the gullies too steep to clear is the big scrub, felled for its timber and its soil. A dead-straight drain leading off a flat paddock is a wetland caught in the act of being killed, generations ago. A lone, massive old gum in a field of younger trees is a survivor of the original forest, left for shade. Every one is an entry in a ledger of taking, and most of that history is recent enough to still be reversible.