The things we let loose

Extraction was only half the upheaval on this coast. The cedar carried off, the scrub felled, the swamps drained — that taking-away has a twin easy to overlook, precisely because it looks like the opposite of loss. The colonists took from the country; they also stocked it, busily and with the best intentions, filling the new place with the familiar species of home and with anything thought useful or pleasant. “Acclimatisation,” they called it, and it felt like generosity. It reached as far as the axe ever did. An introduced species does its damage by replacement, taking a native’s place in country that had no defences ready for it.

The most infamous arrival is the cane toad, and it earns its infamy. It was brought to Queensland in 1935 to eat the beetles that plagued the sugar cane, the crop that then ruled this very coast, milled at Nambour and hauled to the coastal railheads. It was released with high hopes and no caution at all, and it proved almost perfectly useless at the one job it was hired for and spectacularly good at everything else. It bred in prodigious numbers, and it carried in its skin a poison the continent’s predators had never had to survive. The quolls, goannas and snakes that tried to eat it died for their trouble. The story is often told loosely, and the correction matters: the original 1935 releases were up in the far north, around Gordonvale, not here. The toads reached the South-East later, by their own slow, poisonous spread, a tide still advancing across the continent today.

Then came the fox and the cat. The European red fox and the domestic cat gone wild in the bush became, between them, the most damaging introduced predators the Australian fauna has met. They are fast, sharp-toothed night hunters that do not need to be hungry to kill, loosed on animals whose way of life had been built with no such enemy in mind. They fell hardest on the ground the country could least afford to lose. The small and medium mammals, the bandicoots and potoroos and their kin, sat squarely in the size range a fox or a cat finds easiest to take, and much of the quiet emptying of that middle-sized mammal fauna across the region is their work. (Rabbits, deer, feral pigs, the mosquitofish slipped into the creeks: the list runs long.)

The plants came too, and some have made over whole landscapes. Lantana, a pretty garden ornamental first recorded here around 1841, now smothers cleared and disturbed ground across the region in dense, thorny thickets that shade out everything beneath them. Camphor laurel, brought in as a handsome shade and street tree around 1822, seeds itself into old pasture and gully and grows up into weed-forests standing where rainforest should be. Both are now so common that a newcomer might take them for native bush. The green is not always the country’s own.

Which is the reading skill this chapter of the history hands you, and a useful one. A wall of lantana is not the land healing itself. It is the land disturbed and then colonised by an import, the green scar tissue of ground cleared and never grown back to what it was. A stand of camphor laurel in a gully is disturbance made visible. Learning to tell the borrowed green from the country’s own is among the more valuable things a reader of this coast can do, because between the imported predators, the imported grazers and the imported weeds, the settlers replaced large parts of the region’s ecology with something hardier, blander and borrowed. Much of the patient work of caring for this coast now, pulling the lantana and felling the camphor and baiting the foxes and holding the line for the mammals that are left, is the long labour of undoing what was let loose.