The continuing education of an ecologist

Margaret Friedel

CSIRO

Alice Springs

On being introduced as an Alice Springs resident some years ago, whilst visiting Adelaide, I was asked quite sharply “What would you want to live there for?”.  I don’t recall my reply (probably inadequate) but I remember a feeling of bafflement.  How do you begin to explain what binds you to place?

I have been privileged to be part of CSIRO’s research endeavours in the arid interior of Australia for over 36 years, and lucky to have encountered many of the region’s research pioneers, who either stayed on or remained staunch supporters of research in the arid zone.  Imagine, as a newly appointed scientist from Melbourne, driving along a dead straight outback road through dark stands of mulga, in the company of Ray Perry and Ralph Slatyer, who between them had decades of knowledge and experience of the country.  Imagine being challenged by ever-combatative Bob Winkworth, CSIRO’s first resident researcher (1953), about what I knew and having to think fast to demonstrate that I knew anything at all.

Picture my first real exposure to the colours of the outback on an introductory drive through Kunoth Paddock in 1974 with Bruce Strong: how red the mulga soil!  While the colour is oh-so-familiar now, it never fails to lift the spirits.  Listen to my first night ever in a swag, camped on Amburla Station with colleagues, eyes glued on the intensely starry night and ears tuned to the foreign sounds of small beetles tooling about in the leaves by my pillow, the creaking call of the katydids in the bushes, and bats clicking overhead.  This then was the beginning on an enduring love of the bush and the need to know something about how it all worked.

Later, with some years of research in arid lands ecology completed, it seemed to me that there was only so much one could learn from studies in current time.  What about the knowledge in the heads of pastoralists who had lived in the country for decades and watched it change?  From tentative interviews and conversations grew some wonderful friendships and a generous store of knowledge about the land, rain and drought, fire, the changes they had seen and their own histories.

Share the excitement and interest of mustering camps, laugh until you cry with Wallaby Bill Waudby and workmates over a few rums then a camp on the Mt Wedge Station cricket ground, visit respectfully some remarkable Aboriginal art sites and try to imagine the individual people who worked the delicate edges on the stone tools scattered by waterholes.  How did they see the country?  Where are their people now?

Over twenty years or so my understanding of arid lands ecology grew, in part through my own work, but significantly also through the work and insights of others.  Vegetation quadrats were a small sample of a vegetation unit, which was closely linked to other units, interconnected through the lie of the land and the flow of water, nutrients and organic matter.  By closely observing the evidence, it was possible to see where the wind had blown the soil, where the water had washed it, where it had come from and how recently.  And why were the vegetation units where they were?  Look at the evidence of palaeofloods, the shifting and dumping of soils on a scale we have never experienced and yet may in time.  Understand more recent changes by reading the early explorers’ diaries and seeing what they say about Aboriginal people, fire and flood, and native plants and animals.  Appreciate the work of colleagues on remote sensing and what it can tell us about change in complex spatial mosaics.

In conversations with pastoralist friends, I began to have an uneasy feeling that what I had learnt was fine in its way but was unlikely to have a major impact on how land was managed.  On Mt Riddock Station, Dick Cadzow was generously showing us over rehabilitation work on his recently acquired property we were about to study.  I had assumed he was seeking a purely economic return from the work, but I was wrong.  That he was offended by the sight of dust blowing past his homestead was an eye-opener.  The assumptions we make about value systems of others as well as the economic benefits and costs of environmental work came increasingly in focus.

A hands-on study of how best to make land use tradeoffs amongst diverse groups – Aboriginal people, pastoralists, miners, conservationists, horticulturalists – was a sharp and sometimes painful lesson.  Dealing with others’ closely held values could result in confrontation but also enlightenment (and recognition of the inadequacy of some of our tools).  A study of community-based decision-making for regional development was similarly challenging but failed to deter me entirely.  Clearly the messiest and hardest part of implementing ecological knowledge is at the human interface but, unless we tackle it, we are likely to be talking to ourselves.  Subsequently, with many colleagues, I have grappled with diverse attitudes to commercially valuable plants that are invasive, trying to find a way through to better management and better policy development.  Perhaps it’s a function of being around a long time and being a bit battle-scarred, but respectful listening, careful observation and thinking time seem to me to be essential tools of an ecologist.

In closing, I want to acknowledge two groups of people.  The first is family, whose support has been endless, and critical to finding a work-life balance.  The second is all my wonderful colleagues.  You are too numerous for me to start mentioning names but hopefully you can recognise yourselves.  Thankyou for all those nights around the campfire and the slog of fieldwork in the heat and cold, as well as the energetic workshops and the stimulus of shared paper-writing.  Thanks too to colleagues in South Africa, the USA and India, and to students who have diverted me more recently from administration to study fire-invasion feedbacks in central Australia and the implications of land tenure policy for land and herders in Mongolia.  I can’t wait to see what happens next.