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Book Review
| Anthony Scott, Tuggerah Lakes Way Back When ..., Sydney, Sainty and Associates, 2002. pp. 217. $39.95 paper.
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| This book traces the environmental and human history of Tuggerah Lakes on the NSW Central Coast, from the Aboriginal owners through successive waves of white settlers, fishermen, holiday makers and finally suburbanites. It is a story which might be told about many of the lakes along the NSW Coast. In compiling this book, Anthony Scott demonstrates the importance of environmental history in our quest to understand the past as well as the future and explores the interplay and relationship between people and their environments. People's lives were/are intimately and utterly bound up with their environments, and those environments are not merely inert backdrops to human actions, they are dynamic, they change over years or overnight, and they shape human behaviour and conditions. |
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Scott is a scientist with CSIRO Land & Water working on Australian environmental history, and one of the aims of this book is to integrate science and history. So what does history written by an ecologist look like? |
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Scott's project is a wonderful and valuable one. Whereas ecological science has often shunned local knowledge as 'invalid', Scott's purpose is to recover communal environmental memory via oral history interviews with long-time residents and retired professional fishermen. These people, he says, are 'a most valuable source of information' for they 'provide a better understanding and appreciation of the ecology of Tuggerah Lakes'. Yet there is also unresolved tension about the real value of such evidence. Even before the book begins, a longish qualifier acknowledges the 'uncertainty' of oral testimony, stating that it cannot 'settle our questions'; only 'further scientific research' can do that. This suggests that, in the end, science and history cannot be integrated, though paradoxically, this is what Scott is trying to do. |
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The research is impressive — besides the excellent and accessible scientific information and explanations, the interviews are set alongside newspaper reports, local history, Fisheries Inspectors' reports, photographs and maps. Scott reproduces such vivid descriptions of the beautiful place that was: 'The Entrance was a place where nothing could be heard but the sound of the black swans and the moaning of the wind through the swamp oaks' (C. Swancott, 1933, see p. 84) — but was this really a land untouched by people? Many of the oral histories tell of the sheer abundance of lakes and land — they were literally teeming with fish and birdlife. There are treasures like the mind-maps drawn by retired fisherman Arthur Clouten showing how the lakes have changed over a single lifetime. Tuggerah Lakes people show themselves to be remarkably environmentally aware and well-informed on the impacts of residential and industrial development on their lakes. Yes, they disagree on causes and effects, they wonder about the questions of causation (did we do this? Or are we seeing longer natural cycles?) but, then again, so do scientists. What is also strongly evident is that this is a place in the heart for these people, and for the author. Thus the research has the makings of the sort of new environmental history written by historians like Peter Read, Tom Griffiths, Libby Robin, Mark McKenna and others — the environmental history which crosses between science and human experience. |
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Unfortunately, this potential is not realised. The methodological approach is that of science (though I guess science writers like Tim Flannery would strongly disagree!). Whereas historians tend to seek out and explore contradictions, here the search is for consistency, as if this is an experiment with repeatable outcomes. Inconsistency is seen as a failure, invalidating the evidence. While historians seeks to synthesise and interpret, usually employing analytical narrative, apart from a brief historical overview at the start, Scott anatomises Tuggerah Lakes' history into various aspects of the natural environment ('seagrasses and algae', 'nutrient pollution', 'fishing', 'prawning' and so on). He uses a strange cut-and-paste approach to presenting the evidence — a bit like a very well-organised scrapbook. For example, the chapter on seagrasses and algae is broken down into 'early references' (dutifully reproduced), the different types of seaweeds, the smell problems, weed in Lake Munmorah and so on. Each of these topics in turn has a short introductory paragraph followed by the relevant extracts from oral testimonies (undigested and lacking context), then reproductions of newspaper articles and finishes with scientific studies and evidence, before moving to the next topic. The result is both tantalisingly rich and quite maddening to read. |
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What is lost in this avoidance of narrative? One example will illustrate: a seemingly unintentional recurring theme is the history of the Darkingung and Awabakal peoples whose country this was. They are formally given only two pages in the book, and this, surprisingly, is cast in a very old fashioned mould: Aborigines were not numerous, 'probably only a few hundred' and because of their 'subsistence lifestyle' would have had 'minimal impact in the environment'. Thus the powerful idea of an untouched land is expressed in the quote from Swancott above; and more recent research on Aboriginal environmental impacts is entirely bypassed. The story moves rapidly through a taken-for-granted scenario: the Europeans brought diseases, there was an 'inevitable clash of cultures'. Its ends in paragraph two because 'By 1875 the last full-blooded aboriginal [sic] of the Wyong district had died'. |
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On the opposite page, though, is the story and a picture of 'Queen Margaret', the last 'full-blooded' Awabakal who died in 1894. The picture was provided by her grandson Ron Williams and she has great-grandchildren too. There are snippets, scattered through the rest of the book, about well-known Aborigines, and corroborees, about the meaning of the name 'Tuggerah' (either 'cold, bleak, exposed', or the gum from the grass tree), and about whites who speared fish and used 'a womerah, the same as the Aborigines did'. Childhood memories of an Aboriginal burial ground in the sandhills near Budgewoi, long destroyed, emerged from Gordon Browne's 1999 testimony (p.210). While the invasion had a catastrophic impact on Aboriginal peoples, clearly there is an post-invasion Aboriginal history of Tuggerah Lakes — and one which was/is entwined with white history. Frustratingly, these remain merely disengaged, curious snippets, so this story is not told. |
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In sum, Tuggerah Lakesis a terrific source book for the history and ecology of lakes systems and the direction and thoroughness of the research is to be applauded. However, as history it is truly a missed opportunity. The book indicates that we need genuine collaborative work between scientists and historians to fulfil this potential, to tell the stories of people and country we need to hear. |
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| University of New South Wales |
GRACE KARSKENS | |
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