Sample from the Spring 1997 Program 
Rainforest Live! Topic Essays from Queensland, Australia
From the week ending April 25, 1997

Soil, Forest and Land Exploitation in North Queensland, Australia:
A Cultural Perspective
by Michael Billings

Under the former leadership of Sir Joseph Bjelke Peterson, a member of the National Party and the Premier of Queensland, environmental exploitation increased through development of land for buildings. In some cases he has been pictured clearing his land of trees with a bulldozer. There has also been an increase in timbering and mining in Queensland. All of these activities exploit and degrade soil, forest and land resources.

Speaking with an Aborigine of the local community, I found that there has been much resentment against the Aborigines in the political system in the past which can still be seen today, especially in some older Australians. This resentment was shown through different ways the government has dealt with the Aborigines, i.e. withholding land from them, changing laws to deny Aborigines of some of their rights, and more. In the end the government took land from the Aborigines owners for its own use.

However, with a new Premier the exploitation of resources has lessened and Aborigines are trying to get back their land they worked so hard to conserve for centuries. The conservation practices of the Aborigines, like other indigenous peoples, do not exploit resources. The government should look at Aborigine practices and use their knowledge of the land when trying to find new ways to use resources and handle land management.

After speaking with the Aborigines, I felt that in many ways we are the same. Yet while the Aborigines have remained in touch with nature, we have lost touch with it by becoming too involved in maintaining our industrial society.  

 

Bird Communities in the Toohey's Creek Corridor Zone
by John Grant, Faculty, Ecologist

This semester we are continuing a project that aims to monitor the use of the riparian corridor, which is being planted along Toohey’s Creek. This corridor, when complete, will connect Lake Barrine National Park, a forest fragment, with Gadgarra State Forest, a large area of continuous forest. The corridor will run along Toohey’s Creek for the one kilometer that separates these forest areas. By monitoring the bird communities in the two forest areas and developing replantings along the creek, we hope to discover how useful this corridor is as a tool for easing the effects of isolation suffered by bird populations in forest fragments. We use point census counts and mistnetting to find out which birds use different parts of the corridor zone. By comparing lists from different sites, we can see which bird species are using all parts of the area and which are most selective. Some birds live only in the rainforest so they may not be found in the replanted areas yet, which are at most two years old. Nor will they move across the open country between Barrine and Gadgarra. These species are mostly unique to the Wet Tropics region of Northeast Queensland, and are therefore a priority for local conservation. Hence, we are using these species as one indicator of success of the corridor—if they eventually use it to move between Barrine and Gadgarra, the corridor will serve a purpose in connecting populations which otherwise would be isolated. Some changes in bird use of the area are already noticeable, for example about ten species of forest birds are now feeding in the two-year-old planting, whereas a year ago most of the birds found there were grassland or open country species.