Hands in pockets: Cultural environments of the Atherton Tablelands of the past 1,500 years

Abstract

The Atherton Tablelands of North Queensland have been a productive environment for Australian Quaternary research. One of the key issues raised by research here is the role of people in prehistoric fire regimes and vegetation change. However, much of the discussion of Pleistocene human impacts on North Queensland environments is based on inadequate knowledge of past human activities due to the scarcity of archaeological data. This situation is in contrast to the late Holocene period, when more abundant archaeological evidence indicates the development of a distinctive rainforest Aboriginal culture, as was also ethnographically observed in the contact period. Several questions remain about the development of this rainforest culture against the palaeoecological context of expanding postglacial rainforest, and the role of people in shaping the configuration of vegetation across the region. While the archaeological evidence fails to conclusively identify significant modification of environment during the late Holocene occupation of rainforest, the palaeoecological evidence similarly fails to conclusively attribute Pleistocene environmental change to anthropogenic causes. An important factor underlying the linkage between human activity and vegetation change is that of scale, both temporal and spatial. Given the environmental and cultural heterogeneity of the rainforest region of North Queensland an understanding of the spatial scale of human activity and its effects is crucial. Understanding of the temporal resolution of human activities and their aggregation in longer term palaeoecological and archaeological records is also a significant barrier to broader understandings of the human dimension to Australian landscapes. Due to the insufficient resolution of archaeological and palaeoecological data it is unlikely that the scalar characteristics of human interaction with rainforest environments can be directly understood from prehistory. By focusing instead on the recent and historical period a finer examination of the impacts of both Aboriginal rainforest occupation and the well documented post-contact European activities in these rainforest landscapes may be possible. Analysis of historical and ethnographic records has allowed identification of the characteristics of Aboriginal use and modification of the Atherton Tableland rainforest landscape, and the disruption to such use by the arrival of European explorers, miners, timber-getters, and selectors from 1875. It is apparent from this analysis that the human interaction with rainforest has varied considerably across the region, and that generalisation of environmental change from a limited suite of sites is likely to mask significant finer scale variability and diversity in rainforest landscapes and the interaction of people with them. Historical sources also reveal significant spatial characteristics to both Indigenous and European uses of the rainforest landscape, and emphasise the cultural importance of place, a factor difficult to derive from palaeoecological records of human-environment interaction. The historical record establishes a strong connection between Aboriginal occupation of North Queensland rainforests and the use of open pockets of sclerophyll vegetation within the rainforest matrix. Open pockets were also the focal points of initial European occupation of the rainforest. These pockets were therefore cultural places delineated by their anomalous vegetation, and have provided a focus for further investigating the properties of Aboriginal and European interaction with the rainforest landscape. Many of the more significant open pockets of the Atherton Tableland have been dramatically altered by the growth of townships or by flooding following the construction of Tinaroo Dam, but several remain relatively unaffected by European development. Palaeoecological analysis of sediments derived from Noopah Pocket and Mooma Pocket in the central region of the Atherton Tableland has been employed to investigate their recent to late Holocene environmental history and association with human activity. Results of palaeoecological analyses indicate further complexity to the relationship between people, rainforest and climate than has previously been revealed by analysis of crater deposits on the Atherton Tableland. Both Mooma Pocket and Noopah Pocket have been characterised by open vegetation types in the late Holocene, and macrocharcoal records indicate the presence of low levels of burning in the pockets prior to European arrival. It appears likely that Aboriginal use of these spaces included infrequent burning of the grass understorey, without further significant effect on vegetation patterns. In contrast, the European use of the open pockets included the clearing and burning of surrounding rainforest over several decades, a practice that is clearly represented in the palaeoecological records. The effects of this practice were also manifested in changes to the vegetation of the open pockets themselves, which appear to relate to the hydrological effects of rainforest clearing. Finer scale variations in recent climate are also shown to have coincided with the beginnings of European clearing of rainforest, a correlation that may have hastened or magnified the environmental change. These results have implications for understanding the recent history and prehistory of the rainforest region, as well as for the contextualisation of the interaction between people and rainforest deeper into prehistory.