Knowing the Rangelands of Western New South Wales: the Past in the Changing Present.

Abstract

There is growing competition for the resources of Australia's rangelands. This competition is spreading from traditional users, like pastoralists, to increasingly include interests in the wider community. The way that the history of the rangelands is represented is important to the way these interests are perceived, articulated and reconciled. Popular (and much academic) writing on the past European use of the rangelands remains bogged in a tradition that stresses simplistic themes of careless destruction. The 1901 New South Wales Royal Commission into the Condition of the Crown Tenants is oftp seen as a seminal document in the history of the understanding of the rangelands. The Royal Commission was not, though, a starting point of sophisticated knowledge of the rangelands. Rather, it was an important articulation of an existing tradition of knowledge. The Commission was, furthermore, a product of widespread local understanding, activism and support for reform in western New South Wales. The European management of the rangelands from its earliest decades has been the result of informed struggle - not wanton ignorance. To clearly see this is to see the possibility that today's competition for resources contains no villains either. Moreover, to accept this past knowledgeability may challenge elements of our modern commitment to accruing knowledge, particularly the assumption that better knowledge will lead to better management.