Illustrated Transcript

Presented and Narrated by Dr Tim Flannery

Author of the Future Eaters

Narration: Australasia is the most isolated and

distinctive region, on earth.At its heart is the
world's largest island - Australia. A continent
born out of barren earth worn down by wind
and water for an infinity before man. But since
the time humans arrived, a new element has
shaped this land.

Fire has been the destroyer, and the creator of

life here -in a cycle that goes on to this day.

Narration: This region more than any other

has been transformed, by humans. By the first
arrivals - the Aborigines of Australia. By the
Maori of New Zealand, who came from
Polynesia in great ocean going canoes - and
by the people who followed in the wake of
Captain Cook -the latest to set foot on these
shores - the third and final wave of the people I
call the future eaters.

Tim Flannery
Author of 'The Future Eaters'

Flannery:
"The thing that sets us apart from the people
of the old world - is that we are all invaders.
We're colonisers - from three great waves of
human invasion into this region and I believe
all Australasians share something else in Tim Flannery
common - we are all Future Eaters. Together
we've so upset the balance of life here that we
threaten the very land that support us and
through that our own survival."

Narration: Our story begins here, in Australia.

A vast stage - upon which life has led it's own
distinctive, evolutionary dance.This land is
dominated by creatures that have survived
nowhere else on the planet. Platypus
swimming, koala in tree We all recognise
these improbable animals today, but what
made them so different? - and how was our
natural history changed when humans first
arrived here?

Flannery:
"I'm setting out on a journey across this land,
but what I'm really trying to do is travel back in
time.

That's because much of this story happened

so long ago, that it's difficult to find evidence to
support it. But all over this country, in it's plant,
in it's animals, in it's rocks, you find clues as to
the way things were. And from that we can Tim Flannery
start to tell about the forces that shaped this
country, the things that made Australia what it
is today"

Narration: All the lands of Australasia have

developed from the earliest times, as worlds
apart. 90 million years ago the ancient
continent of Gondwana began to fragment.
Tasmantis broke off first, to form New Zealand,
and New Caledonia.

Narration:Then, Meganesia - floating on a

massive continental crust formed New Guinea,
Tasmania, and the great continent of Australia.
In an evolutionary sense, Australia is a unique
experiment. On every other continent the
'placental' mammals, big energy users like
lions, elephants - and even humans, have won
the evolutionary race.

But here, in a race for extreme energy

efficiency, these creatures, marsupials like the
kangaroos - have evolved to a position of
pre-eminence.

The largest marsupial in the world, is the red

kangaroo. No other animal this big hops - but
hopping allows the kangaroo to recapture the
energy of each bound, in the tendons of its
legs.

The force of each leap pushes its gut back,

drawing air into its lungs - saving it from using
chest muscles to breath. Hopping has made
the kangaroo one of the most energy efficient
travellers on the planet.
Uluru - Central Australia
The special conditions that drove this quest for
energy efficiency are most apparent here - in
the so called dead heart of the continent. This
land has such old and poor soil that if you're
not efficient you don't survive.

Flannery: "If you wanna understand the

history of this continent there's no better place
to come than here Uluru the timeless rounded
features of the rock show that it just hasn't
been disturbed for hundreds of millions of
years, there's been no volcanoes, no mountain
building, no ice age here to rejuvenate this
place and as a result the soil here is old, Tim Flannery
leeched and exhausted all that's left really is Uluru, Central Australia
just sand."
Narration: The roots of Australia's infertility lie
in its thick crust. It hasn't crumpled to form
mountains, or been punctured by volcanoes.

Most importantly the ice age was unkind to

Australia. There were no glaciers to grind the
rocks, and release the elements that life
depends on.

Instead, the land lay comatose. Its nutrients

have been slowly leaching, and blowing away - Australian Native Flower
for eons.It's one of natures great paradoxes,
that the poorest ground supports the greatest
bio-diversity.

The infertile soils of Western Australia give life

to over ten thousand species. In this heathland
known as kwongan, there aren't enough
resources for these plants to overwhelm each
other - so they're forced to co-exist.

Flannery: "These soils are so poor that

strongly competitive species just haven't been
able to dominate, instead we've got this
fantastic biodiversity and a most peculiar
biodiversity it is too, yes these plants are so
adapted to the infertility of the place that the
common garden fertiliser you throw on your
garden to make it grow will actually kill them." Kangaroo Paw

Narration: The plants of the heathland have

had to developed intimate relationships with
insects and other animals - for their survival.

The scarlet banksia lures the tiny honey

possum with it's abundant nectar. This
marsupial is the only mammal to depend
entirely on flowers for its food - and as it feeds,
it polinates the plants of the heathland.
Honey Dew Possum
But how can such a rich ecosystem have
grown out of such adversity?

Prof. Mike Archer

University of New South Wales

Mike Archer: "The colossal levels of

bio-diversity that characterise the Australian
heath some the what looks to be most
inhospitable, infertile-type country has to do
with this unique Australian response to the
these environments. The soils were very
nutrient-poor. But that enabled little pockets of Prof. Mike Archer
animals and plants to start to develop as
unique things in a hundred thousand different
places."

Narration: Here, nature has been turned on

it's head. Plants, have even become predators
- like the pitcher plant which lures insects into
it's specially evolved trap - where they are
consumed in the plants own juices.

Even more extraordinary are the sundews -

they've evolved movement to actively capture
their prey, and extract the minerals that the soil Sundews
is unable to yield.

Flannery: Australia's plants and animals have

been so successful in dealing with the infertility
of this continent, that often they've created
what amounts to a grand illusion, and nowhere
is that more apparent than here in the
rainforest.

Narration: In northern Queensland, the rich

tropical forests of are home to Australia's
greatest bio-diversity Tree kangaroos have
only recently left their ground dwelling
relatives. Now they forage in the safety of the
rainforest canopy. The bizarre mating dance of
the rifle bird is just one of the many
extravagant displays of life in this living Eden.

On the forest floor, the brush turkey builds it's

mound. It's one of the few birds that uses heat
generated by the decomposing litter, to
incubate its eggs.

The same rotting leaf litter releases the

Brush Turkey
essentials for life so rapidly, that nothing has
the chance to escape.

It makes the rainforest one of the most efficient

re-cycling systems ever evolved.

But elsewhere, the quest for efficiency has had

quite a different outcome.
Flannery:
"They say that the eye's are the windows to
the soul, but really they lead straight to the
brain, and the brain of the koala tells a story of
evolutionary woe that you just wouldn't
believe."

Narration:In the eucalypt forest, a koala and

her young cub search for the tender new
growth that make up their entire diet.

But eucalypt leaves are so full of dangerous

chemicals and so low in nutrients, that the
koala has evolved to be one of the greatest
energy misers, of all time.

It moves slowly and has a low reproductive

rate, but it's made one even greater sacrifice.

Flannery: "Marsupials are notorious for having

tiny brains, but the koala has really gone out
on a limb because it's the only mammal on
earth whose brain doesn't fit its skull, 40% of
the space inside there is just fluid, and that's
because the brain is a real extravagance. It
takes more energy to run than any other organ
in the body. And the koala has traded brain Wombat
power for survival".

Narration: Australia's three species of wombat

are the only large herbivores in the world, that
live in burrows.

By spending long periods underground, they

require only a third as much food as a
similar-sized kangaroo. Kangaroos bound off
It's long been believed that the marsupials are
primitive relics -surviving in Australia only
because of its isolation, but on the contrary -
now we're seeing just how well they've
adapted to Australia's demanding conditions.

Prof. Mike Archer

University of New South Wales

Mike Archer: It's entirely possible that

marsupials are better adapted to the kind of
strenuous demands that Australia has placed
on mammals of any... any kind than placental
mammals might have been. They certainly
have an extremely wide, what's called,
"metabolic scope". They're very responsive to
changes in the climate, to temperature.
They're much more tolerant of environmentaly
Prof. Mike Archer
stressful conditions, placentals are fussier
about what they need to survive, that may
have given marsupials an edge. Marsupials
were so successful, that before humans
arrived - Australia was a land of giants.

Narration: Of all the marsupial megafauna,

the largest was Diprotodon. Weighing over a
tonne, it was another energy conserver - with a
tiny brain. music 6 fades out track past
models. Diprotodon model

Diprotodon was just one of sixty species of

megafauna, that once roamed the land. Giant
flightless birds, horned turtles, and at least 20 Diprotodon
kinds of kangaroo. At Flinders university in
Adelaide they're being brought back to life.

Assoc. Prof. Rod Wells.

Flinder's University

Rod Wells: "The interesting thing about the

megafauna is that of course they're all leaf
eaters, or browsers, and that way of life is the
way of life of a junk food eater, um these
animals eat the rubbish plants and as a result
of that they have to be large, // If you have
long legs, you have long stride. // An animal Prof.Rod Wells
the size of Diprotodon, for instance, would Flinder's University
probably move at about 8 to 9 kilometres per
hour."

Narration: The giant short faced kangaroo

was unlike any living species. Indeed, in some
ways it had evolved to resemble humans.

Leigh Milne
Fright 3D Special Effects

Leigh Milne: "It's very tall when it's standing

up, it's higher than a man with a short face,
with bifocal vision, massively thickset, and
Short Faced Kangaroo
performing an action that is unique to these
animals I believe, is that they can raise their
arms above their shoulders, and that's how
they used to grasp vegetation and pull it down
to eat. And so, if you have a thing like this,
stooped, muscular... working through the trees
and the bushes in the early morning, well, you
might well imagine it's a man beast"

Narration: The megafauna thrived in Australia

for millions of years - in fact they were here till
just 60,000 years ago.

Flannery: "It might seem like a far off and

exotic time when giant creatures like these
walked the landscape, but really all of the
native animals that you can see in Australia
today were already in existence by then. You
could have heard the same kookaburras in the
trees, and seen the same lizards and snakes
on the ground. But on top of all of that was this
magnificent megafauna. As diverse and
spectacular as Africa has today. And the big
question really is what happened to these Tim Flannery Australian
creatures. Well I think they might have gone Museum
on and on if it hadn't been for a new species
developing in far off Africa - and that species
was us".

Narration: Our ancestors began their long

journey out of Africa - over a hundred
thousand years ago.

They were the product of a different

evolutionary race - a tooth and claw fight with
the fiercest predators on the planet.

Travelling eastwards, they eventually reached

South East Asia - an island realm rich in
coastal resources - where they lived from the
bounty of the sea.

The need to harvest marine life - like turtle

eggs, from off shore islands -would have been
the incentive that drove them, to develop the
worlds first water craft

An invention essential to the next stage of their

migration.

In what is now eastern Indonesia, they

reached the edge of the world they knew -
there a water barrier, almost one hundred
kilometres of open sea, stood before them.
Aerial track from headland to sea,

No-one can be certain when humans first

crossed that water barrier - the sea that
isolated Meganesia from the rest of the world.
The best estimate is between 40 and 60
thousand years ago - a time when Australia
and New Guinea were still joined

The first humans to enter what is now New

Guinea, would have been astonished by the
fauna.

They'd never have seen huge flightless birds

like the cassowary before - nor marsupials, like
the cuscus.

At first they lived by hunting and gathering in Cassowary

the dense rainforest.

As these Aboriginal migrants moved into the

highlands of New Guinea they found rich
volcanic soils.

Here they settled for the first time. They

became some of the worlds earliest farmers -
domesticating and cultivating plants from the
forest, and giving the world key food crops like
taro, and sugar cane.

This new settled way of life allowed them to

develop sophisticated societies - whose
culture has some of the most spectacular of all
human rituals.

Living in balance with nature, their traditional

way of life survives even today.
Rising sea levels divided New Guinea from
Australia just 10,000 years ago.

But long before then, perhaps as much as

60,000 years ago, people had already moved
south.

These first Australians, would have

encountered some of the most fearsome cold
blooded carnivores, since the age of the
dinosaurs.

The largest reptile of all was a relative of the Lace Monitor

lace monitor - the seven meter long,
Megalania.

Narration: For millions of years the

megafauna had survived with these giant
predators - but they had no defences against
man.

Flannery: "To Australia's megafauna this was

a deadly weapon.... and that's because these
huge creatures were built for supreme energy
efficiency, they were slow moving and despite
their enormous heads they had tiny brains, but
worst of all they'd evolved for millions of years
in an ecosystem where nothing like humans
had ever existed and that made them naive,
they had no fear of human hunters"

Narration: The new arrivals had evolved in

competition with the great predators of the
African savanna - but it was only when they
entered Meganesia, that their language and
stone tools gave them a decisive advantage.

They had left behind their predators and

diseases, and were about to become all
powerful beings, in a virgin land.

As they moved south - beyond the Arnhem

land plateau, they found game-rich forests and
grasslands - ideal for hunting the vast herds of
megafauna.
Australia's open landscape would have
enabled people to quickly spread across the
continent - following trails that linked watering
and feeding sites for the megafauna.

The ancestors of the Aborigines had stumbled

across, what appeared to be - a land of plenty.

The prey they feasted on was large and tame,

and easily hunted.

I think it's possible, that these people could

have unleashed a wave of extinctions - across
the entire continent.

Assoc. Prof. Rod Wells.

Flinders University

Rod Wells: "Throughout the world, in the

Pleistocene, we've seen extinction of these
large animals. And that extinction's always
been correlated with the spread of human
beings, across the surface of the globe. And,
of course, the immediate inference is that
humans are the agent responsible for their
extinction. But it's also a period that correlates, Prof. Rod Wells
of course, with major climatic change,
associated with global glaciation. And so
you've got two confounding variables there."

Narration: Was it climate change that killed off

Australia's megafauna, or was it man? It's
probably the hottest issue in Australia's pre
history.

Until recently, it was thought the megafauna

died out, around 20,000 years ago - the height
of the last ice age. But now some intriguing
evidence has turned up out here - in the centre Lake Eyre
of the continent.
Today, Lake Eyre is a salt lake - hostile to just
about all life. It's so hot out here, that the tiny
Lake Eyre dragon walks on it's heels, to avoid
burning it's toes. It feeds on the ants, that
harvest insects - blown onto the baking salt
crust.
Lake Eyre Dragon

But life here hasn't always been so hard.

The lake was once permanently full and

teeming with life - a favoured breeding ground
for the giant flightless bird - Geniornus.

About twice as heavy as today's emu, it's

axe-like beak suggests that it could eat tough
vegetation. It was a member of the
megafauna, that lived along the once lush
shores of Lake Eyre.

Remnants of life from that time, have Geniornus

accumulated here - for the last two hundred
thousand years.

From these bands of sediment, we can tell

what lived here - and when they died.

Flannery "These cliffs preserve a record of

great climate change, the rocks here were
layed down at a time when this lake was full
and was teeming with life, there's even
remains of megafauna here mostly egg shells
of the great extinct bird Genyornis, but the
interesting part of that story is up over here."

If Geniornus died out because of climate

change in the last ice age, then their egg
shells would be here in the top layers of
sediment - laid down 20,000 years ago.

But the shell is only found in the older, lower

layers - going back to a time when the climate
was mild. It suggests that Genironus became
extinct much earlier - at the same time that I
think humans arrived.
Flannery: "This is the piece of an egg shell
laid by one of the last Genyornis ever to live in
this area, it's 60,000 thousand years old which
is about 40,000 years before the great climatic
crisis of the last ice age, which was previously
though to cause the extinction of the
megafauna. It suggests that it was something
earlier which caused the extinction of these
great animals was it the arrival of humans my
guess is that it was and that it occurred
throughout this continent long before climate
change could have ever had an effect on these
animals"

This is the first hard evidence that the arrival of

humans, rather than climate, played the
decisive role in megafaunal extinction.

But it was just the beginning of a cascade of

changes, that would reverberate through
Australia's ecosystems.

The extinction of the megafauna destroyed a

balance between plants and animals, that had
evolved over millions of years - now countless
tonnes of uneaten food covered the land.

Flannery: "If the last of the diprotodons were

dying these vast plains and woodlands and
rainforests were empty but the vegetation
those animals ate was still growing, here,
building up just waiting for that spark that
would set the continent ablaze"

Narration: This place has always been struck

by lightning, but now it ignited huge fires -
fuelled by the built up vegetation.

Fire had always been here in small areas like

the heathlands, but now great walls of flame
swept across the land, threatening the survival
of the smaller animals. A devastating new
force had been unleashed.
It's hard to know what happened next -but
there's evidence in the landscape, that the
nature of the country was dramatically
changed - by fire.

This is just one tiny remnant of the fire

sensitive forests that once covered vast areas
of the continents north, and east.

Flannery: "It's places like these that I think

offer us some clues as to the way Australia
has changed in the past, here a hot fire has
eaten deep into a rainforest and eucalypts are
taking over, and that's the kind of pattern I
think happened again and again over northern
and eastern Australia when fire was first let
loose on this continent."

Narration: Rainforests are killed by fire, but

the Eucalypts had evolved in the fire prone
areas, and they thrived on it.

In an unholy alliance with fire, the eucalypts

spread across the continent - destroying the
original forests, creating the Australian
landscape we know today.
I think the triumph of the eucalypts was to
change, even the climate of the continent. The
original forests had acted like a sponge -
storing huge quantities of moisture, and
transpiring it back into the atmosphere. This
allowed the monsoon rains to penetrate
hundreds of kilometres south. The rains fed a
permanent river system, that flowed inland -
filling the lakes at the heart of the continent.
They were a haven for great hosts of birds.
Pelicans, cormorants, stilts, all came here to
breed - in their millions.

Narration: It was clearly a different

environment from what you see today. John
Magee has been studying the climate record
here - dating back to the time when Lake Eyre
was permanently full.

John Magee
Australian National University

Magee: "A lake is a bit like a rain gauge for the John McGee
continent it represents moisture that's coming into
the continent from the monsoon and early in this
phase of sediments that we see in this cliff which
start back at 120,000 years ago we see a very full
lake and a lake that was obviously supporting a lot
of wildlife, the rivers must have been perennially
flowing from Qld into here"

Narration: But how did Australia's great inland

sea, become a dry

Magee: "One possible explanation is that

changes in the vegetation in the catchments
up in the monsoon area has prevented
effective penetration of the moisture form the
monsoon into those catchments."

Narration: The newly established eucalypt

forests couldn't retain water - rain was no
longer carried inland - the rivers stopped
flowing.

The arrival of humans had sent the land

spiralling out of control.

Fire storms ravaged the country.

Plants, animals and resources were being

destroyed - and people faced dramatic climate
change.

It was a world that should be familiar to

modern Australians.

Narration: The story of how the first future

eaters recovered from this disaster - is one of
humanities greatest triumphs.

Flannery: "About 20 kilometres up this road

here is Oenpelli, in Arhnem Land. And that's
the place where Aboriginal culture has
survived, least influenced, over the last 200
years. And there we can get some real insights
into how people have lived in this continent for
tens of thousands of years, before Europeans
ever arrived here."
Narration: In time, the way Aboriginal people
learned to live with the land - would give rise to
an entirely new, and radically different human
culture.
Aboriginal Rock Art, Arhnem
Land

Narration: The Aborigines who live at

Oenpelli, believe their ancestors arrived here
from the north, carried across the seas by
Yingana - the creation mother.

Flannery: "Wow that's amazing isn't it

fantastic, I've never seen anything like that
before" Aboriginal rock art, and religion, are Rock Painting in Arnhem Land
among the oldest on the planet.

Flannery: "This is stunning there must be

hundreds and hundreds of img on that aye,
and that's the kangaroo kolobarr, barramundi."

Narration: The rock paintings of Arnhem Land

depict a great human endeavour, that goes
back - beyond recorded time.

Flannery:"This is the most amazing delicate

rock art I've ever seen, beautiful red ochre on
a white quartzite base, it's just extraordinarily
complex and it's full of meaning but I just lack
the key at the moment to understand it what Aboriginal Rock Art, Arhnem
it's trying to say to me. It's a record of life here Land
I guess for who knows how many thousands of
years".

Narration: Their art has survived - but the

story of how these people learned to live with
this land, has been largely lost. They must
have faced a crucial challenge - their very
existence was threatened.

Taming the fire, was the first step towards

creating a new balance.When Aborigines first
picked up the firestick they held a powerful
tool. I think they learned to fight fire with fire,
and began to burn off the built up vegetation -
reducing the fuel load that was feeding the
raging wild fires. Eventually, this developed
into a highly sophisticated system of 'firestick
farming' - still practiced in parts of northern
and central Australia.

Knowledge of how to manage the land through

burning, has been passed on by countless
generations of tribal elders.

Nugget Dawson
Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park

Nugget: "A long time ago, we would watch

fires burning along in the distance.
We would see other fires burning towards us
too.
The fires would burn for days, not at sacred
places, mind you. Nugget Dawson
That was the way, burning off to regenerate Elder of the Anangu Aboriginal
new grass for kangaroos, as well as other people.
edible food plants."

Narration: Animals in burnt land The bush

was burned into a patchwork of old and new
growth. It made an ideal habitat for the
remaining smaller animals.

They actually flourished under this regime of

firestick farming - and could now be hunted
sustainably.

For the Aborigines, burning was remarkably

like farming, because it brought new growth -
food for the animals they hunted.

Nugget Dawson
Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park

Nugget: We burn fires which frighten the meat

animals away, but they only go as far as the
next woodland, and by the next afternoon
they're back.
When the rain falls the kangaroos find new
green growth and they'll breed and multiply.
Kangaroos are our meat, but they get very thin
if there is no green feed.
Many of our own delicious foods grow here
too.
Like desert raisins, bush tomatoes, sweet
nectar.
Food for us black people, for Anangu
Aboriginal people.
Narration: These people harvested the fruit
and grain producing plants that grew in the
wake of their burning. The big question is, why
they never took the next step and cultivated
them. But this continent was different. On top
of the problem of poor soils, there was
drought.

Long before the arrival of man, Australia was

already at the mercy of El Nino - an erratic
cycle of drought and flood.
Willi Willi
The problem all Australia's inhabitants face is
never knowing when the next drought will
strike. They've got to be prepared to make to
best of the good times.

Female kangaroos are constantly pregnant, or

have a young one in the pouch. That way, the
young kangaroo has a head start when the
drought breaks.

Rock wallabies can take advantage of the

briefest showers. They can even carry water in
their mouths to their young, waiting safely
above.

The most widespread adaptation is nomadism

- and the banded stilt is possibly the most
extraordinary nomad in the world. They can
wait on the coast for up to a decade for the
drought to break - then, within days of rain
filling the inland lakes, they fly thousands of
kilometres, to begin their breeding cycle.

In just seven weeks, these remarkable birds

can produce two clutches of eggs. Their
hatchlings feed on the rich briny soup which
fills the lakes. After just three weeks, they're
ready to fly.

Life on this continent has always depended on

movement from place to place - to live with the
cycle of drought and flood.
The Aborigines found that they could be no
different. The vagaries of Australia's climate
kept them on the move.

They simply couldn't settle down like people

elsewhere, to cultivate their land.

Instead, they moved across the land -following

what were to them 'highways', linking
resources from one place to another.

Nugget Dawson
Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park

Nugget: We people have walked everywhere

since time began. This is how I used to walk
travelling along, following our Iwara.
Not along roads, but far across the land by
foot. It's not like travelling in a motor car. It's
putting one foot in front of the other. We Nugget Dawson
walked following the rainfall, and stayed where
it had fallen.

We drank from all the different rock holes, and

lived around them for a while. After living there
for a while we'd go off travelling to somewhere
else. So we'd cover the entire landscape
hunting and living.

This is how we used to live. No white people.

Narration: The laws governing these journeys

are still passed down, from one generation to
the next - in song. They sing the paths the
Aboriginal people followed, as they travelled
across their country. They are a guide - to
food, water, and safe passage.

The knowledge recorded in song helped the

widely spread clans to come together.
Sometimes their journeys spanned the
continent.

These 'highways' became known to

Europeans as songlines. To Aboriginal people
they are a map, survival guide, and title deed,
rolled into one.
Flannery: "This ceremony represents just one
small link in a great chain of human
relationships that linked people in time and
place right across Australia, it essentially
turned this continent into a living network of
societies, and in an age before modern
transport and communication that has to
represent one of humanities greatest
achievements." After having changed
everything, these people had set a new pattern
for living with the special conditions of
Australia.

Narration: They'd established a remarkable

ecological stability - there's little evidence of
extinctions in the land, for tens of thousands of
years.

But it was a delicate balance. About three and

a half thousand years ago, the first
domesticated animal reached Australia and
New Guinea - the dingo.

In Asia, the dingo, had already become man's

best friend.

This predator's exquisite sense of smell, and

ability to track - became a gift to Aboriginal
hunters. Together, man and dingo made a
devastatingly efficient hunting team - but they
were hunting the same prey as the last of the
large carnivorous marsupials.

The Tasmanian devil, was once widespread

across the continent.

It was essentially a scavenger, but soon after

the arrival of the dingo, both it, and the dog like
thylacine disappeared from mainland Australia.
They were simply out-competed by humans
with pack hunting dingos.It could have been
the beginning of another wave of extinctions.
Animals of the rainforest, like tree kangaroos
were particularly vulnerable. I think they
survived, because people created sacred
sites, which they call 'story places'.

They were sanctuaries where no humans

could enter, places where fire and hunting
were taboo - areas where animals were
protected.

Flannery: "Most people don't realise how pre-

occupied the Aborigine's were with the
sustainable use of their resources, story
places were often conservation reserves, and
they included the prime breeding habitat of
many species as the animal built up in side the
reserves they'd move outside where they
could be sustainably hunted. They were a
really ingenious solution to the extreme
conservation difficulties that people face in a
place like Australia."

Story places are just one aspect of a complex

culture that created a new balance in this land.

Great meetings of the clans, called

corroborees by some tribes - allowed access
to trade and marriage partners - from outside
the clan.

But most importantly, they created a network

of kinship bonds across the continent -
guaranteeing their freedom to move through
the country.

But always, they managed their land - and that

was the key not just to their survival - but to
the survival of the land itself.

Flannery: "When I was a child I was told that

this was a wild place, I was taught that it was
an empty land - a terra nullius. But really this is
a human artefact, for in a very real sense
Aboriginal people created this environment,
and they developed a way of living here which
endured the test of time for 40,000 years ,
when my people arrived here, they threw that
lesson away and today we're struggling with
the same problems of fire, species extinction
and climate change that the Aboriginal people
triumphed over 40,000 years ago"
Narration: The aborigines were the first
people to so alter their environment that they
threatened their own existence.

But they went through the complete cycle of

future eating, and eventually developed a
highly sophisticated response, to this most
fragile of continents.

In the end they created an entirely new

ecology - one that depended on them for its
very survival.

For they were the people, who tamed the fire.

END ROLLER

© 1998, Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

 Illustrated Transcript
Presented and Narrated by Dr Tim Flannery
Author of the Future Eaters

Narration: Between 3,500 and 1000 years ago,

the Pacific Ocean was criss-crossed by a sea
people, nomadic wanderers who colonised the
islands of Polynesia and beyond.

These Hawaiian sailors are their descendants,

and their twin-hulled canoe - or 'waka' - is an
accurate reconstruction of the vessels used by the
first Polynesians for their extraordinary voyages of
migration.

To mark the achievements of their ancestors,

these sailors have re-traced the route to the
southern ocean, to the most distant and difficult
land to reach, on the fringes of Australasia.

The Polynesians called this land Aotearoa, but we

know it today as New Zealand.

And the descendants of those first colonisers, out

here in force to welcome the waka from their
ancestral homeland, are now called the Maori.

After the Aboriginal peoples, some 40,000 years

before, this was the next wave of humans to
arrive in Australasia, and Iike the Aborigines in
Australia, they too were to have a profound
impact on nature.

Tim Flannery
Author of "The Future Eaters"

Flannery: In Australia, it's hard to know what it

was like in the beginning, when humans first
arrived - the detail's are just lost in the mists of
time. And we don't really know how a future eating
cycle will end because us Europeans have arrived
here so recently that we haven't yet seen the full
impact that we've made on this continent. So if Dr Tim Flannery
you really want to understand future eating the
place to be is here in New Zealand, because here
a whole cycle of future eating has taken place in
just 800 years. The story really has gone full
circle.

Maori chant: 'Sow your seed, scatter to the wind

You may die, but there is still the life force
The flowing currents will help, o voyager
How many wait for the wind? O swimmer, ever
strong
See the godwit flying there
One has landed on the shore
Landed, landed, landed there forever'.

Narration: No-one exactly knows why the

Polynesian ancestors of the Maori set out on their
great voyages of colonisation, in huge
ocean-going canoes.
The largest of these sophisticated sailing craft
could carry up to 250 people, as well as the plants
and animals that they'd need to start a new life.
They were nomads of the wind, who settled on
remote tropical islands, and lived there until food
resources were exhausted. Then they packed up
their waka and moved on, navigating by the stars.

They first moved into the Pacific from south-east

Asia. For 2,000 years, they spread east and north
before finally heading south from Eastern
Polynesia to the land that was later to be known
as New Zealand. Aerials on coast When it finally
came, landfall in Aotearoa must have been
exhilarating. With a landmass of over 250,000
square kilometres, this new land was bigger than
all of the rest of Polynesia put together. Consisting
of two mountainous islands, swathed in dense
forest, this was one of the last great wildernesses.
Landscapes And, unlike Australia, this was a cool,
moist and fertile land, quite different from the tiny
tropical islands the voyagers had encountered
before.

Flannery: 'What these people had discovered

wasn't just another island, it was a whole new
micro-continent and it was different from their
homelands because this place wasn't tropical. It
was so far south that entire mountains were
covered in snow. It was a coool and ancient land,
that really wasn't suited to their tropical agriculture
and lifestyle but I think what would have struck
them most of all was that this place would have
seemed to stretch on forever and ever and it
would have been teeming with wildlife.
Narration: When word got back to Polynesia of
the bounty that could be found in the seas, coasts
and forests of Aoteoroa, it's highly probable that a
mass planned colonisation followed. Compared to
the tiny tropical islands of the Pacific, this was
land was massive, and teeming with game. The
travellers from across the ocean had never seen
wildlife of this kind before, or on this scale. And so
they began to set down roots in this land of plenty,
this gift from their gods. Away from the coasts,
they found a world of mystery: ancient, primeval
forests, unlike anything they'd encountered
before, full of extraordinary creatures.

For these misty canopies, and the species within

them, had evolved in isolation from the rest of the
world: ever since the break-up of the former
continent of Gondwana, 80 million years ago. This
was a strange and unique land, like no other on
Earth. Even today some of the animals are living
testament to the islands' ancient past. The tuatara
is a primitive reptile of a kind thought to be 200
million years old - dating back to New Zealand's
Gondwana origins, a relic from a time before the
dinosaurs. The young are hatched from
soft-shelled eggs, after an incubation of up to a
year - the longest of any reptile. Often called a
'living fossil', the tuatara has no close relations in
the reptile world, and has some unusual
anatomical details - including the remnants of a
third eye, hidden under the skin. It takes the place
in the ecosystem of mammal predators, of which
there are none on these islands.

If the tuatara is the reptilian equivalent of the

mammal predator, the giant weta is New
Zealand's equivalent of a rodent. Around the
same size as a mouse, and somewhat similar in
behaviour, it's the world's heaviest insect, and
another ancient Gondwana throwback

One of the rarest species is the rhinoceros weta.

Like the animals after which they are named they
use their 'horns' to good effect to resolve disputes
over partners or territory.
There are also around thirty species of giant
carnivorous snail. Voracious hunters, they prey on
giant earthworms, as well as on slugs and smaller
snails. But, more than anything else, Aotearoa,
when the Polynesians arrived, was a bird
paradise. Everywhere you went the forest
canopies were alive with birdsong, like a giant
prehistoric aviary.

Flannery: "For an Australian biologist this place is

like a mirror world; I can recognise most of the
trees and plants, but the animals are completely
different. Some of them, like the tuatara, died out
in Australia 100 million years ago, but because of
New Zealand's isolation they still survive here but
what makes this place really special is that this is
a land of birds, and many of them are flightless."

Narration: Flightlessness is a typical island

adaptation that the Polynesians would have
encountered right through their epic voyages
across the Pacific. Up on the cool higher slopes of
the mountains, the takahe feeds on tussock
grass. It's large size is a positive advantage, as
plant material here is difficult to digest and has
relatively low food value, so the larger the
herbivore, the more efficient it can be. And there's
no need for speed and agility when there are no
enemies on the ground to chase you. The
camouflaging green-brown patch on its back,
though, is a clue to where danger lurks. Falcon in
air and on prey.

The only endemic predators on the islands come

from the sky: spectacular birds of prey, like the
New Zealand Falcon. Along with the Australasian
harrier, this is one of the last raptors left on New
Zealand, but at the time of the arrival of the
Polynesians, there were several others, including
a gigantic eagle, which could easily have killed a
man. Despite its camouflage, the takahe and
other flightless foragers would have been easy
prey for a lethal aerobatic hunter with the sharpest
eyes in the business. As well as camouflaging
yourself, the other way to avoid daytime aerial
predators is to become nocturnal, like the national
bird, the kiwi. Its exceptionally long beak has been
developed to probe for insects in the soft forest
leaf-fall, and to fish in the forest streams. It's the
only bird in the world to have external nostrils at
the end of its beak, and one of the few to have
whiskers and an acute sense of smell. Even
though its egg has remained almost ostrich-sized,
the kiwi itself has evolved in the opposite way to
most island birds, and has shrunk its body size.

After about 80 days, the slow process of hatching

begins. Lack of oxygen stimulates the chick to
crack the shell open but the struggle to be free is
exhausting. To build up its strength, it will need to
rest for up to twelve hours before finally emerging
from the shell.

In fact, it's not quite true to say there are no

mammals at all on these islands, there are two
species, and they are both bats. But in these
damp and misty, predator-free forests, one
species - the short-tailed bat - seems to have
decided that its future lies on the ground, not in
the air. Even though it originally camme to these
islands on wings, this strange creature rarely uses
them today while feeding. They can fly, but may
well be in the process of evolving towards
flightlessness, like the kiwi.

But of all the flightless creatures found in this

ancient land, there was one that amazed the first
human arrivals: a walking giant that seemed to
offer them the promise of food for life, and which
they called therefore moa, meaning chicken.
There were 12 species of moa, and the largest
was enormous, sometimes up to three metres
high. These were the endemic megafauna of
Aoteorea - the dominant herbivores, filling the
same ecological niche as elephants do in Africa
today and they'd been around for over 70 million
of years.

Flannery: "There must have been thousands of

birds like this before humans arrived, and we
know quite a lot about them. In addition to
skeletons like this we've got eggs, feathers, and
even moa mummies. And the only danger these
birds knew would've been from above because
they were prayed on by the world's largest eagle.
It had claws like a tiger and could drop on bird like
this with the force of a concrete block. But pretty
soon danger was to come from a completely
different direction, from the people who were
eventually to call themselves the Maori."

Narration: When the Polynesians settled in

Aoteorea, they lived first of all on the coast and
brought with them the knowledge of how to use
fire to clear patches of land to grow crops. They
had brought seeds, plants and tubers from the
tropics, but found that only one, the kumara - or
sweet potato - would survive in these cooler lands
and then only on the warmer North Island.

But with such a bounty from nature, these first

settlers hunted and gathered, enjoying a diet of
seafood and seal meat from the coast, as well as
birds, plants and fruit from the forest.

The first Polynesians also brought with them a

deep respect for the natural world that's still alive
today. All elements of nature were seen as
ancestors and kin, bound by ancient ties and
rules, bringing an underlying shape and harmony
to the world, called 'whangapapa'.

Kevin Prime
Maori farmer & conservationist

Prime: "Whangapapa literally translated would

mean genealogy. But to Maoris it's a bit more than
that because the whole ethos of Maoridom really
comes from whangapapa so we believe that we
have come from Eomatur, who is the supreme
Kevin Prime
being, who had a number of other gods - Rangi
and Papa, the sky and the earth. And they had a
number of children who became all the gods of
the forest. So every Maori person likes to trace
their linkage back to the common ancestor and I
guess that's the importance of whangapapa as a
human, and also the importance of whangapapa
in your relationship to other people."

Narration: Deep in the forest, a ceremony that

combines modern Christianity with an ancient
Maori ritual. Plants and animals were thought to
be relatives, with a life essentially similar to that of
humans; whose existence was not seen as
something separate from the natural world around
them. To cut down a tree without first paying one's
respects to Tane, the spirit of the forest would
therefore be intruding on one's own family,
trampling disrespectfully on one's whangapapa.
So the first chip from the tree is symbolically
returned to the forest, to Tane, and buried in the
soil. It's a symbol of respect and renewal, of new
growth, new life. The Maori believe that the gods
had granted man alone the right to take birds, fish
and plants for their food and other survival needs,
but only as long as the proper rituals were
observed. Afterwards, the carvers are free to
claim their tree, which is destined to be shaped
into a ceremonial war canoe; watched over, as
always, by the spirits of the forest.

It was this intimacy with nature which helped the

Maori to find food in the forest, especially birds. To
succeed as hunters they became the ultimate
bird-watchers, studying where and when different
species fed and nested, and passing on that
knowledge from generation to generation. But to
begin with, hunting was easy, as the many
species of flightless or semi-flightless birds were
completely unused to predators, and had no fear
of man. They were especially vulnerable to
extinction, through over-hunting, as many had
evolved slow reproductive cycles, some breeding
just once every four years.

Birds that are rare today, like the semi-flightless

night parrot, the kakapo, were then abundant, and
hunted for their decorative feathers as well as
their meat. Common flightless birds like the weka,
or ground hen, were particularly important for the
Maori diet, as they provided plenty of meat in one
easy catch. These, like the kiwi and others, were
usually hunted with the help of dogs, which they
brought with them from Polynesia. The practice is
banned today in New Zealand itself, but still
carried out on the nearby Chatham Islands.

But as human populations increased, hunting on

this scale was bound to have an impact on the
flightless birds, especially the large ones, like the
moa. Deep in the South Island's caves, are holes
in the rock where the giant creatures fell and were
unable to escape, eventually starving to death.
But, crammed though they are with bones, these
moa death traps never threatened the population.
It was only when Man arrived on Aoteoroa that
extinction beckoned.

Flannery: "Some moa were among the largest

birds that ever lived. And to judge from the size of
this leg-bone, their drumsticks must have been
enormous. And this meat was probably here for
the taking for the first people who arrived in New
Zealand. That's because these birds were naïve.
All a hunter probably had to do was walk up to
them, put a noose over their head and walk them
off to the nearest ovens. And I reckon that faced
with an abundance of meat like that I would have
downed the gardening tools and just settled in for
a long life of feasting. Hangi feast sequence in
marae. Today the traditional communal hangi, or
feast, involves the slaughter of a pig, sheep or
cow, but in the early days of colonisation the
Polynesians would have gorged themselves on
moa."

Narration: The slaughter was incredibly wasteful

- in some cases only the drumsticks were taken,
the rest discarded; the enormous wastage of meat
clear evidence that the Moa were initially
abundant and easy to hunt. This abundance of
meat supported huge settlements, where people
lived in peace: the largest to exist in New Zealand
until the arrival of the Europeans. But then,
suddenly, the moa were gone.

Prof. James Belich

University of Auckland

Belich: "There were certain areas which were

prime Moa hunting areas. Partly because they
had high populations, partly because they had
river access in to the interior of New Zealand.
What would happen is that Maori hunting parties
would go in during the breeding season. And at
that time, of course, the hunting could be funded
by eating the eggs, which were the perfect travel
food, you know, requiring little preparation, and so
on. And the torpid males who tended to sit on the
eggs would be relatively easy game. So, Moa
populations in their peak areas are attacked at
both ends, eggs and fathers. And the resulting
meat is rapidly rafted down these fast-flowing
rivers to a kind of meat-processing base-camp at
the mouth of the rivers. So those key areas were
creamed-off pretty fast. Rats"

Narration: The Polynesian rat, or 'kiore', which

were eaten by the Maori, had arrived with the first
waka, and quickly began to plunder the smaller
birds and animals.With only birds of prey to fear,
and the hunting traps of the Maori, their numbers
soon multiplied to plague proportions.

Flannery: The Maori say they brought the

Polynesian rat with them deliberately, but I'm not
so sure. For back where they came from it was a
serious agricultural pest, and when it arrived here,
whether as stowaway or livestock, it was to
become a major plague in these forests. And
that's because they were so long isolated that
nothing like a rat had ever existed in them before.
The arrival of the first rats here was to set off an
ecological holocaust.

Narration:In only 400-500 years, the bird

population of Aoteorea had been decimated by
the Polynesian future eaters and the rats they
brought with them, and the great megafauna were
extinct.

With the moa gone, the Polynesians became

dependent on hunting smaller birds as a major
source of sustenance. In special workshops,
skilled hands made traps to catch specific
species. Some of these ingenious traps were
self-triggering, while others, like this noose had to
be manually operated.

With the other flightless birds also depleted, the

most important game birds now were pigeons. In
the autumn and winter they gorge themselves on
fruit, and are easy to catch, using nooses dipped
in a trough, and baited with berries. The next most
important bird for hunting purposes was the kaka,
the forest parrot, which favoured the higher
perches of the beech forests. They were caught
using decoy birds, or by single nooses pulled tight
by waiting hunters. Water fowl like the black stilt
were stalked through the wetlands. While visiting
migrants, like the godwit, would gather in numbers
by the waters edge, where nooses and nets could
be hidden, to entangle their long legs and feet.
Catching these flocks of visiting birds took great
skill, but their numbers were substantial, and they
provided a great seasonal feast for the Maori.

But soon even the great numbers of migrant

waterfowl and seabirds also became part of the
future eating cycle as the era of food abundance
on Aotearoa started to come to an end. For the
Maori were still hunter-gatherers, and consumed
the supply of meat from birds faster than species
like the gannet could regenerate. Despite their
understanding of the need to conserve species,
the Polynesian settlers steadily depleted the
supply of birds, as human numbers expanded on
the high protein diet. The Maori, it seems, were,
as yet unable to convert their intimate knowledge
of nature into principles that would help them to
conserve their precious environmental resources.
Flannery: "It seems to me that there's a
fundamental contradiction here for the Maori had
a deep respect for plants and animals. And yet
they hunted the moa and other megafauna to
extinction, turning this from a land of plenty into a
land of hunger. Well, I think that happened
because, then, the Maori were newcomers, and
they didn't fully understaand the vulnerability of
life here. And It takes a long time to build the
knowledge you need to manage resources
effectively. Well all the while their population was
building until finally their food resources were
almost exhausted, and it was only then that they
realised the full impact of their future eating
habits."

Narration: Without effective communal efforts at

conservation, even the coastal protein resources
were running out.

This was the next stage of the future eating cycle:

eliminating food resources in order of what's
easiest to hunt or gather and what's most
nutritious.

Within minutes the pup springs into life, and is

ready to take to the waters, though its mother has
other ideas.

Seals, sea lions and penguins were once

abundant all around the coasts, but, as population
pressure grew, they too all but disappeared from
the more populous North Island. Seal breeding
colonies are now only found on remoter parts of
the South Island, and it's here that the last of the
yellow-eyed penguin colonies have also survived.

The yellow-eyed penguin breeds only in New

Zealand and is one of 30 species once found
here, in what was probably a global centre for
penguin evolution. Unusually, they often prefer to
nest away from the shore, and every evening they
can be seen crossing the beaches and making
the long trek back up the hill slopes to the
sheltering forest beyond. They nest in burrows,
and among the roots and caves of the tree-lined
cliffs, but as the coastal forests were gradually
cleared by the Maori for farms, the nest sites
began to disappear. Predation from dogs and the
Maori themselves accelerated the decline of the
species, and today it has the dubious distinction
of being the rarest penguin in the world.
For the Polynesian voyagers, the cycle of future
eating that had followed them them around the
Pacific had caught up with them again, even in
this land of plenty. Perhaps they were deluded by
the abundance of wildlife on Aotearoa, with its
millions of birds, huge numbers of easily-hunted
sea mammals lazing on it's shores. Whatever the
reason, it appears that these expert hunters
underestimated their impact on the naïve,
vulnerable species of Aoteorea, and were
unprepared for the food shortages that were to
follow. But the evidence from Maori rubbish
dumps is clear: the diet of sea mammals and sea
food got smaller and smaller over time, as these
coastal resources themselves were run down.
With the moa gone, other birds and seal breeding
colonies seriously depleted, the Maori needed to
find other ways to feed themselves, if they were to
survive at all in the land of the long white cloud.

As hunger began to stalk the land, the Maori had

no choice but to expand their farming. To open up
the land to farms and bracken, whose root was
eaten as a staple crop, 40% of New Zealand's
native forests were burnt. In the North island,
sweet potato horticulture was developed, even
though the cool climate made this difficult.

Elsewhere, the Maori were forced to rely on

bracken root, and protein deficiency and
undernourishment became widespread.
Meanwhile, hunters moved further and further
inland in search of elusive bird protein, often
returning empty-handed. For many, this was a
time of hardship and hunger, but it forced the
Maori to organise in order to survive, and
triggered a period of rapid cultural change and
turmoil.

Flannery: "By the beginning of the 16th century

the Maori had begun to build great fortresses
called pa, right across Aoteoroa. This one here on
One Tree Hill in the middle of Auckland is
enormous. Here people have sculpted a whole
mountainside into a fort and there must have
been thousands of warriors living on this site.
Great fortresses like this suggest to me that Maori
people had actually entered the next stage of
future eating - and that meant war, a war over
resources."
Narration:The famous 'haka' war dance became
increasingly important at this time. This one is
saying 'we will stand our ground'. The actual
frequency of full-scale war was probably low, as
this was a luxury rarely afforded in a resource-
depleted land. This was the beginning of the
so-called 'Classical' period of Maori history, a time
of fortress building, conflict, and even sometimes
cannibalism. The hundreds of pa across the land
were not only symbols of status and power, but
they also had the more practical function of being
fortified food stores.

Prof. James Belich

Auckland University

Belich: "Once by whatever series of accidents,

one group developed pa from peaceful villages or
kianga, and the associated food storage pits, then
they'd have a military advantage over other
groups. They could raid and not be counter-
raided. So therefore an arms race or pa race
suddenly begins, whereby all groups have to
develop pa to protect themselves from those who
have them. In addition to that, as with many
changes in maori society there's this rivalry for
mana amongst maori groups, which means that,
you know, if you're a chief and your neighbours Prof. James Belich
got a pa, then you'll have no followers. So, even
within groups who never fought each other, the
fact that one had a pa, and another related group
didn't was a stimulus to build. So you have
spasms of pa building moving through the country
at quite rapid rates."

Flannery: I wonder what it would have been like

to have been a Maori in the 16th century, when
there was far too many people and not enough
food. But the whole thing about future eating is
that it's a cycle, and by the beginning o the 16th
century I think the Maori had really hit rock
bottom. And I suppose that's when you start
reflecting on where you are and the nature of the
land your in, and you start adapting to it. And I
think from then on we see in Maori society the first
glimmerings of conservation, of conserving their
resources for the future. And from then on that
was to play an increasingly important role in the
new societies that they were beginning to invent.

Maori Chant:
Pull up the root of the flax
From whence comes its sustenance
Farewell, go in peace
Fly to the shoreland,
fly with the tide
Ask me what is the greatest thing
My reply is, it is Man,
it is Man, it is Man

Narration: The tattoo was a mark of identity,

adulthood and above all status, increasingly
important in the new tribal groupings that began to
develop. It was the ultimate adornment, the
external expression of the spirituality
within.Personal spirituality was also expressed
collectively in art forms of all kinds, but notably the
wood carving of the marae, the great communal
meeting-houses. Society became more
hierarchical and organised, as communities were
forced to face up to their worsening resource
crisis, triggered by the end of the great birds, the
moa.

Kevin Prime
Maori farmer and conservationist

Prime:
"The Maori do not believe that they caused the
extinction of the moa. But I also believe that the
extinction of the moa certainly was a huge shock for all
Maoridom. Because that was the one bird that could
provide a feed for the whole tribe. And I think the
development of a lot of the Maori conservation ethic Kevin Prime
had developed then. The ethos of conservation had
developed after the demise of the moa."

Narration: Conservation for the Maori involved

strengthening the traditional rules that governed
the harvesting of nature's resources, and
enforcing them on a community-wide basis.
Today's fishermen have to obey government laws
that restrict where and when they can fish, and
which size fish they have to throw back. So it was
with the Maori of the 16th century, who had to
obey the spiritual restrictions laid down by the
local expert on nature, or tohunga. They knew to
avoid breeding grounds, and creatures that were
spawning.
These reefs are among the most productive in the
world, home to a complex chain of life, the waters
around them rich with fish and micro-organisms. A
crayfish unleashes her spawn on the tide, as
many as a million at one time. As they grow, they
feed on micro-organisms and themselves become
prey for larger creatures, only a few surviving to
adulthood. All over the seabed, new life is being
born, re-charging the chain of creation that keeps
these seas alive and productive. A sting ray
prepares for take-off. It's wing-like flaps lift it
through the deep, in search of shellfish and crabs,
one of the great sights of this underwater world.

The early Maori believed that it was the special

role of fish to be caught and put to use, the very
reason for their existence. According to myth,
Aotearoa itself had been a fish, brought up from
the depths by the god, Maui, and turned into a
homeland for human beings. Fish Edible species
were respected, therefore, as spiritual entities,
and elaborate systems were developed for their
management.

The groper, for example, could only be caught

during a short season around sunken rocks, deep
out at sea. These fishing grounds were very much
prized and 'tapu', which means sacred, under
restriction. Sharks, on the other hand, were
regarded as warrior species, and were hunted
with caution. Here, a marlin has trapped a school
of mackerel, which have formed a large defensive
ball that the predator finds difficult to penetrate.
So the marlin is cleverly working the ball upwards
towards the surface, knowing that there the ball
will break, and the fish scatter, providing a bounty
for all. Whales were particularly sacred and
symbolised plenty, having come from the bountiful
paradise homeland of Hawaiki. This is still one of
the great places in the world to see whales, with
several species coming here to feed, including the
humpback, pilot, orca, right and sperm whales.
Ambassadors from their homeland, as well as
revered and distant kin, whales were at the
pinnacle of a developing culture of conservation,
bound up in spiritually enforced concepts like tapu
and rahui.
Kevin Prime
Maori farmer and conservationist

Prime: "Well rahui was a sort of temporary or

sometimes permanent reservation status I
suppose would be the modern terminology. That
sets aside certain areas to protect a species or to
allow the numbers to build up. So if you..I know in
our particular area there's a place where there's a
rahui kiwi, and no-one was allowed to hunt kiwi in
that particular area, that particular valley because
it was kiwi grew well in it, there was all the bugs
there, the right food for them. And they could
breed well. But any kiwi that were kicked out, the
young ones that ventured out of that area, the
rahui area, they could be freely hunted. So,
basically, rahui was a temporary restriction on
certain areas, you know whether it was eels,
pigeons, rats, kiwis, whatever."

One contemporary example of rahui concerns the

harvesting on Snares Island of sooty shearwaters,
or muttonbirds. Cooked and preserved in their
own fat, muttonbirds were often kept as
high-protein food reserves, for when other
sources of protein became scarce. Strict tribal
rules govern the resource - only an agreed
number of young chicks are taken during the
season, the only time that the rahui is temporarily
lifted. This controlled harvest leaves the adults
free to breed again the next season, ensuring the
sustainability of the resource, a management
system first developed in response to the food
crisis of the 16th century.

Prof. James Belich

Auckland Unversity

Belich: "There's an increased use of tapu, rahui,

sacred prescriptions to prevent the taking of
vulnerable resources outside these appropriate
times. And there's a broadening in the net that
your Maori hunter-gatherer applies to nature. So a
lot of foods are processed carefully and eaten.
There are many kinds of berries that take days to
process. There's a lot more smaller birds become
targets. Mussels, for example, freshwater
mussels, there's some traditional evidence that
early in pre-history they were considered a
contemptible food. In late pre-history they were
considered a very valuable food. So you can see
the shift from a few big easy targets to many small
difficult targets, and from extractive economics to
sustainable economics."
Narration: The Maori had, it seemed, for the first
time, confronted the resource crisis they had
created and moved forward into the final phase of
the future eating cycle. They had become warlike
sweet potato farmers, living in large compounds
with hierarchical structures, and strict rules for
enforcing the conservation of nature. These
systems were built on two foundations - the
spiritual oneness with nature and traditional
knowledge that had been handed down for
generations.

That knowledge can still be found today in the

Maori heartlands. Eel fishing is a family business
bound by ancient rahui systems and access rights
that have been passed from father to son.
Likewise, many still have the skills to farm and
manage the forest. This Maori woman is gathering
the natural dyes she needs for weaving flax; using
the bark from carefully conserved trees. Plants
from the forest are used by the Maori in many
different ways, including paints, food and
medicines. If you scratch the surface of the
modern way of life, it's still possible to find the
ethos of conservation. Many communities still
have tohunga, for example - elders who manage
the forest resources. Even today, the lessons
learnt in the times of hardship survive. And who
knows how successful the Maori might have been
as managers of nature, if their efforts had not
been suddenly forestalled.

Flannery: Right through their travels across the

Pacific, the Polynesian voyagers had been driven
by a cycle of future eating, over exploiting natures
resources and then moving on to colonize a new
virginal island home. But here in New Zealand, it
was different, this was really the end of the line,
there were no new islands to colonize from here
and here the resource crisis was extreme. The
Maori were just beginning to develop ways of
conserving nature, when suddenly, 200 years ago,
the future of Aotearoa was taken out of their
hands alone. For a new wave of invaders had
appeared on the horizon.

Narration: Soon the knowledge about this great,

green, fertile land of mountains and forests, with
whales, timber and enormous farming potential
would find its way back to another seafaring
nation on the other side of the world. And then
another period of colonisation would begin: the
third and most damaging wave of invaders. The
Maori could only watch helplessly, as the future
eating cycle began all over again.

Maori Chant:
So many deaths, so many losses
Farewell spirits, farewell all
Long Hawaiki, Hawaiki far away
Farewell spirits, go depart For you the dawn, the
morning tide
For us the evening tide, farewell.

END ROLLER

© 1998, Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

 Illustrated Transcript
Presented and Narrated by Dr Tim Flannery
Author of the Future Eaters

Narration: Ever since Europeans arrived in

Australasia, nature, has been on the run.

Red deer, are just one of thousands of introduced

species that have infested New Zealand.

And every year, in Australia - the cycle of natural

disasters, continues.

It's as if the land, is spiralling out of control.

In Sydney harbour, tall ships gathered to

celebrate the bi-centenary of the arrival of the
British, in 1788.

Ever since, wave after wave of migrants, from

around the world - have made Australia, and New
Zealand - their home.

Tim Flannery
Author of 'The Future Eaters'

Flannery: "It's easy to imagine that us

Australasians have really made a secure future
for ourselves here, but ever since the time the first
Europeans arrived we've altered nature so much
that we've become an exterminator species the
third and most damaging wave of the people I call
the future eaters."
Narration: Those first settlers to land in Australia
and New Zealand, saw their role as taming an
alien, and sometimes hostile environment - a 'new
frontier'.

But there was a problem - someone had got here

first - at least 40,000 years ago.

The Aborigines had developed a lifestyle so

specialised, so in tune with Australia's demanding
conditions, that the Europeans couldn't
comprehend it.

Instead they convinced themselves that Australia

was a terra nullius - an empty land, there for the
taking.

In New Zealand, after decades of warfare and

broken treaties, the Maori were finally subdued.

War and disease, so decimated the Aborigines

and Maori - that it seemed they'd be part of the
next wave of extinctions in Australasia. For many
Europeans, it was convenient and inevitable - a
process of 'natural selection'.

And the lands themselves - despite their great

age, they christened them the 'new lands'

New Zealand, New Caledonia, New Guinea and

the great island continent of New Holland, later
re-named Australia.

When Captain James Cook first saw this place,

he described it as being like 'a gentleman's park'.

For the British, Cook's description brought to mind

the richest and most fertile of lands. But in this
vision of an 'Arcadia', they were badly deceived.
The land supported a rich diversity of
extraordinary wildlife.

But in reality this diversity had evolved in one of

the most nutrient-poor regions, on the planet.

Only creatures and plants that were highly

energy-efficient, thrived here. Far from
discovering a land of plenty, the colonists had set
foot on some of the poorest soils in the world - but
that wasn't all.

Flannery: "This land had another bitter lesson in

stall for those who misunderstood it. As the
explorers pushed inland they expected to find a
living river system, an Amazon or a Mississippi
but instead this is what they discovered a great
river system indeed but one that only flowed once
or twice a decade".

When it rains, water from distant storms flows

down the dry creeks -releasing precious nutrients
stored in their beds.

It can quickly become a flood - carrying massive

volumes of water across the continent. .

This is a time of plenty - a trigger for new life.

Native fish, that have been trapped in the
billabongs, can now travel to their breeding
grounds. Birds, like cormorants, gorge themselves
in the rich waters. Even the infertile soil, blooms
with such an abundance of life - that the land can
appear as rich as that of Europe

But drought, has always followed.

The native animals have evolved to survive with it

- but it brought disaster to the 'new' arrivals.

Flannery: "The people that sat around this fire

place dreamed of establishing a pastoral empire
here at old Kanyaka. In the 19th century the son
of an English aristocrat came out to this country
during a good year and decided to sink the family
fortune into the place. Pretty soon he'd built this
village with 70 people living in it, but then in 1864
the inevitable drought hit and he had to walk
away, he had to abandon his newly built English
manor house, leaving the family dreams and their
fortune in ruins"
Narration: Despite disasters like this, each good
season saw more and more farmers move onto
the land. Government policy actually forced them
to carry at least 4 times the density of sheep, as
today.

The result was wholesale massacre of the native

pastures - by hoof and jaw.

When the next drought came it brought

catastrophe. Erosion In this very spot in the
Flinders Ranges, 40,000 sheep died in just one
season.

Craig Nixon
Flinders Ranges National Park.

Nixon: "Those sheep didn't die of thirst they died

of starvation, so basically they ate everything that
was here er completely and utterly gone, er their
hooves sort of pounded this soil into a powder er
the first rains that came along and washed it all
away, as a result we've got this gully erosion. Now
that may have been ok, er the country may have
survived with that given some more good years
but hot on the heels of that 1880 drought came
the rabbits."

It was bad enough that the new invaders

overstocked the land - but they even brought their
own pests with them.

Rabbits, foxes, and a whole menagerie of other

European creatures.There were only two native
predators, capable of holding back these
introduced pests.

The wedge-tailed eagle, is a lethal hunter - it's

one of the worlds largest raptors.
The other natural defender, was the dingo - it can
even kill foxes and cats. But their European
traditions taught the farmers that these natural
predators, were in fact, the pests.

They were systematically wiped out by bounty

hunters.

Now, introduced species like the fox, rabbit and

feral cat could spread unchallenged across the
continent, in plague proportions - triggering a
hundred years of ecological turmoil. People
herding rabbits in fence

Narration: Across the Tasman Sea in New

Zealand, the colonists were repeating the same
mistakes made in Australia - with devastating
consequences for wildlife. These fertile,
temperate islands were more familiar to the
Europeans than the unpredictable dry lands of
Australia. Track across misty forest

When the settlers first arrived, 60% was still

ancient forests of kauri, beech, and podocarp - all
of them singing with life - for this was a land of
birds. On the forest floor they found unique
creatures, like the tuatara - a 200 million year old
throwback to the prehistoric continent of
Gondwana. Tuatara

And the mouse-sized giant weta, the largest

cricket in the world.

Giant Weta

Despite being hunted by the Maori, many

flightless birds like the takahe, still survived.

With no ground-based, mammal carnivorous, life

for this army of flightless foragers had been
relatively easy. But not even the national bird, the
kiwi, was safe from the impact of the latest human
arrivals.

Flannery: "New Zealand's wildlife had evolved in

isolation for something like 70 million years, and
that meant that it was superbly adapted to the
special conditions of New Zealand. But it came at
a great cost for that same isolation meant that
New plants and animals were extremely
vulnerable to change"

Narration: As in Australia, the first settlers

cleared the forests - triggering a cascade of
environmental change.

On steeper slopes, the clearing and burning often

led to erosion, and there was inevitable species
loss. Sheep on hilltop But the sheep and cattle
flourished - generating one of the highest
standards of living in the world.

Flush with the wealth from exports of meat and

wool, the colonists set about building another
England. Horses and hounds hunt Recreational
activities were imported from the 'old country'. But
there was a severe shortage of creatures to hunt.
So a huge variety of alien species was brought in,
and set free. Rabbits proved to be the same
ecological disaster, they were in Australia. Here
too they quickly reached plague proportions.

In an attempt to control them, carnivorous

mammals were introduced. But the hundreds of
ferrets, stoats and weasels, found it easier to hunt
the native birds, especially the flightless ones -
which were much less elusive than the fleet-
footed rabbit.

As these mammal predators multiplied, their

impact on the native birds became catastrophic.
And soon another, even larger carnivore was to
stalk the woods.

Thousands of feral cats, descendants of those

first brought in as pets, went wild, and began to
prey on the bird life of the islands, already under
siege from rats, and other predators.
Not even the mountain grasslands and forests
were safe from the new invaders. Red deer Red
deer, brought in to be hunted, quickly multiplied -
becoming a national pest. As well as overgrazing
grasslands, they gorged themselves on the new
growth in the native forests - turning the forest
floor into a wasteland.

The only part of the native vegetation that seemed

to be safe from the invasion, was the higher
canopy of the forests. It's up here that many of the
native birds feed and nest.

They also play a vital role in regenerating the

forest. By eating the fruit and nectar they pollinate
plants and distribute seeds in their droppings.

But by the 1930s it was noticed that the dense,

green canopies of the native forests were
changing colour, and dying.

The culprit was yet another introduced creature -

the Australian brush-tailed possum.

This leaf-eating marsupial had been imported to

establish a fur industry.

No-one imagined then, that it might threaten the

very forests of New Zealand - or that it could be
responsible for the disappearance of many native
birds, like the kokako. After decades, infra-red
cameras finally confirmed people's worst fears -
the supposedly vegetarian possum, had been
preying on the eggs and chicks of native birds, all
along.

Soon the situation for the nation's forests and

birds, was critical.

There were estimated to be around 70 million

possums on the loose, devouring the equivalent
of 140,000 football fields of native forest every
day.

Flannery: "If I could have walked here 200 years

ago, I would have seen a forest that was alive
with the calls of thousands of birds. But ever since
the Europeans have arrived this forest has been
slowly silenced and most of the birds that lived
here are now extinct. All of those pollinators of
plants, dispersers of seeds and eaters of insect
pests are gone. It's as if the fabric of the entire
ecosystem has just been torn apart."
Narration: Australia's forests and grasslands
were suffering from a different problem.

The Aboriginal system of managing the land

through fire had gone - the Europeans had put an
end to it. This firestick farming, had played an
important role, in sustaining the medium sized
marsupials.

The rufus hare wallaby, is rarely sighted today -

yet, just a century ago, it was one of Australia's
most common animals. Brush tailed bettong The
brush tailed bettong, was also widespread
throughout the country. And the bilby, would have
been familiar, to all the Aboriginal people of inland
Australia. But now, all these animals, are teetering
on the brink of extinction. The demise of the
marsupials has been silent and almost invisible.
The only people who witnessed the process are
the desert Aborigines. And it happened, so
recently - that elders like Nugget Dawson still
remember hunting and eating these animals.

Nugget Dawson
Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park

Nugget Dawson:"This is wayuta (possum) it runs

around the treetops and calls out. It used to live
all over here.We were so familiar with these
animals once, when we were children, and when
those that have passed away were alive, we knew Nugget Dawson
them all."

Narration: Nugget lives near Uluru, a place

where Aborigines have been given title to their
land. It's one of the few areas where traditional
land management has been re-introduced - using
firestick farming.

Nugget Dawson:"By burning we generate fresh

new growth,which is good feed for the kangaroo
and all these animals who loved to eat fresh
green growth and fresh green grass. But because
there isn't much burning any more they've all died
out and all we get are these stuffed skins. What
are we to do?"

It's out here, in the arid zone, that the loss has
been highest.

Scientists from South Australia are conducting a

fauna survey, to discover the extent of the
damage - and to see if the few survivors are still
breeding.

They're working together with the Anangu

Pitjantjara people, custodians of this land.

Frank: "We can see only one place now, where

there's only few rock wallabies are now. "

Peter Copley
Dept. of Environment and Natural Resources

Peter Copley: "There's one colony just in this

area here and there's one other colony about 40
kilometre to the west here and that's all we've
been able to find in the last 5 or 6 years working
with Anangu." Peter Copley

Flannery: "Well this is a beautiful little Waru, this

rock wallaby is an endangered species today, yet
when these fellas were young they were
everywhere through this country, there's so many
species of our marsupials that have suffered the
same fate, 23 of them are extinct and this really is
the last survivor among the middle size mammals Tim Flannery and a Rock
in the whole of this region." Wallaby

Narration: An important part of the study, is to

document the knowledge of the traditional owners
of the land - and to forge a partnership that will
help to sustain the remaining wildlife.

The invaluable knowledge of the elders is being

recorded, and shared - with the wider world.

Peter Copley
Dept. of Environment and Natural Resources

Copley: "People have come away from a lot of

their country and spent much more time away
from it, as a consequence they haven't been
doing hunting over as broader area of the country,
haven't been using fire for a range of purposes
and because of that the vegetation has got older
post fire and then lightning strikes have taken out
much, much broader areas of country than used
to occur when traditional owners were on their
country and burning in patches to provide a range
of habitats for a big range of animals."

Flannery: "The kind of knowledge that's being

shared here is extraordinarily complex and
detailed and it's been built up over generations by
these Aboriginal people, I guess it's the only way
they've been able to survive in this extraordinarily
harsh land, and we're in the middle of that
process now, us Europeans are trying to adapt to
this same kind of country for the long term, and
the knowledge that's being shared there is
probably our best guide as to how we can do that.
After all these people are the only people who
have ever lived here in the long term."

Narration: In New Zealand, the extinction crisis

has gone much further than in Australia. By the
1970's it was realised that the nation was
perilously close to losing, almost everything.
Among many others on the brink of extinction,
was the flightless night parrot - the Kakapo. Living
in burrows had made it particularly vulnerable to
feral predators. Kakapo

Only 57 survive and most of them are male. Just

one new female has been found in the last twenty
years. Kakapo on nest at night

The last male kakapo boom forlornly, all night, and

every night, in a vain attempt to attract a mate,
that will almost certainly never come.

It was vital to save not just the kakapo, but all the
other remnant populations of native creatures that
were left.

In many cases, they'd only survived on tiny

offshore islands - protected from feral predators,
by the ocean. These islands were of enormous
ecological importance - they were to become life
boats for New Zealands wildlife.

Alycia Warren
Department of Conservation N.Z.

Warren: "We noticed that there were islands that

had species remaining on them that were now no
longer found on the mainland. But often one
island just had one species on it. And by removing
feral animals from islands we were able to bring a
lot of extra species to them. So now we have Alycia Warren
quite a few islands that are lifeboats for animals
that are native to New Zealand."
Narration: Over the last decade, the entire known
population of Kakapo has been moved to island
lifeboats.

It's hoped that here, in the absence of predators,

the last of the night parrots will breed successfully.

But not all of the 700 offshore islands, were safe -

the rat had already reached many of them, posing
a severe threat.

Systematic poisoning campaigns were waged -

and New Zealand quickly became a world leader,
in controlling feral pests. Something like 70
islands have now been cleared of these
introduced mammals - paving the way for more
and more ambitious species recovery
programmes.

Flannery: "It's pretty clear that New Zealand will

never be able to get rid of all its introduced
predators, but maybe they can be controlled,
especially here on the offshore island lifeboats,
where some native species are down to just a
handful of individuals , and they may be coming
back from the brink, and if that's so it'll be an
amazing conservation achievement."

Narration: The next stage of the 'lifeboats'

programme, is to see whether principles
developed on islands, can be used on the
mainland. Rotoiti National Park, in the mountains
of the South Island, is home to another
endangered parrot - the kaka. Rotoiti was one of
the first mainland 'life boats' to be established.

David Butler
Department of Conservation N.Z.

Butler: "This looks like an intact forest, we're in

the national park here. And the key problems are
the introduced pests found in these forests. So
that's a wide range of mammals, both predators
and herbivores, so we've got possums, rats, mice,
stoats, probably a few feral cats. And then we've
got pests people really aren't thinking of as pests,
the wasp. We have large densities of common
wasps in these forests and you'll see the
honeydew that's on the bark of a number of the
trees here, that provides a very high energy
resource that allows wasps to build up large
numbers in the summer."
Narration: Honeydew is a high-protein, sap-like
liquid, exuded by an insect hidden inside the bark
of trees.

It's a vitally important food - there's hardly a

creature in the forest that doesn't depend on this
energy source to some extent.

But 10 years ago, this vital life support system

was disrupted, when another invader from Europe
arrive here - the common wasp.

With no natural enemies, it was able to breed at

will - filling the forests with it's constant buzzing.It
also preyed in swarms, on the insects - another
vital source of food for birds.

In 1995 it was realised that the breeding cycle of

the kaka, had been disrupted. The wasps, were
thought to be partly to blame. A wasp eradication
programme began, using baits of poison cat food.
Soon the baiting will be tried on a forest-wide
basis. But the other reason for the kakas decline,
was the large number of mammal predators in the
forest.

Alan Saunders
Department of Conservation N.Z.
Sanders: "Unlike true islands, these pest
mammals can re-invade mainland islands easily.
So really the big challenge at mainland island
sites is to control that re-invasion rate of things
like possums and rats and cats and stoats. And
that's really the big challenge which we've yet to Alan Saunders
get fully under control."

Narration: The impact of feral predators was

poignantly demonstrated, when the kaka finally
began to breed again.One pair of birds did
commence mating - an old male had been joined
in the forest by a young female.

Two chicks were born to the pair, and monitoring

of the nest site began. But sadly, it soon became
apparent why the numbers of females had
declined.
Before the chicks had fledged, the young kaka
hen disappeared, and was tracked by radio to an
old log. The guilty party was almost certainly a
stoat. Hens on their nests are sitting targets, it
explained the drastic decline in the numbers of
female birds. This year, close to Rotoiti Lake, the
kaka have been breeding again, and now the
nests have been protected on a forest-wide basis. Stout

Ron Moorhouse
Department of Conservation N.Z.

Moorhouse: "Yeah, so Tim, this is one of our

protected trees here. You see the sheet of
aluminium round the base, which is designed to
prevent stoats climbing the tree. And the
entrances up top and below that you can see a
small patch of aluminium. That's where I've
actually cut a hole to get access to the chicks."

Narration: Conservation field officers make

regular checks on the nest sites - to ensure the
chicks are being properly nurtured. It's a delicate
operation, needing skilled hands.

Alan Saunders
Department of Conservation N.Z.

Saunders: "What we've focussed on really in

mainland island sites recently have been different
suites of introduced mammals and so right here
it's really those mammals, plus the wasps which
are our focus. If we can control, effectively control
those we'll really be starting to talk about real
ecosystem restoration, at the mainland."

Ron Moorhouse
Department of Conservation N.Z.

Moorhouse: To some degree we have to put the

chicks in perspective a bit. A really important thing
is that the female birds haven't been preyed on.
They can always make more chicks, but if you
lose those female birds you can't replace them.
With many of our species extinction can be quite
an insidious almost a surreptitious sort of thing.
The animals are long-lived so they actually
survive a long time so you get the impression that
they're still around. And it's often maybe just a
specific sex or age that's vulnerable to predation.
So in the case of kaka it seems to be primarily
female birds and the young that are vulnerable to
perdition. So you can get the impression there's
still a lot of kaka there, but actually that may be a
heavily male-biased sex-ratio. Flannery: What a
bird, wow.

Flannery: "It's only recently that people have

started to value New Zealands unique
ecosystems. But the challenge to hang onto
what's left is enormous. You just can't undo 800
years ecological damage in a decade, or even a
century. But to make matters worse, the cascade
of changes flowing through this forest now are so
profound, they just have to result in many, many
extinctions."

Narration: The battle to maintain New Zealands

bio-diversity has only just begun.As the people of
New Zealand fight to turn the extinction tide,
Australians are still struggling to come to terms
with the ecological damage, caused by previous
generations.

Australia environmental crisis isn't just about

disappearing wildlife - but the degradation of the
land itself. And it's all because we, the third wave
of future eaters, misunderstood this country from
the very beginning.

The mistakes continued well into the 20th century.

The scramble for wealth drove agriculture ever
onwards - into the more and more marginal land.
This wasn't really farming in the sustainable
sense, it was more like mining the soil. The few
nutrients that had sustained this ecosystem for
thousands of years, were used up by just a few
crops of wheat - and then the land was ruined.

Our rivers too came under attack. When it began

in 1949, the Snowy Mountains Scheme was one
of the engineering wonders of the world. Australia
was driven by a vision of becoming another
America, a nation of hundreds of millions - feeding
the world. Controlling the unpredictable cycle of
drought and flood, was thought to be the key.
Today so much of the Murray river's water is used
for irrigation, that only a third of it's flow ever
reaches the sea.
The Murray Darling system was the life line for
over 30,000 wetland areas, that depended upon
it's cycle of drought and flood. The rivers waters
were once rich in native fish - but today the
Murray cod, Australia's largest fresh water
species, is already extinct in large tracts of the
river.

Dead gum trees and carp The wetlands

ecosystems are dying - from either being
permanently dry or constantly full of water, that
drowns the majestic river red gums. The powerful
technology of the third wave of future eaters did
eventually make the land yield. And Australians
won a lucrative bounty from wool and wheat. But
the cost has been enormous. Once the native
trees were cleared the water table rose, bringing
salt to the surface - rendering the land useless.

And every time the drought returns, more and

more of the precious topsoil is blown off the land.
Millions of tons are lost to erosion every year. In
1983, a dust storm enveloped Melbourne,
plunging the city into twilight. In just one afternoon
Australia lost 4 million dollars in nutrients alone -
blown away forever across the Tasman Sea.

The same winds that blow away the soil, fan the
bushfires that rage on edge of our cities - plunging
whole communities into crisis. And these
bushfires too are a man made catastrophe - the
legacy of leaving the land unmanaged by the
Aborigines - for the firestick was extinguished
here over 200 years ago.

Flannery: "It looks to me like we're not in control

here, in fact us Europeans never have been,
because we still haven't learnt how to live with this
country, we've tried to transplant a foreign heart
into a different body and we're seeing all the signs
of a massive rejection, and if we keep on trying to
treat our country like this and keep on trying to
ride it so hard we're going to kill it and that's what
I mean by future eating. "

Narration: So far we've been making a living at

the country's expense. But it doesn't have to be
like this. Branding Cattle

Now one in every 3 farmers, 24,000 of them

belong to Landcare, they're committed to making
a living here sustainably.
They're doing it by observing their country
carefully - studying the fine detail of how it works.

Out here, on the edge of the Simpson desert - hard

experience has taught graziers not to be greedy - to
move their cattle on at the first sign of pasture
degradation - for it's all too easy to overstock this land.
The artesian water here comes to the surface under
great pressure.

At Dalkanina Station, Daryl Bell is actually using

the water to minimise the impact of his cattle on
the land.He pipes the underground water to
storage tanks, placed in areas of good growth.
The water keeps the cattle in an area that can
sustain them. At the first sign their food is being
depleted - another tank is activated - and the
cattle moved on - leaving the land to recover.

Daryl Bell
Dulkanina Station, South Australia

Bell: "I think one of our major secrets in the whole

lot is the invention of poly pipe and polythene
tanks and fibre glass tanks you can move stock
on little lots of water and they can sustain there
for a long, long time left alone. It's all the more
remarkable because he's doing it in one of the
driest places on earth that supports a pastoral
industry."

Flannery: "I guess you must get a lot of people

who come out here and look at this country and
say gee it looks pretty hard I don't know how you Daryl Bell
do it. "

Bell: "Yes well I suppose well we are on the edge

of a desert but er it's er very robust but at the
same time very fragile, but it's more robust than a
lot of people give it credit for, but you gotta be
kind to it and it'll be kind to you, but you abuse it,
it'll break ya. "

Narration: Much of Australia is rangelands,

unsuitable for growing crops, but ideal for meat
production. Kangaroos and emus are the only
large land animals that are perfectly adapted to
this country. Both have the potential to be
harvested sustainably and profitably over vast
areas of the continent - and they taste good too.
Flannery: "It's cost our environment nothing to
produce this kangaroo steak, but the cost of
making this loaf of bread has been enormous..
We loose 7 kilograms of irreplaceable soil for
every kilogram of wheat we grow here, and it's no
exaggeration to say that what we eat today will
shape our country's future. We can either
continue to eat at our country's expense or we
can find ways to feed ourselves that's in tune with
it's nature."

Narration: The salt-water crocodile has been

here for at least 4 million years. Now in the
Northern Territory, people are beginning to raise
crocodiles for meat and skins - turning the tables
from crocodiles eating us - to us eating them. As
Graham Webb argues, there's both a
conservation and economic logic to farming and
eating these creatures.

Graham Webb
Crocodylus Park, Darwin

Webb: "It's just very simple, any animal or plant

you want to look at. If it has a high value, either
for skin, meat, or just because it's beautiful,
people will look after it. If it has a low or a
negative value, if it's eating your cattle or eating
your sheep or something like that, then you pay
money to get rid of it. If it has no tangible value
then it's very easily replaced. And that's the Graham Webb
problem with wildlife conservation on a global
scale. People are frightened to put a value on. But
if it doesn't have a value it's going to be replaced.
"

Narration: It's not just our wildlife that needs to be

valued - water is the other great natural resource
that we've been literally giving away. It's been
squandered to create enormous wealth for few -
and until we put a true economic value on water, it
will never be managed sustainably. More than
anything else, our future lies in how we manage
this land.

Kakadu National Park is one of Australia's premier

world heritage areas. It's complex ecology of
wetlands, rainforest and grasslands, has been
managed by the Aborigines alone - for the last
40,000 years.
Greg Miles
Kakadu National Park

Miles: "Aboriginal people have been burning this

place for more generations than you can count. In
fact much of what you see around in terms of the
vegetation and the landscape has been sculpted
by fire. It's a product of fire and it's necessary for
us in partnership with the Aboriginal people to
maintain that to maintain the status quo because
if we don't, if we become shy of fire, the way
people perhaps are in southern Australia we're
going to have a pyrotechnic anarchy develop in
this country which would probably result in really
severe late season hot fires in the late dry season
which are very destructive. " Aborigine starts fire

Narration: Despite all that's happened to them,

Aboriginal knowledge of how to manage this land
with fire, has survived. Now it's being applied,
using modern technology. The traditional rubbing
together of sticks, has been replaced by
incendiary capsules - thrown from the air. The
idea is to burn on a controlled, but widespread
basis, in order to prevent destructive hot bushfires
triggered by lightning in the dry season - the
firestick has been revived, on a grand scale.

Miles: "What we do is use technology to mimic

what they used to do. So with the aid of satellite
imagery, helicopters, incendiary capsules and a
whole range of other things, quad motorbikes -
you name it. We use all these high tech methods
to achieve the same result that Aboriginal people
got by doing it with banksia cones and walking on
foot maybe fifty or hundred years ago right back
into the far distant past. "

Narration: One thing is certain though, neither

Australia nor New Zealand can build a sustainable
future, without the support of their people.

A trip to one of the latest of New Zealands island

lifeboats, shows just how far the public is behind
this national conservation programme. Just a few
kilometres offshore from Auckland, lies the island
of Tiritiri Matanga. It looks green now, but ten
years ago it was barren, overgrazed pastureland,
given over to goats. Today, the island is almost
entirely covered in forest again, and is being used
as a lifeboat sanctuary for rare birds like the
flightless takahe. The transformation has been
achieved mostly by volunteers - over a hundred or
so of whom appear every weekend, joined by
boatloads of children in their holidays. Over a
hundred thousand native trees have already been
planted.

If real results are to be achieved, and wastelands

turned back into forest again, the wholesale
support of communities is essential, on both a
national and a local scale. Eventually the new
forest will grow to resemble this, the last relic of
pristine forest left on the island - its canopy alive
once again with the sound of native birds.

Flannery: "Well what an incredibly beautiful

place, you can just hear the health of the
ecosystem in all these birds that are mostly gone
from New Zealand forests, and just 10 years ago
most of this island was just pasture. I'm just
amazed what people can do when the whole
community works together pretty single mindedly
to restore something like this."

Narration: In reality, it's all too easy for urban

people, to forget about environmental problems -
like species loss, and the degradation of soil and
water.But, it's the cities where most people live
and ultimately they will decide the future of this
land. Urban people especially need to assess
their life styles - and decide what kind of
consumption levels are sustainable in these
lands.

What level of population can be supported, and

how much of our unique natural heritage can be
retained. Each wave of human invaders into this
region has changed its very nature, but eventually
they've learnt to live sustainably in these fragile
lands.

Except that is - for us, the third and final wave of

the future eaters.

Flannery: "My people came ashore at this place

just over 200 years ago, and ever since then they
have been acting as if they never left Europe. Well
the time has come now for us to become real
Australasians, to learn to respect the uniqueness
of these most fragile of lands and to live within
their limits, and to let their rhythms, their richness
and grandeur sit easily in our spirits."