Did aboriginal people live off the forest before European colonisation?
There was actually very little forest in Australia prior to the British invasion. There are areas on the coast which have heavy forest, but in the western forest you’ve got the result of centuries of aboriginal burning which has resulted in open grassland with occasional gum trees. Aboriginal people have a lot of land management practices. For instance, they made fish traps in the river. These were made of stone in the form of a fence in the water. The fish would swim into it and get trapped. It conserves live fish and aboriginal people come and get them. There is eel farming in south-eastern Victoria. They had channels which linked the coastal rivers with inland rivers across the low mountain ranges which allowed the breeding ground of eels to be extended. The management of the environment by aboriginal people involved a lot of knowledge about replanting and growing. Once Europeans began to intensify, they pushed aboriginal people off those large pastoral properties and began to creat
