e about these questions and claim some expertise in the field, are the poet Mark O'Conner, the CSIRO scientist Doug Cocks, Ted Trainer the deep ecologist, the Birrell supporters and Katharine Betts.
Their essential argument is that Australia is a supremely eroded, overwhelmingly arid continent, that we are alread y overpopulated, and that if our present rate of population growth, the historically general 1.5 per cent to 2 per cent annually that has been the case over most of our history, continues further, disasters will develop in the not-too-distant future.
In one article, Flannery advances the argument that we should reduce the population from 19 million to 12 million. One wonders whether that includes an offer of voluntary euthanasia on his part! This line of argument involves a very considerable virtuosity with statistics.
Cocks and Flannery, who attempt occasionally to quantify their views, toss around various figures for arable land available in Australia. They appear to concede that most estimates of available arable land, made by people who know something about the subject, show that there are still vast areas of unused arable land in Australia.
Nevertheless, they manage, by ingenious manipulation of the figures to argue that this is really not significant, because the arable land is in Northern Australia, the water is in Northern Australia and we should be ultra-cautious. They continually express animosity to agriculture, which seems to be the hallmark of quite a few modern pseudo-geographers and pseudo-anthropologists.
There is a whole school developing of semi-scientific popular journalism devoted to the argument that agriculture is destroying humanity. Flannery even argues that it would be a good idea to make a large part of Australia into an enormous ecological theme park, finding large mammals from overseas to replace the diptodron in the ecological niche that it used to occupy about 10,000 years ago. Flannery often seems to prefer animals to humans. I disagree with this approach. <В В
Past arguments about Australia's population. Tim Flannery's curious legend about Griffith Taylor
Many of the ecological opponents of migration make a hero of Griffith Taylor, a past Australian geographer. Tim Flannery paints Taylor as an opponent of further increase in Australian population, and as someone who shared Flannery's view that Australia has a very small population carrying capacity. He repeats this legend about Taylor and paints him as a kind of martyr to the forces in Australia, "the boosters", who in the past favoured a large increase in Australian population, and are said to have forced Taylor's academic exile from Australia to North America.
A rather vigorous academic argument has developed about the long-dead Griffith Taylor, with opponents of migration ascribing to him this martyr status, and academic liberals and leftists responding indirectly by drawing attention to Taylor's mad, racist views, which he shared with many other geographers and anthropologists of his time, of which a representative and interesting sample is found in a letter from Ian Castles of the Academy of Social Sciences, in the March 2000 Quadrant. p> Castles says of Taylor:
The demeaning assumption was alive and well in the 1920s. Second-year students in Australia's first university department at the University of Sydney were instructed by its head, Griffith Taylor, to "insert the measurement of three skulls in a table", using calipers, tapes and radiometers; and were directed to a paper on the Kamilaroi tribe, co-authored by Taylor, for a discussion of "the changes in skin-colour and nasal index which result from hybridisation ". In 1924, Taylor solemnly told the Royal Society of New South Wales of a teacher's opinion "that blacks at the age of 14 were about as intelligent as white children at the age of 10 ". In his Environment and Race, published by Oxford University Press in 1927, Taylor asserted that the development of man's reasoning faculties was "correlated with the size of the brain ", and that" we can show a continuous series of measurements leading from the primitive Negro (69) up through the Iberian (75) group ... and West Europeans to the Alpine (85) and the Mongolian peoples. p> As Ian Castles is quite right to point out about Taylor, he obviously shared the nutty phrenological racism current among many academics in his time and place, but this argument about Taylor is eccentric for another, rather more basic, reason.
I have recently discovered that the Tim Flannery version of Taylor's views on migration and the carrying capacity of Australia just isn't true. I recently bought, in a package of secondhand books, Griffith Taylor's book in the Oxford Geographies series, the fourth edition on Australia, published in 1925.
For that time, i...
