t's a pretty good potted geography of Australia. What fascinated me most is the fact that Taylor's views on settlement and population, as expressed in this very basic geography textbook, are almost the opposite of the views attributed to him by Flannery.
On page 262, Taylor asserts that there are 616,000 square miles of land suitable for close temperate settlement, 100,000 square miles of tropical agricultural lands, 1,009,000 square miles of good pastoral lands and 655,000 square miles of fair pastoral lands.
If anything, this is an overestimate in the opposite direction to Flannery's views. Taylor was also a strong advocate of a large expansion of irrigation for agriculture, if his 1925 standard Australian geography book is any guide. The very last paragraph in the book, the postscript, commences with the following.
In a paper published in the American Geographical Review, July 1922, the writer shows that the prospects of the fertile temperate regions in Australia are very hopeful. Using the present condition of Europe (with her 400 millions of population) as a criterion, he deduces that 62 millions of white settlers can establish themselves in eastern and south-western Australia. p> Despite his bizarre anthropological racism, Taylor wasn't a bad prophet on some matters. He is well known for his prediction that Australia would have between 19 million and 20 million population in the year 2000, which has turned out to be spot on.
It is pretty fascinating the way legends grow. Rather than being a fierce opponent of population growth as painted by Flannery, Taylor was a bit of a "booster" himself in relation to population.
Flannery and company also praise the conservative economist Bruce Davidson, who conducted a constant polemic in the 1950s and 1960s against northern agricultural development, on dry economic grounds. In this instance, their account of Davidson's views is probably accurate.
My heroes in this area are the "boosters": people such as Ion Idriess, JC Bradfield, William Hatfield and Jack Timbery, who advocated various and quite feasible proposals for agricultural development, particularly in the immediate postwar period. The Snowy scheme was one product of this kind of outlook. p> In the 1970s a vigorous Australian resident opponent of Malthusianism and supporter of Australian development and high migration was the late Colin Clark. He had worked as an economist for the World Food Organisation and been a major English university economist, and he conducted a considerable argument with Paul Ehrlich in the 1960s and 1970s. His predictions about world agricultural production etc have generally been confirmed by subsequent developments.
Ehrlich's more alarmist predictions have repeatedly been refuted by later events. Colin Clark had a very serious debate with Derek Llewellyn-Jones, in the book Zero Population Growth published by Heinemann in 1974. Most of Colin Clark's predictions have turned out more accurate than those of Llewellyn-Jones.
It is necessary to make some assumptions about likely future world developments concerning food, agriculture and resources. In this field I have found the very detailed literature of the World watch Institute of considerable use.
While the Worldwatch Institute is, in the main, overly alarmist, it has performed an enormous service over recent years in tracking world developments in food production, arable land, fertiliser use and many other important things. A very useful understanding of what is really happening on a global scale can be acquired from the very serious crossfire that takes place between Malthusians such as the Worldwatch Institute and major capitalist growth advocates such as the Hudson Institute.
The truth about likely future world developments lies somewhere between the opposite projections of these two schools of thought, and anyone seriously interested in these matters can derive great value from studying the material produced by these two currents of thought, and the debates between them.
Nevertheless, there is no serious doubt in my mind that the Worldwatch Institute alarmism is somewhat closer to the reality than the Hudson Institute optimism, for the medium-term future. There is likely to be a global shortage of food and arable land and water for quite a while, although not as catastrophic as the Worldwatch Institute believes.
Despite the short-term low world prices for commodities, artificially created by the global financial speculations of finance capital, over time there is likely to be enormous demand for food on a world scale, and ultimately prices for it must rise. That reality underpins my argument.
The second reality is that the global shortage of arable land and water produces a situation in which Australia cannot possibly afford to indulge the fantasy of Flannery and Paul S...
