Reading the land

"'Once when I was doing fieldwork on French Island, the ranger pointed out to me that around 1995 he noticed a striking change taking place in some of the island forests and woodlands. The dense heathy understorey had begun to die away and 'fall over', leaving a more open understorey dominated by grasses or bracken. However, in other woodlands this was not happening. This led me to realise that French Island was experiencing a remarkable ecological development that needed to be investigated'. This local event was a reminder of something universal: the land has its definite patterns and its own set of laws. And each landscape responds in a particular way to processes of disturbance, whether natural, such as fire or flood, or of human origin, such as clearing of the vegetation.

This book examines these laws through two case studies. The first is Central Victoria, where the patterns in the diverse countryside are explored, using a system of land classification. The second is French Island, unusual in that it has experienced two land use changes. European settlement involved clearing, logging and burning of the bushland for agricultural development. However, following establishment of the Park in the 1970s, most of the land was dedicated for conservation. The book sets out to reconstruct a picture of the original ecology prior to settlement and to trace its response to the changing land use. To discover these patterns and history, the author shows how we must learn to read the land - revisiting a place again and again, observing how it changes with time, and looking in the present for clues to the past. In addition to scientific enquiry, the book considers the perspectives of Indigenous culture, of artists and of writers." -- Back cover.