ABSTRACT
The European enthusiasm for lighting fires and burning off is also evident in the various narratives of Europeans venturing to the goldfields in the 1850s. Certainly, European settlement and its dramatic disruption of traditional Aboriginal society may have led to some changes in the vegetation of the rainforests. Throughout much of the east coast of Australia, the rainforests were clearly there at the beginning of European settlement. While the El Nino effect in Peru has been known to Europeans since the nineteenth century, it was only in 1969 that it was linked to the Southern Oscillation and really only since the early 1990s that the effect has been widely known. Along with the natural phenomena leading to drying and vegetation change, it is likely that Aboriginal fire practices also altered the rainforest environments over the thousands of years before European settlement. Once Europeans came, the Aboriginal population was severely reduced and the practice of burning the bush discouraged.
