ABSTRACT
Right across the Wet Frontier, the settlers found that clearing the rainforest was a simple matter. The rainforest vegetation grew again often more densely requiring clearance, whilst plagues of insects, birds and mammals ate their crops, predators killed their livestock and destructive frosts increased. Clearing the rainforest unleashed plagues of indigenous pests. In clearing rainforests with fire, the settlers were unknowingly mimicking a natural process which the rainforests were well adapted to recover from. New clearings and their crops provided a tempting food supply for native birds and mammals. In South Gippsland, ‘the scrub surrounding the little clearings was alive with wallabies that wrought great damage to the selectors’ grass’. In some regions, land was saved from abandonment by the use of ‘clearing leases’. On the rainforest frontier of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, settlers caused extreme environmental change, as they attempted to replace the Australian rainforest with European landscapes.
