In Australia, Curr attributed the generally poor soils and the thin covering of vegetation to the frequent Aboriginal use of fire.
In 1907 John Cleland remarked that the high degree of fire adaptation within the Australian vegetation may have been due to human causes and that this suggested a considerable antiquity for the ancestors of modern Aboriginal peopel arrivint on the continent.
Blainey suggested that the introduction of Aboriginal fire practices to Australia would have resulted in massive deforestation, ***ewed by the silting up of many waterholes. The wet places, he argued, were previously refuges that would have offered protection from wild fires for large marsupial hervibores...
Palaentologist Tim Flannery put forward another theory, arguing that Aboriginal burning practices may have developed further within Australia as a response to the extinction of large browsing animals, through over hunting, and the grasslands left to grow unchecked.
Evidence for changes in vegetation due to an increase in fires comes from an unlikely source - the study of jungle fowl mounds on Melville Island in northern Australia. Jungle fowls do not nest in eucalypt forests, although ancient mounds are found in areas now dominated by this type of vegetation, which loves fire. Charcoal dated from these mounds has shown a general reduction in monsoon forest cover on the island over th last few thousand years, whihc is possible due to Aboriginal controlled use of fire.
Accross Australia, it is possible that Aboriginal burning practices became more intensive since the beginning of the Holocene period- that is during the last 10,000 years.
When the Europeans first arrived in Australia, the vegetation was being deliberately and systematically burned....
