B - Comments by Bruce Davidson

Summary

‘Australia's land resources at risk’ by Colin Chartres (Chapter 1);

‘Biological and physical causes of land degradation’ by Gordon Burchr Dean Graetz and Ian Noble (Chapter 2)

The theme of these chapters appears to be threefold. Namely, that Australian soils are naturally inferior to those of Europe and the United States of America, that European farming in Australia has led to land degradation, and that this is continuing.

No attempt is made to construct some index of initial soil fertility which would make it possible to quantify the degree to which the total fertility of soil in Australia is inferior or superior to that of Europe and the United States of America (Leeper 1970, p23). It is even possible that the area of good soil on a per capita basis is higher in Australia than that in Western Europe or the USA. Many Australian soils, including the black cracking clays of northern New South Wales and central Queensland and the black soils of the Wimmera are more fertile than most European soils in their natural state. It would be difficult to find poorer or more eroded soils than the slopes of the Welsh hills where all the top soil has been removed and farming is carried out on the sub-soil (Robinson 1934). It is not recognised that many of the best soils in Europe, including the wheat lands of East Anglia, the Polders of Holland, and the fields of Flanders, are due to man-made drainage (Summers 1976, Liddell Hart 1970, p330-331).