History of our food bowl

As we witness the wave of humanity flowing along the Monash freeway and spilling out onto the once productive farming lands around Pakenham, Officer and Clyde, instead of neat rows of leeks, celery and spring onions emerging from the fertile land, we can only watch in disbelief as houses spring up from the ground in neat rows, almost as tightly packed as the former crops.

The houses are barely finished and a new family is moving in. Where once this would have been a big event and the new residents welcomed with a cuppa and scones, now the few remaining farmers can only look on in bewilderment and wonder where this wave of humanity has come from and how the local community will survive the onslaught.

It is easy for us to lose sight of the fact that less than two hundred years ago the First Australians probably stood on the same land and wondered who these strange invading white fellows were. First the explorers came and went but following close behind were the squatters who came looking for pastures and stayed with their mobs of cattle and sheep.

The footprint of the First Australians had been light and their touch tender on the landscape for more than thirty thousand years. They didn’t seek to change their environment but rather become as one with it.

In the summertime they could roam amongst the giant Mountain Ash, some of the tallest flowering plants in the world, and among the deep tree fern lined gullies growing on the rich volcanic soils around the area we now know as Gembrook.

They undoubtedly had their vantage points on the foothills where they looked out over what was, at the time, one of the largest freshwater swamps in the world, covering some forty thousand hectares. The white man would name the swamp the Koo Wee Rup swamp, meaning black fish swimming. The First Australians considered the swamp to be inhabited by monsters Too-roo-dun (Bunyip). It was a place they would only venture into during the day to gather food. And retreat to high ground at night to camp.

The stewardship of the land transferred from the first Australians to the settlers during the 1800’s. The new land managers looked at the land differently to the first Australians. The first Australians would only harvest enough to meet their immediate needs and perhaps to trade with other First Nations tribal groups.

The new stewards of the land brought with them an attitude of land management developed in Northern Europe over thousands of years. They thought of the land more as a resource to be developed and exploited.

They bought with them animals and crops that they were familiar with. Sheep, cattle and horses were soon grazing the native pastures where once there had been kangaroos and wallabies.

As the needs of the growing population increased they soon started to cultivate the land around Berwick, Clyde and Officer to grow wheat, barley and oats and plant grasses they believed more productive.

The Koo Wee Rup Swamp and the steep, heavily timbered foothills to its immediate north were a major barrier to the productive lands further east. Plus many of the land managers who had land on the edge of the Great Swamp were familiar with farming peat lands in the old country and were keen to drain it as they sought to increase its productivity by changing the land use. They were unable to see that the Great Swamp, in its existing form, was extremely productive and acted as a filter for water entering Western Port.

Some of them built private drainage schemes. This usually involved the building of a levy bank around their land which had the effect of increasing the water on neighbouring land. Nothing has changed in 150 years! This caused a lot of friction among the settlers.

The Government was also keen to improve access to the east and, along the way, take advantage of the fertile land of the Great Swamp.

The first formal government sponsored drainage scheme started in the 1890’s when Melbourne was the largest city in Australia. By the time the drainage scheme was finished the Koo Wee Rup and Dalmore swamps would be transformed to what we know today.