Brumbies (Equus ferus caballus) as Colonizers of the Esperance Mallee–Recherche Bioregion in Western Australia

NICOLE Y. CHALMER

“Brumby” is the Australian term for feral wild horses (Equus ferus caballus). This distinctively Australian vernacular was first published in the Australasian (Melbourne) in 1880 as referring to wild horses in Queensland. Though the origin is obscure, it may have originated from the Pitjara Aboriginal language group in Queensland, whose word “baroombie” was reported as meaning unbroken or wild horse.1 The ancestors of the Esperance Mallee-Recherche bioregion (EM-R) brumbies were brought there by the first Anglo settlers in the 1860s. Horses aided Anglo occupation and reengineering of Aboriginal and marsupial landscapes during colonialism by acting as part of a broader suite of biotic introductions that Crosby described as Europeans’ “portmanteau biota.”2

The landscapes colonized by horses and the Europeans who brought them were not wilderness in the common usage; they were humanized landscapes because they had been shaped for at least 45,000 to 50,000 years by the actions of Aboriginal peoples. After the demise of the Australian megafauna soon after humans arrived, the use of fire by humans in many instances continued to maintain biotic regimes established by large grazing herbivores such as Diprotodon species.3 Conversely, the ease with which horses and other large introduced herbivores colonized parts of Australia may suggest that unoccupied grazing niches were available to them.

After escaping human control in the EM-R bioregion, brumbies became widespread and numerous during the late nineteenth century through to the 1970s. They were able to occupy habitats along the coast and inland from west of Esperance town to the east and north beyond Cape Arid. However, since the 1970s, as humans continued appropriating space and resources from nonhuman nature, their numbers have plummeted as vast tracts of land were cleared and fenced for industrial agriculture and other areas were alienated into parks and reserves. Brumbies are now reduced to two small populations—one of about thirty to forty in less than 200 square kilometers in the well-watered coastal Cape le Grand national park; the other inland in the arid eastern mallee-woodlands, where fewer than fifty or so may be left. Nevertheless, their continued presence and the purposeful trail pads they have developed over time reflect ownership and agency in their country and how in the past they successfully colonized the EM-R bioregion. In this chapter, I primarily refer to the colonization of the eastern mallee-woodlands rather than the Esperance sand plain populations because the history, culture, and ecology of brumbies in the mallee-woodlands is better documented and more visible than those of the horses that have long disappeared from the Esperance sandplain.

In this chapter, I argue that brumbies have culturally adapted to the mallee-woodlands and shaped the ecology in ways that maintain landscapes shaped by earlier herbivorous megafauna and Aboriginal inhabitants. In this way, the history of brumbies in colonial and postcolonial Australia suggests that in certain instances the introduction of domesticated animals from Eurasia into the so-called New World can be understood as a type of continuity rather than an abrupt change brought by the onset of European colonialism. Since introduction, brumbies became intimately engaged with landscape details and resources as they physiologically and culturally moved beyond their history of domestication and created what I describe as a “brumby cultural landscape.” This is reflected through the knowledge of resources they use to find food and water, and through the creation of horse trails as they move purposefully throughout their home range. Yet there are signs that, like the decline of megafauna and the practice of Aboriginal “fire stick farming,” the brumby landscape is in decline as a result of the increasing utilization of land for agriculture, human settlement, and protected areas that seek to “restore” ecosystems to a fabled and often idealized pre-European colonial condition.

Landscapes and Brumbies

The EM-R bioregion is located on the southeastern coast of Western Australia, and is part of the Nyungar, Wudjarri, and Ngadjunmaia traditional lands that form part of the Shire of Esperance.4 At the coast, the bioregion features white beaches, turquoise blue ocean waters, and over 200 rocky islands forming the Recherche Archipelago. Inland there are landlocked islands, granitic rocky domes that rise above the flat to gently undulating plains as they did above the ancient shallow seas over 30 million years ago. These granite islands are important oases, providing water and growing lusher grasses and other vegetation within the surrounding dry mixed woodlands, bushlands, and grasslands. They have been a resource focus of native animals and Aborigines in the past, and later Anglo settlers and their animals. For brumbies, they form landscape nodes of food and water interconnected physically and culturally with their networks of trails.

The biogeographical ecozone inhabited by the brumby mobs (the Australian term for a group) that I will be discussing is part of the uncleared southeastern reserves and unallocated crown lands beyond Esperance agricultural land. They form the southern and eastern portion of the Great Western Woodlands and are dominated by large Eucalypt species interspersed with areas of Mallee species and mosaics of grassy herbaceous clearings. Comprising almost 16 million hectares (approximately 39 million acres), this is the largest relatively intact temperate woodland left on Earth.5 Small bands of wild horses, descendants of the horses brought into the area by early European settlers, live in the woodlands and trek between areas of resource richness. Brumbies face threats such as dingoes (which can kill foals), human hunters, drought, and the occasional broken leg from slump holes in the limestone country.6 They persist in these landscapes despite these challenges.

Ecosystems Reflect Animal Agency and Culture

Environmental history tends to emphasize change due to human influences because of the abundance of records produced by humans and the dangers associated with environmental determinism. There has been renewed interest in giving agency to nonhumans and more-than-human systems from a variety of fields. This research is informed by the recognition that the world’s biophysical, biological, and nonhuman cultural interrelationships began well before the appearance of humans.7

A number of disciplines and researchers now accept that culture is widespread and not unique to humans. Research by animal behaviorists, such as Temple Grandin, provides evidence that animals using their superior senses such as sight, hearing, and smell perceive the world in images and details far beyond the range and comprehension of humans.8 Particular forms of animal culture and language likely evolved as a result of the need to pass on specific survival details important to their particular population and species, such as observations about their habitats and ecosystems including predator avoidance, what foods to eat, and where water is found.9 Animals, in this sense, create cultural relationships with particular home ranges based on continued interaction with and shaping of food resources, competition, and landscapes. In many instances, preexisting animal cultures, such as the creation of animal pathways, informs human settlement patterns.

The commencement of the present Ice Age epoch (Quaternary) 2.58 million years B.P. (before present) created environmental conditions that stimulated the development of gigantism in animals worldwide. In Australia and elsewhere, this suite of fauna has been termed “megafauna” (animals over 40 kilograms), though in comparison to other places a relatively small number of Australian species reached the supersizes (1,000 kilograms or more) common on other landmasses. Up until at least 50,000–41,000 years B.P., at least 340 species of land mammal (the majority marsupials) inhabited every suitable ecological niche in Sahul-Australia, as well as species of giant Varanid lizards and giant land birds known as Genyornis species.10 Within the relatively short time span of several thousand years after the arrival of Homo sapiens, sixty-seven of these species became extinct.11

Before the arrival of people, the ecosystem evolution and resilience of Sahul-Australian landscapes was a function of the cultural and biophysical behaviors of the organisms that lived in them. Landscapes were engineered both purposefully and inadvertently by plants, animals, and microorganisms that maintained habitats and ecosystems in complex interacting and resilient webs of life, in ways that sustained individual species and maintained a collective ecology. Jones, Lawton, and Shachak have developed the following definition of how organisms, particularly herbivores among mammals, can be defined as ecosystem engineers: “Ecosystem engineers are organisms that directly or indirectly modulate the availability of resources to themselves and other species, by causing physical state changes in biotic or abiotic materials. In so doing they modify, maintain and create habitats.”12

The concept of “keystone species” adds further to this paradigm as it proposes that there are some species that play a disproportionately important role in their ecosystems’ structure and function.13 Therefore, the evolution and resilience of pre-human Australian ecosystems was a function of the agencies of the organisms that lived in them. Organisms including plant species, the smallest microbes, and fungi, to the largest herbivores and various keystone predators, also have and have had major roles as ecosystem engineers.14 Following from these paradigms it can be argued that the ecosystems of the EM-R bioregion are the result of interactions between the geological and living components of the landscape, which have over immense periods of time been undergoing adaptive cycles, uninterrupted by the geological upheavals that occurred in much of the northern hemisphere, and developed ecosystems with relatively long-lasting ecological resilience.15 A large part of this adaptability and ecosystem resilience is reflected in the ability of living organisms—particularly large herbivores, including wild horses—to influence biophysical conditions in ecosystems and so improve their ongoing ability to exist and prosper.16 In this way, brumbies may be important in maintaining the resilience and biodiversity of present EM-R bioregion ecosystems that are no longer managed by the Aboriginal social ecological systems that replaced the previous animal landscapes.

Bone deposits found in Western Australia near Balladonia, as well as caves on the Nullabor Plain and at Mammoth Cave near Margaret River, confirm the suite of wildlife along the south coast as similar to that found throughout Australia in similar environments. There were giant flightless Dromornithid birds (such as Genyornis) filling the giraffe niche; short-faced kangaroos that reached 3 meters in height may have filled a large primate niche; and the rhinoceros-like Diprotodon, and pig-like Zygomaturus, as well as large and small wombats. The wide diversity of kangaroo species were equivalents to the antelope and equine niche. Their predators included Thylacoleo the marsupial lion, thylacines (Thylacinus cynocephalus), and Tasmanian devils (Sarcophilus sp.). The largest predators were giant lizards up to 7 meters long, the Varanus (related to the present-day Komodo dragon).17

It is hypothesized by researchers such as, for example, Johnson and Prideaux et al., that large grazing herbivore species were vital in shaping ecosystem vegetation communities through their targeted herbivory that drove the evolution of plant morphology, such as spines and growth forms that protect the plant from grazing, as well as edible fruits to facilitate seed dispersal, along with physiological adaptations such as poison and unpleasant taste.18 At the habitat level, mega grazers would have had a variety of impacts, including: reducing the density of vegetation and creating gaps and grassy mosaics that smaller herbivores could graze upon; increasing plant diversity; suppressing some species and favoring others; dispersing seed and facilitating niches for the animal coinhabitants of ecosystems; and reducing the frequency and intensity of lightning-ignited fires in the landscape by reducing accumulation of plant material and accelerating the rate of recycling and redistribution of ecosystem nutrients as they produced large amounts of dung and urine.19 Large keystone predators such as the Varanus lizards and Thylocoleo carnifax, the marsupial lion, would also have exerted top-down control as a trophic cascade by regulating herbivore and smaller predator densities, which in turn affected plant community structure and biomass and then animals dependent on the configuration of these.20 These keystone and ecoengineering species are proposed to have even exerted influence on geomorphology and climate as they created particular vegetation communities.21 The biophysical processes described were integral in the creation of various feedback loops and influences that maintained ecosystems in a resilient state. At the level of individuals and populations, one of the most important influences upon ecosystem structure and function was through the agency of animal social systems and their cultures.

Many researchers define “culture” as the process of socially transmitting skills and knowledge to others.22 Until recently, culture was considered to be an exclusively human trait and the concept that animals also created landscapes and interacted with them culturally was considered a step too far. For example, in his 1992 paper “Animal Culture,” Galef examined the research at that time and concluded with a series of complicated reasonings that there is no evidence of animal culture that could not be explained by processes of instinctive behavior brought about as genetic transmission through natural selection.23 Those who disagreed point out that transmission of information in this manner can only happen once during an individual’s lifetime and its transmission by chance would mean that an enormous amount of time would be needed before it became a population trait. This time lag is inherently inefficient in contrast to the speed of cultural transmission that allows new behaviors to be learnt by many organisms in a matter of days and hours, rather than the many years of randomized natural selection it would take for behavior to spread among populations through genetic transmission.24 Learning is a feature of all living organisms, which means that individual organisms can quickly achieve adaptation. This learnt adaptation can then be socially transmitted to offspring and others in the population through learning rather than genes, thus becoming culture.25 The ability to pass on and learn new information may in itself become part of a population’s evolutionary genetic makeup that favors the immediate adaptive flexibility of cultural behavior. Brumbies provide an example of this. They quickly learned how to access food and water resources in their landscape. Brumbies formed pathways to water and good grazing as a map-like landscape that future generations maintained through occupation. This knowledge is then passed on through generations based on the raising of foals by their mothers and groups.

During the Pleistocene, many of the Australian landscapes and vegetation communities were similar to those of the present. Large tracts of the EM-R bioregion would have been semiarid scrublands and woodlands as they are today, but featuring a far greater mammalian biodiversity than was present when Europeans first came to the region.26 Fossil records confirm the presence of at least two species of the herbivorous wombat-related Diprotodon that can be envisioned as roaming through the EM-R bioregion grasslands in herds or family groups, and perhaps preyed upon by Thylacinus sp. and Thylocoleo carnifex, the marsupial lion. Many smaller marsupial predator and prey species were also present.27 These herd-living Diprotodon species, and groups of giant macropods whose fossils have also been found on the south coast, may have lived in and maintained ecological niches analogous to those now occupied by brumbies.28

Paleontological evidence suggests that Pleistocene horse species, including Equus ferus, originated in North America and migrated to Eurasia via the Bering land bridge. They and many other megafauna became extinct in North America within a period coinciding with the arrival of humans approximately 13,000 to 14,000 years ago.29 Throughout Eurasia they were reduced to the extant single genus by extinction events, with those wild equids left most diverse in savanna faunas in Africa and Eurasia, where today they fill the relatively restricted niche of large grazers of poorer fibrous plant material. Warmuth et al. provide evidence that the process of horse domestication was relatively recent and initiated about 450 generations B.P. Assuming a generation time of twelve years for wild horses, this corresponds to a start date for horse domestication around 6,000 years ago—a short time in which to evolve significant adaptations to a domesticated diet, which may explain why so many domestic horse illnesses are related to dietary factors.30 It may also explain how brumbies in the EM-R bioregion and other places so readily returned to ancestral behaviors and food sources but may differ in some physiological traits compared with related African species that primarily rely on poor fibrous material. Feral horses seem to have expanded this typical niche because they include softer palatable browse and herbaceous plant species in their diets.

How Brumbies Became Colonizers

The Sahul/Australian animal landscapes were claimed by humans around 40,000 to 55,000 years B.P., leading to the demise of the megafauna and many other organisms that were codependent upon their ecosystem engineering and keystone species roles. Humans became the dominant cultural keystone species in terms of predation and also ecosystem engineering as they managed ecosystem plant communities, mainly with fire. Within these human socioecological systems, surviving species that could coexist also had vital roles in maintaining the resilience status of the new regimes. For example, the small soil-improving mammals included echidnas (Tacchyglossus aculeatus); burrowing bettongs (Bettongia lesueur); brush-tailed bettongs (B. penicillata), which have been measured as individually turning over up to 6 tons of soil in a year; potoroos (Potorous sp.); bilbies (Macrotis lagotis); bush rats (Rattus fuscipes); and southern brown bandicoot (Isoodon obesulus), which during their foraging and burrowing behavior turned over plant litter, dug shallow and deep holes, and spread seed and mycorrhizal fungi. This activity improved soil organic matter breakdown, provided a seed bed, and allowed rainfall absorption as well as perpetuating food resources for the species involved.31 Kangaroos (Macropus sp.) and emus (Dromaius novaehollandiae) were the largest nonhuman animals left and because they were very important food for people, a significant amount of Aboriginal eco-farming with fire in the EM-R bioregion aimed to provide them with productive grassland habitats.32

The resulting mosaics of grassland were described positively by explorers such as John Septimus Roe as being “much good and available country, both arable and pastoral, has been seen in patches adapted to limited operations.”33 These grasslands were the initial attractant for the Anglo colonial pastoralist incursions that commenced in the 1860s and destroyed Aboriginal social ecological systems within twenty to thirty years. The settlers used the inherent biological traits of their domesticated animals, including horses, as an agency of colonization, a process described by Alfred Crosby as “ecological imperialism.” Horses escaped to become wild, and as long as water was available, they were adapted both culturally and biologically to prosper in long-unoccupied ecological niches. Wild horses were the first large animals to live in the EM-R bioregion since the demise of the megafauna.34

Anglo settlers had distinctly different social, economic, and political systems to the Aboriginal inhabitants. They prioritized transforming lands they viewed as “dormant” into productive landscapes to produce goods for the monetary exchange economy. European settlers brought with them domesticated animals and plants that they were long familiar with as culturally appropriate food sources. In the EM-R bioregion, the transformations of Aboriginal social ecological systems that took place as a result of European colonization discarded the local animals and plants as food sources and were based first on pastoralism and later agriculture.35 Therefore, Anglo occupation was interwoven with their culturally desirable domesticates. Like their masters’ horses, cattle, sheep, and pigs, vegetables, cereals, and fruit plants had successfully extended their worldwide range through participation in previous European diasporas.36

Horses in Anglo colonial culture were rarely used for food. Horses functioned as the power source for long-distance transport of people and goods, and they provided the power for farm equipment. Horses pulled implements to plough the soil and seed the first cereals planted in the region—wheat grown to provide them with chaff and grain so they could continue to power colonization.37 Horses had the ability to eat both native and naturalized plants like domestic ruminants.38 However, because they are not ruminants, they were largely immune to the mineral deficiency diseases that plagued introduced ruminant herbivores along the southern Western Australian coastal lands. Ruminant herbivores needed to be taken inland to the better soils for a certain period each year to prevent the coastal disease caused particularly by lack of the trace elements cobalt and copper, as well as the macro element phosphorous. Horses were used to drove cattle and sheep between the coast and inland for this practice of transhumance.

As strongly social animals capable of forming deep attachments to each other, horses are also capable of forming strong attachments to people who treat them with respect and firmness and so were often viewed with deep affection by their human masters.39 This appeared to be an important part of the emotional structure and interactions of colonization using horses. The first horses recorded in the EM-R bioregion were those of the explorers. Their journals confirm that often there were strong emotional attachments. Starting from Perth in 1848, John Septimus Roe explored the mallee and woodlands north and east of Esperance, then returned along the coast. The affection for his horses is confirmed by the effort expended to keep his favorite horse “Ney” alive. Much time was spent coaxing the exhausted animal to a large granite outcrop with plentiful grass and water where he could recuperate: “As both grass and water were abundant at this limited spot, I determined on leaving him here to have a chance of recovering from his exhaustion, and of being called for again on our return homewards by a more southerly route.”40 Later, when on the coast and about 60 kilometers south of where Ney had been left, two days were put aside to go and fetch the horse. The granite outcrop where he had successfully recovered was officially named Mt. Ney by Roe in his honor.

This human–horse affection theme is continued among other colonial settlers. In 1874, the educated and rather genteel Brooks family from Victoria, Mrs. Emily Brooks, her son John Paul, and daughter Sara Theresa walked around 800 kilometers from Albany to Thomas River in the EM-R bioregion in response to the government’s promise of the availability of large tracts of land to lease. However, by the time they arrived most of the land was taken. So, leaving his mother and sister at Thomas River Station, John Paul and a party of men and horses set out for Eucla to look for land. During the expedition, his horse Jessie was left behind after they all nearly died of thirst. He spent many hard days searching before finding her: “Home again, hurrah! … The magic effect on poor Jessie, and myself at the sight of the horses, the cart, and the tent, could be caused by nothing less than home.… Nobby [another horse] and Jessie are kissing one another at a great rate.… J.D. says ‘Well, my goodness! Mr Brooks, there’s no mistake you deserve her, there’s not many men in this country would have walked 120 miles for her, but she’s all right now, and she’ll live to pay you, I would have staked my life you would not have found her alive.’”41 This family eventually settled at Balbinya station, inland from Israelite Bay.

The Dempster brothers were the first Anglo settlers to be given leaseholds in the Esperance bioregion in 1863, so commencing the destruction of landscape management systems of the local Aboriginal peoples. Horse breeding was important to the family farm business at Toodyay, taken up in 1843 near Perth, the capital of Western Australia. Here young horses were trained and sold to India for the remount market.42 The brood mares ran semiwild in the bush after mating but could be located if needed because the home range of each horse was known. Mustering to catch weanlings took place at the end of spring, when horses congregated at the few remaining waterholes.43

In 1864, few of the Dempster horses were sent to India. Instead, some pulled wagons to transport stores and equipment to Esperance Bay and others were ridden to drove the cattle and sheep flocks to the new properties. With an unfenced pastoral empire of over 600,000 hectares, horses were vital as mounts for the shepherds who took stock from place to place following the feed and water. They were also necessary to effect the local transhumance system used to avoid coastal sickness in sheep and cattle. Though the Dempsters would not have known the underlying cause (as previously described), earlier observations elsewhere in the state had found the solution was to move stock to mineral-rich inland pastures. Sheep and cattle were walked from Esperance 200 kilometers inland to Fraser Range and back every year. Historical records are ambiguous about horse escapes or releases by the Dempsters. With the large numbers owned in such a huge area and their probable continuation of the practice of letting mares run in the bush, it is very likely that some may have escaped beyond human influence to become brumbies.44

In 1901–2, Heinrich Dimer (a German sailor who jumped ship in 1884) and his part-Aboriginal wife Topsy, were granted over 25,000 hectares of pastoral leases north of Point Culver, which became Nanambinia Station. Their main sources of income were from wool and cattle, with station management based upon Aboriginal shepherds moving flocks of sheep and some cattle between the scattered granite outcrops and following the rain. Without permanent streams and no rivers in the mallee-woodlands, the Aboriginal-made gnammas and small catchments on these granite outcrops were the only water source.45 Water was the ongoing concern because these water storage systems held too little water to provide for large numbers of domestic animals. Using camel and horse-pulled scoops, over time the Dimers built a number of large dams and improved catchments around the numerous granite outcrops to increase the amount and permanency of water on their properties. This provided the water base for running large numbers of sheep, cattle, donkeys, horses, camels, and wildlife.46 Other settlers also used this strategy so that an attractive feature today of most granite outcrops in this drier region is the deepened and enlarged run-off dams around their bases that create almost permanent water storage.

This provision of water to both stock and wildlife (including animals that later became wild, such as horses) was a fundamental ecological impact of pastoralism in this part of the EM-R bioregion. Although this allowed the carrying capacity to be increased, it also made overstocking more likely by wild as well as domestic herbivores. Even so, erratic rainfall and drought, especially from the 1930s to 1940s onward, meant that water continued to be a limiting factor. As Karl Dimer notes in his history of life on the station, “the scarcity of water, in fact, tended to rule our lives.” This intermittent water scarcity is likely to have prevented the level of overstocking that probably occurred on the water-abundant coastal areas leased by others.47 In present times, lack of water during droughts is an important restrictor of brumby population growth in the eastern mallee-woodlands as some, especially mares and foals, die of thirst.

Like many settlers, the Dimer family had a strong relationship with their horses, both as an economic necessity for income and for managing the large areas of land they leased, but also at an emotional level that was built on affection and respect for the individual horses as personalities in their own right. Horses were bred for stockwork, with some sent to a business partner who broke them to saddle for sale as saddle horses. All were named and known as individuals and used in rotation to rest them physically and emotionally, sometimes as saddle horses, or pulling the sulky, cartage wagons, and ploughs. When given time off they were freed until needed again or when mustered to castrate young males and handle and train yearlings. As Karl describes, individuals could always be found on the huge property because the home ranges to which each consistently returned were well known: “I went off on a mare called Darling … to look for some saddle horses. Each mob of horses had their own territory in which they liked to run.… I was looking for Ringer who was a very good saddle horse, and I knew he always ran at a place called Gudamoona, which was his birth-place.”48

A horse would travel great distances to return home. Karl let a mare go 100 kilometers south of Nanambinia at Mt. Ragged: “I let Rachel go, knowing she would go back to her own run, or district, and that next time we wanted her, we would find her there.”49 So strong is this homing desire in horses that they would attempt even greater distances to return home. During the late 1920s, agricultural farming started up at Salmon Gums and Eastern State Shire horses were imported to chain and plough the virgin bushland for agriculture. A number escaped and tried to return to their homes—over 1,000 kilometers from Salmon Gums; with the arid, almost waterless Nullarbor Plain to cross, many must have died in the attempt. The Dimers rescued a number of them and rehomed them on their station. Their genetic influence can be seen in some mobs of present brumbies with their heavier build, hairy feet, and white facial blazes.50

Karl described how the horses loved their freedom and had many pads (trails) going to so many places, you had to be right up with them and know where the pads went to catch them as they could dash down a pad and get away: “To prevent the horses getting away … you had to turn off a mile or so before the pads and be waiting there when the horses came along it. You could just about see the surprise on the horses’ faces when they confronted a rider on what they thought was their getaway chance.”51 Some were not caught. Windjammer may have been one of the early brumby ancestors because she was never caught: “Syd tried his luck with Windjammer, who got the name because she was so fast, but he had no luck in getting her in either.”52

Gradually, pastoralism at Nanambinia petered out and during the 1940s the partnership was split, the Aboriginal workers translocated or died and “[the] horses back westward were left to run wild” and so joined the ancestors of today’s brumbies. Since they already knew the country and most had been born there and grown up in it, the transition from domestication to wild would have been seamless.53

Freed of human control and successfully filling a vacant ecological niche unoccupied since the demise of the megafauna, brumbies became widespread and numerous, roaming along the coast and inland from west of Esperance town to east and north beyond Cape Arid. Until the 1970s, they were accepted in the landscape as they came into the town to graze on road verges, lawns, and in the town parks. Their long-term demise started as vast tracts of sandplain and mallee-woodlands land were alienated for agricultural development after the Second World War. As did native wildlife, their numbers plummeted as large-scale clearing and fencing commenced from the 1950s to the 1980s. Until clearing bans were introduced in the latter part of the 1980s, about 1,000,000 hectares of land were eventually developed for agriculture and brumbies and native wildlife lost their habitats and either died of starvation and predation or were destroyed by edicts from government National Parks bureaucracies, which showed an unrelenting intolerance toward anything termed “feral.” There are now only two small populations left in the EM-R bioregion—one in Cape Le Grand National Park and the other in the mallee-woodlands east of the farmland.

Brumby Mobs and Landscape Resources in the Eastern Mallee-Woodlands

Ungulates, including wild horses, rarely range randomly. They have places they prefer and others which they avoid. Though no long-term ecological studies have been attempted with the EM-R bioregion group of horses, observations over a number of years have indicated that parameters of habitation appear similar to those found in studies elsewhere by researchers such as Patrick Duncan.54 These indicate that composition and structure of grazed plants and their nutritional variation throughout the year is important in determining where horses will move to; another factor that Duncan has shown to be important is the presence of biting insects, particularly blood-feeding March flies (family Tabanidae—called horse flies in other countries). They are present in large numbers during late summer to autumn and found in the shady forested areas; and if behavior correlates with Duncan’s findings, horses would avoid feeding in such areas at times when these flies are most abundant.55 In this part of the EM-R bioregion the occurrence of successive years of low rainfall and drought and the presence and permanency of water and remaining feed is a major factor in brumby spatial organization. Studies elsewhere in Australia have found the size of the home range directly related to yearly food and water availability.

In central Queensland, a study of brumby movements by Hampson et al. used GPS trackers to record the distances and locations traveled to by two populations of brumbies in different resource areas. They found that horses traveled as far as 65 kilometers from watering places and would go up to four days without water in their search for food in the less hospitable landscapes. This ability provides evidence that without human intervention for the past 150 years, brumbies may have started to evolve physiological adaptations similar to those of their never-domesticated wild cousins, Przewalski horses (Equus ferus przewalskii), to improve water use efficiency and withstand dehydration more easily than their domestic ancestors. Brumbies, when dehydrated, are recorded as being able to drink large quantities of water in a few minutes and rehydrate rapidly.56 In the EM-R bioregion, brumbies also typically travel far greater distances daily than their domesticated counterparts and eat a far wider selection of high-fiber foods as well as nutrient-dense foods. Domestication has resulted in confinement and altered feeding patterns, which in many ways parallel the modern human lifestyle that is thought to be responsible for endemic levels of obesity, cardiovascular disease, arthritis, and diabetes. A common affliction of domesticated horses is Equine Metabolic Syndrome linked to laminitis. This disease is analogous to human diabetes as it is caused by eating high sugar (fructan) energy feeds such as found in lush pasture and grain with inadequate roughage, which can lead to obesity and insulin resistance.57

In the mallee-woodlands, native and naturalized grasses, succulent herbs such as pigface (Carpobrotus spp.), and bluebush and saltbush shrubs are scattered patchily throughout the landscape. The mix of soil types and scattered granite outcrops ensures numerous vegetation communities, including tall eucalypt woodlands with an understory of grasses and edible bluebush (Maireana spp.) and saltbush species (Atriplex spp.). There are also woodlands of native cyprus (Callitris spp.), many species of mallet, mallee and banksia shrublands, and Kwongan heathlands. North of Israelite Bay there are numerous treeless grassy glades and alkaline karst plains (such as found at Kangawarrie) on stiff clay soils underlain by limestone and featuring underground caverns and slumps. The treeless clearings and granite outcrops grow many edible native plants such as perennial kangaroo grass (Themeda triandra), wallaby grass (Austrodanthonia caespitosa), and spear grasses (Stipa eromophila; Austrostipa nitida); there are bi-annuals such as windmill grass (Chloris truncata), herbs including pigface, and shrubs such as bluebush and saltbush.58 Numerous feral plants have colonized including blowfly grass (genus Briza from the Mediterranean), medic legumes (Medicago, also of Mediterranean origin), and South African capeweed (Arctotheca calendula), which all contribute to edible species. There are also some very poisonous native plants that brumbies have somehow learnt to avoid, such as wild tobacco (possibly a Solanum sp.) and Gastrolobium sp. (which contains the toxin sodium fluroacetate used in the manufacture of 1080 poison) that grow around and on granite outcrops. Native mammals can tolerate this poison, but it is fatal to introduced herbivores and predators. Hypothetically, avoidance is likely to have somehow been a socially learned behavior that has become an intergenerational tradition, perhaps through distant past observation of others dying after eating this plant. The invariable and rapid death from these plants does not allow for an individual to learn avoidance from mistakes. Brumbies may have also evolved a level of immunity to this toxin, although this also is an untested hypothesis.

The best grazing areas for wildlife, including brumbies, are found around the granite outcrops. Rain runoff promotes fertile, moist mini-habitats, encouraging introduced and native edible grasses and other plants to thrive. With no creeks or rivers, water resources are also focused on the granite outcrops, which catch water in the ancient Aboriginal gnammas and deep rock depressions formed through natural weathering. After good rains, large transient puddles occur along the few dirt roads. Largely permanent water is found at Pinehill, which has a large runoff dam deepened and extended by settlers. Breeborinia Rock, 25 kilometers to its northwest, also has a permanent deepened runoff dam. A number of other outcrops to the north, northwest, east, and northeast have semipermanent to mostly permanent waters, some in gnammas and others where Anglo settlers constructed clay dams and rock walls on granite to funnel water into small dams scooped out around the edges. All are connected by brumby pads, with the most used being those that lead to the most permanent water sites.

Social Systems and Land Ownership by Horses

With the abundance of edible plants and improved waters, horses were biologically preadapted to the mallee-woodlands of the EM-R bioregion. Their social and cultural behaviors that allow transmission of knowledge and the reduction of conflict and inbreeding are also adaptive. These factors ensure that knowledge is passed on to offspring, who take it with them when forming new mobs and ensure unnecessary competition for space and mates is minimized.

Linklater et al. have determined how horses interact socially and spatially. They have found that both sexes tend to disperse from their natal bands so that matrilineal groups are not formed. Fillies will join a mare band, while colts form transient bachelor groups after dispersal. Horses form long-term stable bands of mares, with one to four usually permanent stallions (one stallion is sexually dominant, and the others have arrested sexuality). The bands are as small as one mare and one stallion, or up to twenty mares with associated stallions. The stallion(s) associated with the mare bands can also be long term. This type of society is termed a female defense polygyny. Home ranges overlap with bachelor groups as well as those of other bands, and there is little evidence of territorial defense. There is strong loyalty and attachment to core home range and strong friendships can form between individuals.59 In the mallee-woodlands most bands are small, and brumbies do not overpopulate because there are significant constraints on their numbers. In particular, finite water availability means death from starvation and thirst during the uncommon but inevitable serious droughts, where even “permanent” waters dry up and feed disappears. Dingoes may take foals and horses are injured by environmental hazards such as karst plain slump holes, where broken legs can occur. Recently, more are being killed by human hunters who chase them with quad bikes and shoot them for fun. Their indiscriminate shooting of females and foals could eventually lead to local extinction.60

For past and present animals and humans living in this region, being familiar with and knowing the exact location of life-sustaining landscape features is a necessity for survival. Traveling between the scattered granite domes, which are not only a resource base but also navigational markers, brumbies visibly occupy and claim areas of the mallee-woodlands. Their crisscrossing trails and stallion dung piles left at strategic points, illustrate how deep past large animal landscape interactions may have looked. Tracks and trails are a physical manifestation of many animal cultures, a way to promote memory through association that helps individuals to find important places. Locations of resources are learnt from mothers and others as targeted rather than random movements.61 The web of brumby footpads trodden for generations connects the important landscape nodes of food and water. Perhaps these trails originally followed Aborigine and/or kangaroo tracks, but many were certainly horse tracks, developed as areas of importance to them were learnt and linked in space and time. Research elsewhere has also indicated that horse trails were used frequently by other wildlife, such as emus and kangaroos, for travel routes.62

Breeborinia rockhole and Pinehill dam are about 20 kilometers apart and the most direct route between them is across a huge gypsum lake system featuring treacherous gypsum dunes, scattered bogs, and quicksand. There are scattered sidetracks to other watering places and feeding areas and the linking tracks at first appear to meander aimlessly. Instead, they actually find the safest ways to cross the lake. My colleagues and I found this out on an exploratory expedition to work out how far brumbies travel between two waters by riding our horses from a camp near Breeborinia to Pinehill and back in one day (over 40 kilometers).

The horse trails meander across only the eastern portion of the lake system. Failing to question why, we decided to cross at the western end, which was a shorter distance from our camp to Pinehill. After sinking into quicksand, it became obvious that there were so many hazards to avoid such as quicksand, bogs, and deep dry gypsum dunes that our trip would take far longer than estimated from using maps. It took many dangerous and exhausting hours to finally get through. On the return journey we determined to cross at the eastern end following brumby pads. Riding along them it became obvious that they deliberately avoided the hazards and because the trails had generations of use, they had formed into compacted narrow tracks much firmer than the lake beds they passed over. Our horses did not instinctively understand this, and it took a few unpleasant boggy episodes off the trails before we and they learnt that it was best to only walk on the trails. In spite of being longer, it took far less time to return than our outward journey as we acknowledged that brumbies are cultural beings with a deep knowledge of their homelands.

Brumbies: “Feral” Landscape Destroyers or New Ecosystem and Landscape Engineers?

The presence of brumbies in the Australian landscape, including the EM-R bioregion, is controversial to a significant proportion of Australians who perceive them as environmentally damaging feral animals. The use of the word “feral” has become politicized as an implicit justification to aim for elimination of nonnative wild animals throughout Australia, including wild horses. There is much discussion about management of wild horses based on perceptions of their environmental impacts, which in this region are based on research conducted elsewhere as there have been no empirical studies that accurately represent their agency in local ecological systems. Though seen as feral pests by most land managers, there is a growing minority in the local community with a more “kincentric” worldview, where the agency of horses (and other wildlife) is recognized as having become a legitimate part of local cultural, historical, and ecological systems.63

Among the brumbies themselves during the last 160 years of occupation of the EM-R bioregion, their behavioral relationships within their homelands have moved them beyond the biophysical into the realms of cultural landscapes. This is supported throughout the discussion by Albrecht et al. about the rights for existence of “feral” buffalo in northern Australia, where the concept of “ecosystem being” is introduced. This view is based on the idea that a species and its individual members have over time developed an identity integral to their relationships with elements of the ecosystems they occupy and that they are now a well-established component within a complex adaptive system, such that their removal may have a cascade of unforeseen and negative consequences.64 Integral to this concept is recognition that the feeding behaviors of large mammalian herbivores can be important in determining the composition of plant communities, with their presence leading to increased plant biodiversity that has a complementary impact on animal biodiversity. They also recycle nutrients and reduce the flammability of landscapes by removing excessive vegetation dry matter build up.65 From an Australian context with the extinction of the original large herbivore keystone species, fire was used by humans in Australia and the EM-R bioregion as a key ecological process for maintaining biodiversity and preventing wildfires.

As a consequence of postcolonial dislocation of Aboriginal people from land management in the EM-R bioregion (and throughout Australia), fire is no longer an integral part of a full-time cultural landscape management system. The current bureaucratic systems in place are limited by political and economic factors, lifestyle and workplace regulations, and different philosophies—none of which is proving effective in managing the outbreak of wildfires, which have such destructive impacts on people, property, and ecosystems. Catastrophic fire risk periods are also becoming more frequent, as human-induced climate change is resulting in reduced rainfall and increasing temperatures. This suggests that a complete cultural paradigm shift is required to economically and ecologically reduce the impacts of this devastating landscape shaper.66 Ecological substitution with large herbivores such as horses, camels, and cattle can modify landscape flammability as they create mosaics through patchy grazing and can provide firebreaks that prevent small fires from becoming large and destructive.67 They could be used in nature conservation to facilitate self-managing functional, biodiverse ecosystems (rewilding). The concept of rewilding landscapes with large herbivores to restore ecological function is an ongoing discourse that is being progressively implemented throughout the world, with the highly adaptable E. ferus caballus an appropriate candidate.68 For such a paradigm shift to occur in Australia, it would first be necessary to overthrow the cultural myth that the feet of all hoofed mammals have destructive effects upon Australian soils. Rangeland ecologist P. B. Mitchell asserts that the “common sense” myth of hard hooves as the primary cause of soil compaction and therefore land degradation in semiarid Australia is supported by little empirical evidence, but as an uncritical generalization, it has become rife in scientific and popular literature. Accordingly, not enough attention is given to potentially more important factors in land degradation such as the impact of excessive stocking rates, preferential grazing, and animal behavior.69

There is abundant evidence that where there is an overpopulation of brumbies they can damage or negatively change particular Australian ecosystems. However, there is also evidence that moderate levels of brumby grazing that reduce plant biomass and thus flammability, as well as create and maintain a patchy landscape, could facilitate positive effects on ecosystem biodiversity as predicted by the ecosystem disturbance hypothesis.70 This hypothesis theorizes that moderate levels of ecosystem disturbance can enhance and maintain biodiversity in ecosystems.71 I would argue that the effect of starting out with a research imperative that tends to have a preconceived view of ecological roles as harmful by default can be seen in much of the primary research completed to date in Australia, which has tended to search for particular situations where the focus is on negative impacts in small-scale localized situations, from which sweeping analogies are then drawn across large-scale landscapes. Inherent qualities of E. ferus caballus as a species never native to Australia are being assumed as the primary factor causing these impacts, rather than examining the link between overpopulation impacts where any species (including humans, sheep, and kangaroos) can overexploit and biophysically damage ecosystems. This is especially relevant in Australian ecosystems because the only native predator large enough to prey on horses and perhaps limit their population without human intervention is the dingo (Canis dingo). Since colonial times, this medium-sized predator has been the focus of high-level persecution and population suppression as it is viewed as an unwanted destructive predator within agricultural social ecological systems that have largely been based on sheep. Therefore, other than a few anecdotal instances, there has not to my knowledge been any serious consideration or research directed toward the role of dingoes as a keystone predator in controlling brumby populations.

Nimmo et al. concur with my general argument as they concluded from a review of Australian research that there are a number of serious gaps in understanding “the ecological effects of feral horses on native environments, particularly with regard to Australian ecosystems.”72 Until these understandings are reached through peer-reviewed research that examines brumby populations and their ecosystem interactions across a range of landscape scales and without the “harmful by default” view, then, as Wallach contends, the new Australian megafauna—including brumbies in the EM-R bioregion—“are, of course, changing their new habitats, possibly by bringing back [a] lost Pleistocene functionality.”73

Conclusion

The history of brumbies in the EM-R bioregion offers an important alternative example to studies that see the introduction of Eurasian fauna as a type of “ecological imperialism” with devastating consequences. So too does the history of brumbies challenge contemporary purist notions of ecological restoration, which sees introduced species as problems to be managed or eradicated. Brumbies in the EM-R are examples of the hybridity of new ecosystems that have been created as a result of globalization.

Overall, during the last 160 years, brumbies as colonists have adapted well to the eastern mallee-woodlands of the EM-R bioregion. They have learnt to accurately locate water and feed and how to avoid eating poison plants. Intergenerational trail pads have been developed that are safe and efficient and link important food and water nodes throughout the landscape. As big animals, like many of the extinct megafauna and much larger than the native animals that had survived with Aboriginal social ecological systems, brumbies may indicate how past animal cultures organized landscapes. They may be considered as positive rather than negative agents of ecological change, capable of bringing back some of the past ecosystem functions of extinct megafauna that enabled resilience and sustainability through biodiversity, nutrient cycling, and fire mitigation. For instance, though untested by research, anecdotes suggest reduced wildfire frequency and intensity in the EM-R landscapes where they live, supporting evidence that prehuman animal landscapes in Australia may have been significantly less fire prone.74 Brumbies also intimately know their landscape and the resources it offers as they move around in their homelands, behaving as do present megafauna in Africa and, by implication, how extinct Australian megafauna would have proactively occupied habitats in the EM-R bioregion. As yet there has been no research on the possibility that brumbies could have positive influences on the landscapes they live in as large herbivores. There is a plethora of negative discourse on their assumed deleterious impacts as the illusion of “natural and unchanging wilderness” in Australia is advocated. Yet this illusion is based on pre-European landscapes that were so intimately influenced and managed by Aboriginal social ecological systems that they were not a wilderness and were not the same landscapes that existed in prehuman Australia.

The following quote by Pat Fischer, Gooniyandi Traditional Owner, reflects a different way of conceptualizing the world and its ecological networks as a function of the creatures who inhabit it along with humans. From them we can discard human arrogance and learn: “Brumbies do not belong to us they belong to the land. They are teachers of natural ways. They tell us what the seasons will be like, when the dry times are coming. They find water in the dry river beds with their hooves, water that brings life to the cattle, native animals and birds. They are now part of our Country, they reflect its health. They deserve the same care and respect due to all in Creation. Allow them the vast open spaces, allow them the land to run free, honour them for what they are.”75

Notes

  1. 1. Robyn MacDougall, The History of the Guy Fawkes River Australian Brumbies and the Brumbies of the Northern Tablelands (New South Wales: Self-published, 2001), 9; Frederick Ludowyk, Wild Horses Running Wild: Chasing Our Brumby, https://www.ausemade.com.au/fauna-flora/fauna/mammalia/perissodactyla/equidae/equus/brumby/brumby.htm.

  2. 2. Alfred W. Crosby, “Ecological Imperialism: The Overseas Migration of Western Europeans as a Biological Phenomenon,” in The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History, edited by Donald Worster (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 103–17; Eugene N. Anderson, Everyone Eats (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 89.

  3. 3. Tim Flannery, The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of Australasian Lands and People (Chatswood, NSW: Reed Books, 1994); Chris N. Johnson, Australia’s Mammal Extinctions: A 50,000-Year History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 212–14; Matt McGlone, “Paleontology: The Hunters Did It,” Science 335 (2012): 1452–53.

  4. 4. See terminology adapted from Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities, Interim Biogeographic Regionalisation for Australia, Version 7 (Canberra, ACT: Australian Government, 2012). Most groups were likely to have been multilingual, so interpretations by early anthropologists may have been inaccurate and circumstance dependent. The area is part of an area under claim by the Esperance Nyungars and the Ngadju people.

  5. 5. Alexander Watson, Simon Judd, James Watson, Anya Lam, and David Mackenzie, The Extraordinary Nature of the Great Western Woodlands (Perth, WA: The Wilderness Society of WA Inc./Scott, 2008). The Great Western Woodlands (GWW) is a 16 million hectare swath of grasslands, mallee, woodlands, and heathlands interspersed with salt lakes, which represents the largest intact remaining Mediterranean woodland habitat in the world; http://www.gondwanalink.org/whatshapwhere/gww.aspx (11 February 2017).

  6. 6. Trent Ridgway, personal communication, 2013; the Ridgway family has a lease over a huge lake system for gypsum mining and often see wild horses—sometimes in the hazardous, hole-ridden, limestone flats, sometimes with broken legs.

  7. 7. Stephen Dovers, “Sustainability and ‘Pragmatic’ Environmental History: A Note from Australia,” Environmental History 18, no. 3 (Autumn 1994): 21–36. In this article, Dovers explains that “In seeking a sustainable relationship between human and natural systems we must first construct histories, establish baselines and identify long term trends.” A. R. Main, “Ghosts of the Past: Where Does Environmental History Begin?” Environment and History 2 (1996): 97–114. Main discusses the premise that modern landscapes in Western Australia are the result of deep past animal and plant adaptations, as well as Aboriginal land management practices; for instance, research indicates that small fungi-eating, digging marsupials such as bettongs are keystone species in soil structure and function. Greg Martin, “The Role of Small Native Mammals in Soil Building and Water Balance,” Stipa Native Grasses Newsletter 16 (Autumn 2001): 4–7.

  8. 8. Kalevi Kull, “Adaptive Evolution without Natural Selection,” Biological Journal of the Linnaean Society 112, no. 2 (2014): 287–88; Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson, Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior (New York: Harcourt, 2006). Grandin is autistic and acknowledged as a leader in understanding how animals think and probably see the world. Her proposition is that autism allows her to see the real world in tremendous detail, visualized in pictures; and this is likely how animals, particularly mammals and birds, interact with their environment—totally necessary for finding food, mates, and avoiding hazards. “Normal” humans, in contrast, generally see an “idea” of the world as constructed by their forebrain through generalized experience.

  9. 9. Grandin and Johnson, Animals in Translation, 136–37, 292–93. Most mammals and birds must learn what to eat and what not to eat from their parent(s) because it is not an instinctive process.

  10. 10. R. Morrison and M. Morrison, The Voyage of the Great Southern Ark: The Four Billion Year Journey of the Australian Continent (Sydney, NSW: URE Smith Press, 1988), 267–69.

  11. 11. Johnson, Australia’s Mammal Extinctions, 16–35; Susan Rule, Barry W. Brook, Simon G. Haberle, C. S. M. Turney, Arnold Peter Kershaw, and Christopher N. Johnson, “The Aftermath of Megafaunal Extinction: Ecosystem Transformation in Pleistocene Australia,” Science 335 (2012): 1483–86.

  12. 12. Clive G. Jones, John H. Lawton, and Moshe Shachak, “Organisms as Ecosystem Engineers,” OIKOS 69 (1994): 373–86. Following on from these assertions, human beings are definitely ecosystem engineers on a grand scale from the past to the present but the roles of other organisms are only recently being teased out.

  13. 13. L. Scott Mills, Michael E. Soulé, and Daniel F. Doak, “The Keystone-Species Concept in Ecology and Conservation,” BioScience (1993): 219–24; Kevin N. Laland, John Odling-Smee, and Marcus W. Feldman, “Niche Construction, Biological Evolution, and Cultural Change,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23, no. 1 (2000): 131–46; Mike Letnic, Feya Koch, Chirs Gordon, Matthew S. Crowther, and Christopher R. Dickman, “Keystone Effects of an Alien Top-Predator Stem Extinctions of Native Mammals,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 276, no. 1671 (2009): 3249–56, which examines the role of dingoes in ecosystem structure and biodiversity.

  14. 14. Eric A. Smith and Mark Wishnie, “Conservation and Subsistence in Small Scale Societies,” Annual Review of Anthropology, no. 29 (2000): 496–97. The ecosystem engineering concept is discussed in depth in the following two papers—Jones et al., “Organisms as Ecosystem Engineers,” 373; Justin P. Wright and Clive G. Jones, “The Concept of Organisms as Ecosystem Engineers Ten Years On: Progress, Limitations, and Challenges,” BioScience 56, no. 3 (2006): 203–20. Examples are provided by the following papers: Christopher N. Johnson, “Ecological Consequences of Late Quaternary Extinctions of Megafauna,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 276 (2009): 2509–19; P. M. Huang, “Foreseeable Impacts of Soil ML-Organic Component-Microorganism Interactions on Society: Ecosystem Health,” in Ecological Significance of the Interactions among Clay Minerals, Organic Matter and Soil Biota, edited by A. Violante, J.-M. Bollag, L. Gianfreda, and P. M. Huang, (Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 2002).

  15. 15. Hans Lambers (personal communication) has described how Great Western Woodland ecosystems are among the longest lasting and most “stable” on earth due to such long periods of geological stability in Western Australia. This is supported by the many plant species that directly modify the soil through pedogenesis, recently discovered by the following authors: William H. Verboom and John S. Pate, “Exploring the Biological Dimensions to Pedogenesis with Emphasis on the Ecosystems, Soils and Landscapes of Southwestern Australia,” Geoderma 211–12 (2013): 154–83; Carl Folke, Steven R. Carpenter, Brian Walker, Marten Scheffer, Terry Chapin, and Johan Rockström, “Resilience Thinking: Integrating Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability,” Ecology and Society 15, no. 4 (2010): 20. Resilience thinking has been developed as a way of understanding social ecological systems; the premise is that three aspects are central: resilience, which allows adaptability and transformability that interrelate across multiple scales, is just as true for all ecosystems.

  16. 16. Theoretical considerations of how organisms are believed to create habitat are found in Wright and Jones, “Concept of Organisms,” 203–9. For examples of ecosystem engineering by plants, which the authors refer to as the Phytotarium Concept, see William Verboom and John Pate, “Exploring the Biological Dimensions to Pedogenesis with Emphasis on the Ecosystems, Soils and Landscapes of Southwestern Australia,” Geoderma no. 211–12 (2013): 154–83.

  17. 17. P. F. Murray and P. Vickers-Rich, Magnificent Mihirungs—The Colossal Flightless Birds of the Australian Dreamtime (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004); Patricia Vickers-Rich and Thomas Hewitt-Rich, Wildlife of Gondwana (Chatswood, NSW: Reed, 1993).

  18. 18. See the following for descriptions of megafauna species found in Western Australia, plus plant communities and adaptations: Gavin J. Prideaux, Grant A. Gullya, Aidan M. C. Couzens, Lynda K. Ayliffec, Nathan R. Jankowski, Zenobia Jacobs, Richard G. Roberts, John C. Hellstrome, Michael C. Gaganc, and Lyndsay M. Hatcherf, “Timing and Dynamics of Late Pleistocene Mammal Extinctions in Southwestern Australia,” PNAS 107, no. 51 (2010): 22157–62; Johnson, “Ecological Consequences”; Vickers-Rich and Hewitt-Rich, Wildlife of Gondwana.

  19. 19. David M. J. S. Bowman, “Australian Landscape Burning: A Continental and Evolutionary Perspective,” in Fire in Ecosystems of South-West Western Australia: Impacts and Management, edited by Ian Abbott and Nial Burrows (Leiden: Backhuys, 2003): 113–14; Anthony R. E. Sinclair, “The Role of Mammals as Ecosystem Landscapers,” ALCES 39 (2003): 161–76.

  20. 20. Letnic et al., “Keystone Effects,” 3249–56; for cascading trophic effects due to removal of an apex keystone predator, see Tracy A. Hollings, Ecological Effects of Disease Induced Apex Predator Decline: The Tasmanian Devil and Devil Facial Tumour (PhD diss., University of Tasmania, 2013), 2.

  21. 21. Ingeburg Burchard, “Anthropogenic Impact on the Climate since Man Began to Hunt,” Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 139 (1998): 1–14; Rule et al., “The Aftermath of Megafaunal Extinction,” 1483–86; George Monbiot, Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea, and Human Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), ch. 7.

  22. 22. Carel P. van Schaik, “Social Learning and Culture in Animals,” in Animal Behaviour, Evolution and Mechanisms, ed. Peter M. Knappeler (Berlin: Springer, 2010), 638; here van Schaik discusses the concept of culture in animals from an evolutionary perspective and why it can no longer be considered specific to humans.

  23. 23. Benett G. Galef, “Animal Culture,” Human Nature 3, no. 2 (1992): 157–78.

  24. 24. Laland, Odling-Smee, and Feldman, “Niche Construction,” 136; Carel P. van Schaik, “Animal Culture: Chimpanzee Conformity?,” Current Biology 22, no. 10 (2012), 402.

  25. 25. Kalevi Kull, “Adaptive Evolution without Natural Selection,” Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 112, no. 2 (2014): 287–88.

  26. 26. Tim Flannery, personal communication, 2010.

  27. 27. Peter Hiscock, Archaeology of Ancient Australia (London: Routledge, 2008), 52–54; Prideaux et al., “Timing and Dynamics,” 22157–62; Vickers-Rich and Hewitt-Rich, Wildlife of Gondwana; Danielle Clode, Prehistoric Giants: The Megafauna of Australia (Melbourne: Museum of Victoria, 2009); Ken McNamara and Peter Murray, Prehistoric Mammals of Western Australia (Perth: Western Australian Museum, 2010).

  28. 28. McNamara and Murray, Prehistoric Mammals.

  29. 29. Christopher E. Doughty, Adam Wolf, and Christopher B. Field, “Biophysical Feedbacks between the Pleistocene Megafauna Extinction and Climate: The First Human-Induced Global Warming?,” Geophysical Research Letters 37, no. 15 (2010).

  30. 30. Anne Forsten, “Horse Diversity through the Ages,” Biological Reviews 64 (1989): 279–304; Vera Warmuth, Anders Eriksson, Mim Ann Bower, Graeme Barker, Elizabeth Barrett, Brian K. Hanks, Schuicheng Li, David Lomitashvili, Maria Ochir-Goryaeva, Grigory V. Vasiliy Sizonov, and Andrea Manica, “Reconstructing the Origin and Spread of Horse Domestication in the Eurasian Steppe,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 (2012): 8202–6; Brian A. Hampson, Melody A. de Laat, Paul C. Mills, and Christopher C. Pollitt, “Distances Travelled by Feral Horses in ‘Outback’ Australia,” Equine Veterinary Journal 42 (2010): 582–86.

  31. 31. G. Martin, “Small Native Mammals,” 4–7; Mark J. Garkaklis, J. S. Bradley, and R. D. Wooller, “The Relationship between Animal Foraging and Nutrient Patchiness in South-West Australian Woodland Soils,” Australian Journal of Soil Research 41, no. 4 (2003): 665.

  32. 32. Martin, “Small Native Mammals,” 4–7; Garkaklis, Bradley, and Wooller, “Relationship,” 665; E. J. Eyre, Journals of Expeditions into Central Australia, and Overland from Adelaide to King George’s Sound, in the Years 1840–1; … Including an Account of the Manners and Customs of the Aborigines and the State of Their Relations with Europeans, 2 vols. (London: T. W. Boone, 1845). Eyre recognized the Aboriginal SES, as did George Grey; George Grey, Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in North-West and Western Australia, during the Years 1837, 1838 and 1839, under the Authority of Her Majesties Government, Describing Many Newly Discovered Important and Fertile Districts, with Observations on the Moral and Physical Condition of the Aboriginal Inhabitants, vol. 2 (London: T. W. Boone, 1841).

  33. 33. J. S. Roe, “Report on an Expedition to the South-Eastward of Perth, in Western Australia, between the Months of September, 1848, and February, 1849 under the Surveyor-General Mr. John Septimus Roe,” Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London 22 (1849): 3.

  34. 34. Karl Dimer, Elsewhere Fine (Bunbury, WA: South West Printing and Publishing, 1989).

  35. 35. Geoffrey C. Bolton, Spoils and Spoilers: A History of Australians Shaping Their Environment (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1992), 11–12. This concept is discussed in many articles, including Cranford S. Holling, Lance H. Gunderson, and Garry D. Peterson, “Sustainability and Panarchies,” in Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems, edited by Lance H. Gunderson and Cranford S. Holling (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002), 63–102.

  36. 36. Crosby, “Ecological Imperialism,” 105–6.

  37. 37. Dimer, Elsewhere Fine.

  38. 38. Thomas G. Hungerford, Diseases of Livestock (Sydney, NSW: McGraw-Hill, 1975).

  39. 39. Wayne Linklater, Elissa Cameron, Kevin Stafford, and Clare Veltman, “Social and Spatial Structure and Range Use by Kaimanawa Wild Horses (Equus caballus: Equidae),” New Zealand Journal of Ecology 24, no. 2 (2000): 139–52.

  40. 40. J. S. Roe, “Report,” 13–14.

  41. 41. J. P. Brooks, Journal of a Trip to Eucla Undertaken in the Spring of 1874 (Eucla, WA: Esperance Museum, HS/832).

  42. 42. The “remount market” here refers to the breeding of young horses to sell each year to the British Army in India; Australian Light Horse Studies Centre, “Remount Section, AIF, Contents. Topic: AIF-DMC—Remounts,” Saturday, 14 November 2009, http://alh-research.tripod.com/Light_Horse/index.blog?topic_id=1116006 (11 February 2017).

  43. 43. R. Ericson, The Dempsters (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1978), 77–78.

  44. 44. Ericson, Dempsters, 77–90; 252–65.

  45. 45. P. R. Bindon, “Aboriginal People and Granite Domes,” Journal of the Royal Society of Western Australia 80 (1997): 173–79. “Gnamma” is an Aboriginal word for water-containing hole or pool of water in a rock. These may be wide shallow depressions or holes over 2 meters in depth containing thousands of liters of water. Aboriginal people used fire to shatter the granite and augment the natural weathering and disintegration of granite to further deepen and enlarge the natural depression or hole.

  46. 46. Dimer, Elsewhere Fine, 42–43; Karl Dimer, Karl Dimer—Pastoralist: Station Life from the Turn of the Century. Transcribed from speech to Esperance Historical Society, 1973.

  47. 47. Dimer, Elsewhere Fine.

  48. 48. Dimer, Elsewhere Fine, 249.

  49. 49. Dimer, Elsewhere Fine, 268.

  50. 50. Dimer, Elsewhere Fine, 181.

  51. 51. Dimer, Elsewhere Fine, 268.

  52. 52. Dimer, Elsewhere Fine, 169.

  53. 53. Dimer, Elsewhere Fine, 370.

  54. 54. Patrick Duncan, “Determinants of the Use of Habitat by Horses in a Mediterranean Wetland,” Journal of Animal Ecology 52, no. 1 (1983): 93–109.

  55. 55. Duncan, “Determinants”; http://australianmuseum.net.au/march-flies (11 February 2017).

  56. 56. Hampson et al., “Distances.”

  57. 57. N. Frank, R. J. Geor, S. R. Bailey, A. E. Durham, and P. J. Johnson, “Equine Metabolic Syndrome,” Journal of Veterinary Internal Medicine 24, no. 3 (2010): 467–75; Hampson et al., “Distances,” 582–86; Christopher C. Pollitt, “Equine laminitis,” Clinical Techniques in Equine Practice 3 (2004): 34–44. Laminitis results in the outer nail of the hoof separating from the underlying tissues with rotation of the pedal bone, and if not treated can result in permanent hoof deformity and lameness.

  58. 58. Brendan Nicholas, “Vegetation in Platt,” in Esperance Region Catchment Planning Strategy, edited by John Platt, Brendan Nicholas, Rod Short, and Stephen Gee (Esperance, WA: Esperance Land Conservation District Committee, 1996), 11–19.

  59. 59. Linklater, Cameron, Stafford, and Veltman, “Social and Spatial Structure,” 139–52.

  60. 60. Trent Ridgway, personal communication, 2013. The Ridgway family has a lease over a huge lake system for gypsum mining and sometimes see brumbies in the hazardous, hole-ridden, limestone flats with a broken leg; personal observations of horses shot and left along tracks and around water points.

  61. 61. The concept of “animal culture”’ is gradually being accepted by a number of researchers as a way to explain how knowledge is passed on to group members and offspring other than through natural selection. See C. P. van Schaik, “Animal Culture,” 402; Grandin and Johnson, Animals in Translation.

  62. 62. Jonaki Bhattacharyya and Stephen D. Murphy, “Assessing the Role of Free-Roaming Horses in a Social–Ecological System,” Environmental Management 56 (2015): 433–46.

  63. 63. Bhattacharyya and Murphy, “Free-Roaming Horses,” 441.

  64. 64. Glenn Albrecht, Clive R. McMahon, David Bowman, and Corey J. A. Bradshaw, “Convergence of Culture, Ecology, and Ethics: Management of Feral Swamp Buffalo in Northern Australia,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 22 (2009): 361–78.

  65. 65. A. R. E. Sinclair, “The Role of Mammals as Ecosystem Landscapers,” ALCES 39 (2003): 161–76; N. Thompson Hobbs, “Modification of Ecosystems by Ungulates,” Journal of Wildlife Management 60, no. 4 (1996): 699, 702.

  66. 66. Climate Commission, The Critical Decade: Western Australia Climate Change Impacts, https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/uploads/e0d4e50478b96d1a50c821b7b 2c022a4.pdf (12 February 2017).

  67. 67. Hobbs, “Role of Mammals,” 703–4, 706.

  68. 68. Pernille J. Naundrup and Jens-Christian Svenning, “A Geographic Assessment of the Global Scope for Rewilding with Wild-Living Horses (Equus ferus),” PLoS One 10 (2015), doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0132359 (12 February 2017).

  69. 69. P. B. Mitchell, “Historical Perspectives on Some Vegetation and Soil Changes in Semi-Arid New South Wales,” Vegetatio 91, no. 1–2 (1991): 169–82; and in Vegetation and Climate Interactions in Semi-Arid Regions, edited by A. Henderson-Sellers and A. J. Pittman (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), 175–79.

  70. 70. John F. Bruno, John J. Stachowicz, and Mark D. Bertness, “Inclusion of Facilitation into Ecological Theory,” Trends in Ecology and Evolution 18, no. 3 (March 2003): 119–25; Stephen H. Roxburgh, Katriona Shea, and J. Bastow Wilson, “The Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis: Patch Dynamics and Mechanisms of Species Coexistence,” Ecology 85, no. 2 (2004): 359–71.

  71. 71. David M. Wilkinson, “The Disturbing History of Intermediate Disturbance,” Oikos 84, no. 1 (1999): 145–47.

  72. 72. Dale G. Nimmo and Kelly K. Miller, “Ecological and Human Dimensions of Management of Feral Horses in Australia: A Review,” Wildlife Research 34, no. 5 (2007): 408, 411.

  73. 73. Arian Wallach, “Bettongs and Bantengs: Welcome to Australia’s Wild Anthropocene!,” Rewilding—Special Edition, Journal of National Parks Association of NSW 60, no. 1 (Autumn 2016): 28–29.

  74. 74. Rule et al., “The Aftermath of Megafaunal Extinction,” 1483–86.

  75. 75. Kathryn Massey and Mae Lee Sun, Brumby: A Celebration of Australia’s Wild Horses (Wollombi, NSW: Exisle Publishing, 2013), 1–2.