By Hitesha Ramnohur and Aleena Flack
This piece first appeared as a featured article in volume 95, issue five of Pelican. You can view our print archive here.
Please briefly introduce yourself to our readers and tell us a little bit about your work.
I am a biodiversity professor at UWA, currently based at the Albany campus. Prior to that, I was managing the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew in London and also Kings Park and Botanic Garden in Perth. Most of my career has actually been outside academia, however, I did have another two years at UWA in between the two gardens.
I have been a conservation biologist throughout my career and I am really interested in caring for plants, animals, and applying Western scientific understandings to that. The main thrust of my research stems from the fact that Western technological societies have not done an impressive job caring for biodiversity, despite the science that has been prosecuted, biodiversity is still trending downwards. I deliberately came to Albany because I wanted to work with Noongar Aboriginal people. Given that they have been here for around sixty thousand years and because of their management of Country, I figured maybe we could learn something if we can collaborate to try and understand Noongar approaches to caring for Country and combining their side with the Western side and have a dialogue about how we can go into the future.
We’ve noticed that you proposed a theory called the OCBIL theory. Could you explain to our readers who may have a non-scientific background what the theory is about?
I’ve done most of my research in Southwest Australia from Shark Bay right around to Israelite Bay, the other side of Esperance. That region has attracted much attention since the 1800s because it’s a broadly upward sloping plateau off the coastal plains, with a few slightly elevated bits of country like granite rocks and Stirling Range down near Albany. There are no big mountains, and yet it is as rich as many of the tallest mountain ranges in the world in terms of plant species and in some invertebrate groups.
So that’s a real enigma. How could it be so rich, given it hasn’t got the diversity that the big mountain ranges have in terms of habitat? And I guess I have spent most of my career coming up with a series of potential explanations for that and then secondly, trying to work out how to best conserve what is out there.
OCBIL is an acronym for Old Climatically Buffered Infertile Landscapes and after thinking about this for thirty years and working on it, they seem to be the clue to why the flora is so rich. Richness comes because there are things like the granite outcrops and quartzite ranges that we do have, which are really old, ancient stuff. The granite rocks on the Darling Scarp, for example, are half the age of the Earth itself.
“Climatically buffered” alludes to the fact that the ocean has been on the coast of the Southwest for at least a hundred million years and there has been the moderation that you get of climate created by being close to oceans for very long periods of time. The land and coastline are relatively stable, and consequently what happens is that weathering erodes a landscape like that. There were big mountain ranges here a hundred million years ago, when the Stirling Range was first created. They were weathered down simply by rainfall, which leaches out the nutrients, dissolving the essential nutrients of life, like phosphorus and especially nitrogen, and flushes them out of the system and you basically end up with mineral quartz sand.
The combination of those three attributes, the old landscape, climatic buffering from the prolonged exposure to oceans, and the infertile soils creates a unique series of selection pressures on animals and plants that do not move around the landscape much which are not necessarily birds, as most birds fly around or mammals like kangaroos that can travel long distances, but the invertebrates, like the tiny little things like land snails, beetles, and spiders.
That model of landscape and having this incredibly rich flora and fauna is counter to most of the literature you will read on species richness around the world because most of the countries in the world have relatively young, often disturbed and fertile conditions. The northern hemisphere, for example, was under ice just eighteen thousand years ago and the slate was wiped clean and what we see in the northern hemisphere today are those animals and plants that have been able to essentially reinvade glacial lands. Glaciers grind up the earth and release all the nutrients and there has not been enough time for them to wash out into the ocean.
That’s a very long winded account of OCBIL, but the final thing I will say is that we have found evidence for these now in half of the world’s global biodiversity hotspots and not just in Southwest Australia, but other parts of Australia. Brazil is a major research programme now going on subdued mountain ranges north of Rio de Janeiro, not the Amazon Rainforest but these are quartzite ranges that are very similar. So the theory has turned out to be predictive for what is going on in a number of countries around the world, which is very exciting for me.
You’re currently working on a project which involves applying traditional Noongar ecological knowledge to modern natural resource management. Can you tell us a more about this knowledge and how it can improve resource management?
I have worked with Whadjuk people in Perth before I went to London and now I am working with people along the South coast. They’re the two big land systems and they are quite different. What we are discovering we are primarily finding through oral history, which entails identifying people who hopefully have continuous oral history in their family, such as escaping the Stolen Generations. They are knowledgeable about the old times, as people are in the desert or up in the Kimberley or Pilbara. But the conditions they live in here in the Southwest, a global biodiversity hotspot on subdued landscape, are quite different from most of the country. When you see people write about Aboriginal land management, it is primarily desert people they are talking about, or Pilbara, Kimberley, and tropical people, but not Southern Australians. We collaborate with a number of families down here and one big thing that I have learned is that Noongar culture is framed around extended families, and what really matters to Noongar people is extended families. So, we have worked family by family and went out where people want to take us and we work under UWA human ethics approval. The intellectual property they share remains theirs and should we end up publishing anything, it is with the Noongar elders as co-authors and decisions on the final content is theirs, not ours.
Let me try and summarise a couple of the things that Noongar people have shared with us. First and foremost, old landscapes versus young landscapes. Noongar people have known about that for sixty thousand years and they live in country in such a way that protects the uplands, the granite hills, and the places like the Stirling Range, and have concentrated most of their activity like hunting and camping on low points in the landscape that are relatively fertile and often disturbed.
On the other hand, the uplands are like granite rocks. You know, as I am sitting here in Albany there are two granite rocks just outside the window that flank either side of the CBD. People would revere them and they regard them as inspirited and the last thing you would do as a traditional Noongar is to camp on them because they are full of spirits and they overlook the country and I believe that their language reflects this. Their name for uplands for hills is Kaat and that is the same name applied to the human head. Like the human head, they believe the hills have eyes and ears and are looking over the country and if you’re behaving badly they will see you, and you and your family will be punished.
Contrarily, if you are behaving appropriately and respectfully, that will be seen and you and your family will be cared for and kept safe. It took me forty years to come up with the OBIL theory, and when I published it, I thought this is something new that no one has thought about before, but in actual fact, not only Noongar people, but other First Nations people around the world have similar perspectives on hills. That’s what Noongar people are telling us today and would have told us a long time ago if we had asked.
Is it true that vertebrates can be more important pollinators than invertebrates on islands? If so, would you say that this is because these animals are more predominant on islands or would you attribute another reason?
When I reflect on oceanic islands, the statement is not true as far as I can work out. There are vertebrates on oceanic islands, but generally most plants are pollinated by insects or the wind. In Southwestern Australia, these uplands that I have been talking about are island-like. Granite rock, for example, is a very distinct habitat emerging out of the surrounding forest or Mallee or heathland country and they behave as islands. What we have found is that Southwest Australia is the hottest spot in the world, in fact, for vertebrate pollinated species, where about about fifteen percent of the flora is pollinated by birds and mammals.
If you think of banksia, grevillea, and eucalypts, all of those attract vertebrates among their pollinators. Although fifteen percent of the overall flora is pollinated by vertebrates, if you look at the threatened species of flora, it’s forty percent, or even significantly more.
The statement you made is true for those islands like places, not only in Southwest Australia but in other parts of Eastern Australia, Brazil, Madagascar, and South Africa and other places where there are these old climatically buffered infertile landscapes.
In past years, we have lost a lot of vertebrates due to deforestation. Do you think that this loss can negatively impact the pollination process and affect the quantity of available crops?
Yes is the short answer, and probably one of the best examples is the Hawaiian Islands. They have a group of very specialised honeyeaters which are the dominant birds that pollinate Australian flora and fauna as well. There is a raft of plant species that have specialised on Hawaiian Islands for bird pollination and in the 1800s, a form of avian influenza was introduced to the islands and that took out all of these specialised honeyeaters up to a certain level on the mountain.
Where originally they were distributed from the ocean right up to the summits, now you will only see them very high up. Consequently, things like lobelias which are specialised for birds in Hawaii are becoming increasingly rarer in the lower altitudes. We had the same challenge in some ways in Southwestern Australia with dieback disease, which is a fungus that occurs in the soil and is transmitted by wet boots or bulldozers or kangaroos. It isn’t uniformly attacking the flora but there are certain families of which the most susceptible are probably the Proteaceae – that’s the family with banksia and grevillea – many of that family are vertebrate pollinated by birds, honey possums, and mammals and they are being eradicated. Perhaps the best example there is, the top of the Stirling Range, the highest mountain there is Bluff Knoll where the flora was dominated by two banksias, one called Banksia brownii and the second one, Banksia montana, which was only found on the Eastern Stirling Uplands, is almost virtually extinct now. It is down to less than a dozen plants, whereas it was dominant before.
Could you explain what granite outcrops are? And do you think that they are well protected and conserved in Australia?
Granite is a form of crystalline rock, with a sort of pepper and salt complexion and it is formed underground which is a relatively light rock, so it floats upwards from the molten rock beneath the earth, slowly and as it floats up in a bubble, called a pluton, the sides are compressed by heavier rocks, but as it approaches the surface the top has less and less pressure on it, so granite peels off rocks parallel to the soil surface like an an onion peel. It erodes in a very interesting way because of that.
Consequently when rain hits it, it acts like a big water catchment and you end up having at the base of the rocks, patches of forest or woodland in, say, a country that is normally heathland because of the extra moisture that’s coming off the rock. And it’s the most common bedrock we have in Southwestern Australia. The Darling Scarp is predominantly granite or granitoid rocks and when you get out into the Wheatbelt, these granite rocks are really important water catchments. For early settlers and for Noongar people, they were the only source of freshwater. I mentioned that they were revered and if you wanted a drink, you had to go to a granite rock.
As for the protection status in Australia, we do not know exactly how many granite rocks there are in the Southwest, but it is thousands and some of them indeed are well protected in the sense of being in nature reserves, national parks and water catchment areas. But there are thousands of them that have been disturbed in various ways and a major cause of concern these days is off-road vehicles.
What people don’t realise here in Southwestern Australia is this incredible concentration of rare and threatened plants and animals that are on them and just driving across, even walking across, that’s very destructive for small shrubs. You can kill what is likely to be a really threatened species.
Is it true that around these granite outcrops we see a unique set of plants? And if so, could you recommend to our readers as to where we can expect to see them in WA? If anyone’s wanting to visit maybe?
Yes, absolutely. For example, Darling Scarp, if you are seeing outcrops of rock, it will be granite or a similar rock called gneiss, which is a granitoid type of rock. The best place to see granite flora is on Moore Island and in jarrah forest. There are also some mountains like Mount Cooke and a place called Boulder Rock.
The short answer is there are thousands of these. Look for areas of sheetrock, unfractionated rock that forms big sheet like structures and that will probably be granite. In the space of often just fifty metres or so of a walk on granite, you will see this tremendous diversity of vegetation types and in amongst each of the layers that you see, there will be rare plants.