Under the Senate's spotlight are the arrangements between the Tiwi Land Council and Great Southern, the promoter of broad-acre MIS forestry schemes on the islands that have seen vast swathes of virgin tropical savanna transformed into a monocrop of the fast growing Acacia mangium.
Colonialism has an insatiable appetite - it is forever hungry, it can never be satisfied, and it recruits both unwitting as well as willing emissaries from the vast ranks and ever-growing number of colonised Aboriginal people.
It is a little too early to tell what the mid-term effects of the collapse of these schemes will have on the viability of what is a valuable and useful agricultural enterprise but it remains to be seen how many of the trees that have been planted will ever be harvested - or just be left to rot in the ground.
"...a poor dried up land afflicted by fever and flies and fit only for a college of monks whose religious zeal might cope with the suffocating heat and musketos which admitted no moment of repose." Matthew Flinders describing northern Australia
“During the decade 1950-60, a great deal of research work was carried out in tropical Australia. It has been claimed in many quarters that this research has solved the problem of agricultural development north of the tropic…Yet it is easy to demonstrate that intensive farming in tropical Australia would only be possible if [...]
