The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #1397 Message #1121474
Posted By: Bob Bolton
22-Feb-04 - 09:23 PM
Thread Name: Origins: The Gum Tree Canoe (Steele/Winnemore)
Subject: RE: Lyrics: Gum Tree Canoe?
G'day Q,
That's why I used the term "feral".
Almost any foreign organisn ... especially if introduced by some homesick settler seeking to make a new environment "more like home" - or even worse: imported by some 'get-rich-quick schemer, as with eucalypts into California - will bring a host of unforeseen problems ... and grow in quite different ways from those in its balanced native habitat.
Australia has suffered particularly badly from such ill-considered releases as it was largely settled in the decades of Victorian imperialistic arrogance - and because the native flora and fauna were so totally different ... adapted with a fine (but not understood) degree of precision to a very different land.