GRASSY WOODLANDS

Europeans have wrought enormous changes to grasslands associated with eucalypt woodlands (“grassy woodlands”) since the nineteenth century. Virtually all of the species that we consider native to Australia have been managed for tens of thousands of years by means of Aboriginal burning and hunting practices. From the mid-twentieth century these same grasslands have been subject to industrial farming and have undergone dramatic changes, which, while striking to a botanist, are often invisible to the untrained eye.

The setting for these photos is south-eastern tussocks and many species of forbs. Grassy woodlands, or the remnants of them, are the rural backdrop that most city dwellers drive through when they visit a friend or relative in the country’s south-east. Open paddocks of green or tawny brown, scattered open-grown trees with short trunks and broad spreading crowns are so familiar, yet often so unknown to us. But trees such as yellow box () and Blakely’s red gum () only represent a tiny fraction of the plant species that grow in these grassy woodlands. Most species are in the ground layer.