Spear-grass & wallaby-grass

Kneel down in almost any paddock on the Adelaide Plains and the grass under your hand is, in all likelihood, a foreigner. Wild oats, veldt grass, couch — this is what “grass” means on the plains now, and it is not what grew here. To find the plant that built this country you generally have to look at its margins: a fenced cemetery corner never ploughed, a strip beside an old railway line, a stony reserve where the range front is too steep for a tractor. The tussock grassland that once floored the whole of the Adelaide Plains, under a scatter of big old gums, is now the most vanished habitat in this book — a high bar to clear.

The grass came in two main forms, and neither looks much like a lawn. Spear-grass — several species of Austrostipa, still called Stipa in older records — carries its seed on a long, twisted awn that behaves like a tiny drill bit, corkscrewing itself into wool and socks as it dries (Planning SA 2000). Wallaby-grass, Rytidosperma, is gentler: soft, pale, fluffy seed heads on wiry stems, the sort of grass early colonists likened to a hayfield rather than a wilderness. Over both, standing well apart, grew South Australian blue gum and grey box, with river red gums along the creek lines: an open, walk-through structure that looked, to the first Europeans, uncannily like a gentleman’s landscaped estate (Kraehenbuehl 1996), and owed much of that openness to generations of Kaurna land management with fire. Precisely because it looked so ready-made, it was the country taken first, and taken fastest.

The arithmetic of what is left needs two separate numbers, not one. Across the Adelaide Plains as a whole, something like four per cent of the original native vegetation survives in any form (Bradshaw 2012). The grass floor itself has fared worse again: less than one per cent of native grassland across the whole Adelaide and Mount Lofty Ranges region remains today, in small, isolated scraps, nine in ten of them smaller than thirty-one hectares (DEH 2009). The grass went first and hardest for an unglamorous reason — it was the easiest ground to plough and the most rewarding to graze flat, so while a handsome old gum might be spared for its shade, the tussock understorey beneath it was eaten out or turned under long before anyone thought to spare a paddock tree. A lone, wide-crowned gum over a paddock of introduced grass is a woodland orphan: the storey survived, the floor did not.

Because the loss ran ahead of anyone’s living memory, it also ran ahead of anyone noticing. Nobody now alive has stood in an unbroken stretch of the original tussock grassland, so a paddock of exotic pasture reads as what grass looks like: ordinary, in no need of explanation. That is how a landscape disappears without an alarm ever being raised: not in one clearing but in two centuries of nobody left to remember what “grass” used to mean here. Find a genuine remnant — spear-grass drilling its awns into your socks in early summer, wallaby-grass nodding undisturbed along a fence a plough never reached — and you are looking at one of the last honest witnesses to what this whole coastal plain once was.