Victoria River Downs
The next example of The Old rangelands provided is a part of a legendary area of cattle production, Victoria River District in the Northern Territory.
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I class this area as Old not only by the length of its pastoral occupation, approximately 100 years, but also by the management style that these lands have endured. The style is euphemistically called free-range. That is, there was virtually no control of animal numbers or their distribution by fencing. That was the situation in most of the remote cattle country until little more than a decade ago. The consequence of this cattle-hunting style of management was that the parts of the landscape preferred by cattle were grazed into oblivion. The degraded state of these preferred areas is obvious. They are white, which indicates bare soil, in the FCC images of 1972 and 1989.
As an experiment, I leave it to you to decide whether the net landcover change you can detect in this image has been for the better or for the worse; or that such an assessment cannot be made. I offer you this challenge to put you in the place of the decision maker or land manager. What would you do in their place?
