edward harold fulcher swain's vision of forest modernity

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Edward Harold Fulcher Swain's Vision ofForest ModernityGregory A. Barton a & Brett M. Bennett aa The Australian National University and University of WesternSydneyPublished online: 29 Jun 2011.

To cite this article: Gregory A. Barton & Brett M. Bennett (2011) Edward Harold FulcherSwain's Vision of Forest Modernity, Intellectual History Review, 21:2, 135-150, DOI:10.1080/17496977.2011.574340

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EDWARD HAROLD FULCHER SWAIN’S VISION OF FOREST MODERNITY

Gregory A. Barton and Brett M. Bennett

INTRODUCTION

Edward Harold Fulcher Swain (1883–1970) developed a unique set of beliefs about theimportance of forests that he tried to implement during his career as a forester in Australia.Swain began his career as a cadet in New South Wales in 1899 and eventually served as theChair of the Provisional Forestry Board in Queensland from 1918 to 1924 and the Forestry Com-missioner of the New South Wales Forestry Commission from 1935 to 1948. Swain envisioned anew society built on forests and forest products. He articulated this vision in his publications andspeeches and sought to implement them during his years as a state forester in Queenslandand New South Wales. Swain pessimistically believed in the impending decline of coal and oiland argued that trees could be used to replace these non-renewable resources as they ran out.He called for professional foresters to wrestle control of land-use planning from the then-dominant agriculture and mining sectors in order to establish more economically and ecologicallysustainable patterns of production. Timber products could be turned into fodder for animals andfood and alcohol for human consumption. He also believed that virgin forests would providespiritual and psychological healing for Australia. Parks would provide revenue from tourism aspeople from cities flooded into the forests to experience nature. He called for nothing short ofa new modern society based intensively upon forests.

Historians have not systematically examined Swain’s ideas and life. No biography of Swainexists. Many monographs on the history of Australian environmental thought fail to mentionhim even once, though he advocated setting aside national parks, had strong ecological viewsand wrote prose and poetry about rural and scenic environments.1 The majority of the existinghistorical scholarship on Swain’s life tends to examine his economic ideas and his protestsagainst the reckless cutting of tropical forests. Scholars have focused on his attempts to save

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©2011 International Society for Intellectual Historyhttp://www.informaworld.com/journals DOI: 10.1080/17496977.2011.574340

We thank the two anonymous reviewers for helping to clarify the argument and structure of the article. James Beattie, JohnDargavel and Peter Kanowski kindly read and commented on versions of the paper. We presented parts of the paper toseminars hosted by History Departments at the Australian National University, Macquarie University, and the Universityof Sydney and the Fenner School of Environment and Society at ANU.1 See, for example, Environmental History and Policy: Still Settling Australia, edited by S. Dovers (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2000); M. Mulligan and S. Hill, Ecological Pioneers: A Social History of Australian EcologicalThought and Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); D. Garden, Australia, New Zealand, and thePacific: An Environmental History (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC Clio, 2005).

Intellectual History Review 21(2) 2011: 135–150

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the forests on Frasier Island and the northern Queensland hardwood forests from development.2

Most recently, John Dargavel has explored his long-standing conflict with his nemesis, CharlesEdward Lane Poole, the Principal of the Australian Forestry School from 1927 to 1945.3

These works focus on specific dimensions of Swain’s ideas, but do not situate them within theframework of his larger philosophies.

Historians have never analysed Swain’s overarching and most unique belief – that forestsshould be used as the material and spiritual base of a new modern society. Swain’s actions asa forester must be understood within the context of this larger belief. The historical geographerJ. M. Powell came closest to identifying Swain’s overarching philosophy when he quoted afiery speech given by Swain at the 1947 Empire Forestry Conference in London. In thespeech, Swain advocated that foresters take control of land management from agriculturalists:‘[We] foresters have been dispossessed by the agriculturalists from our traditional suzeraintyof the earth […] At the very beginning of things indeed, man existed without agriculture, hesubsisted upon the forests.’4 Powell describes Swain’s ideas as ‘forestry fundamentalism’

because Swain appealed to an ancient past when humans lived in harmony with forests beforethe age of agriculture. Swain’s speech did have a Genesis-like tone, but he metaphorically referredto the past rather than literally suggesting that humans go back to a pre-Neolithic and Palaeolithicworld. He appealed to this idealized past as a way of convincing foresters to help him create aradically modern society.5 Swain’s ideas did not express a pre-existing ‘fundamental’ philosophyof forestry, but rather, originated out of the fears and realities of resource scarcity prompted bytwo world wars and Australia’s experience of agricultural failure and deforestation. He marriedtogether different intellectual strains of the Enlightenment by advocating extreme marketforces, driven by profit and loss, and environmental management by experts.6

Swain’s unique, bold ideas must be situated within both Australian and British imperialcontexts. Swain, like other Australian foresters, lived on the ‘restless fringe’ of the BritishEmpire and participated widely in imperial debates throughout the first half of the twentiethcentury.7 Situating Swain’s ideas within their proper imperial context helps to clarify theorigins of his thought and sheds light on larger debates about the environmental history of theBritish Empire. There is a continuing debate about whether the policies pursued by foresters inthe British Empire were direct applications of German and French methods or whether they

2 J. M. Powell, An Historical Geography of Australia: The Restive Fringe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1989), 166–8; K. Frawley, ‘Queensland Rainforest Management: Frontier Attitudes and Public Policy’, Journal ofRural Studies, 7:3 (1991), 219–39, at 231; K. Frawley, ‘Establishing Professional Forestry in Queensland: The SwainYears: 1918–1932’, in Australia’s Ever-changing Forests IV: Proceedings of the Fourth National Conference on Austra-lian Forest History, edited by J. Dargavel and B. Libbs (Canberra: Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, Aus-tralian National University, 1999), 144–64; D. Hutton and L. Connors, A History of the Australian EnvironmentalMovement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 54; P. Holzworth, ‘Forest Conservancy and Alienation’, inSecuring the Wet Tropics?, edited by G. McDonald and M. Lane (Sydney: Federation Press, 2000), 69–84.3 For his conflict, see, J. Dargavel, The Zealous Conservator: A Life of Charles Lane Poole (Perth: University of WesternAustralia Press, 2007), 162–4.4 J. M. Powell, ‘“Dominion over Palm and Pine”: the British Empire Forestry Conferences, 1920–1947’, Journal of His-torical Geography, 33:4 (2007), 852–77, at 873.5 It should be noted that the focus of Powell’s article is not on Swain but the larger context of the conference and the ideasexpressed at it.6 See F. Jonsson, ‘Rival Ecologies of Global Commerce: Adam Smith Versus the Naturalists’, American HistoricalReview, 115:5 (2010), 1342–63.7 B. M. Bennett, ‘An Imperial, National and State Debate: The Rise and Near Fall of the Australian Forestry School, 1927–1945’, Environment and History, 15:2 (2009), 217–44.

136 G. A. BARTON AND B. M. BENNETT

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developed in response to local environmental constraints and colonial political and economicconditions.8 Recent research suggests that foresters in the British Empire developed uniquescientific techniques and management principles that differed from those in Germany andFrance.9

Swain’s ideas help to further deconstruct the diffusionist continental paradigm: he activelyfought against what he perceived to be ‘feudal’ continental European forestry methods. As arejection of Europe, he devised his own curriculum of forestry based upon his experiences inAustralia and his unique ideas of nature and society. Swain strongly advocated his anti-Europeanideas at two Empire Forestry Conferences, joining a chorus of empire foresters who disagreedwith the use of German working plans and believed continental forestry did not pay enoughattention to the profitability of forests.

Historians have also wrestled with the relationship between imperial environmental projectsand modern environmentalism. Many historians studying forestry have used a binary modelemployed originally by American environmental historians that divides the rise of environment-alism into two movements: a utilitarian conservation movement and a more preservation-orientedenvironmental movement. This fitted with existing views on colonial forestry. Many historiansstudying forestry in the British Empire (especially India) have viewed forestry as a coercivecog of capitalism that used the cover of ‘scientific’ language to justify the appropriation oflarge swaths of forests for the production of revenue and imperial control. Colonial forestrywas purely utilitarian and had no connection with the environmental movement.10 Against thisextreme, other scholars have pushed back against the strict separation of conservation andpreservation.11 Gregory Barton and Richard Grove, in particular, have demonstrated linksbetween imperial environmental ideas and modern environmentalism.12 The science ofecology, the desire to preserve forests for aesthetic reasons and the practice of organic farmingall were part of imperialism and modern environmentalism.

8 See G. A. Barton, Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2002); R. Rajan, Modernising Nature: Imperial Eco-development 1800–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006);J. Beattie, Empire and Environmental Anxiety, 1800–1920: Health, Science, Art and Conservation in South Asia and Aus-tralasia, 1800–1920 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).9 P. Vandergeest and N. Peluso, ‘Empires of Forestry: Professional Forestry and State Power in Southeast Asia, Part 1’,Environment and History, 12:1 (2006), 31–64 and ‘Empires of Forestry: Professional Forestry and State Power in South-east Asia, Part 2’, Environment and History, 12:4 (2006), 359–93; A. Agrawal, Environmentality: Technologies of Gov-ernment and the Making of Subjects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); K. Sivaramakrishnan, ‘Science,Environment and Empire History: Comparative Perspectives from Forests in Colonial India’, Environment and History,14 (2008), 41–65; G. A. Barton and B. M. Bennett, ‘“There is a Pleasure in the Pathless Woods”: The Culture of Forestryin British India’, The British Scholar Journal, 3:1 (2010), 219–34; B. M. Bennett, ‘Locality and Empire: Networks ofForestry in Australia, India and South Africa, 1843–1948’ (Ph.D. Thesis, The University of Texas at Austin, 2010);B. M. Bennett, ‘Naturalising Australian Trees in South Africa: Climate, Exotics and Experimentation’, Journal ofSouthern African Studies (2011), forthcoming.10 Rajan, Modernising Nature, 103.11 See, in particular, P. Anker, Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895–1945 (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 197; Barton, Empire Forestry, 144–65; and J. M. Hodge, Agrarian Doctrines ofDevelopment and the Legacies of British Colonialism (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007), 144–78.12 R. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Barton, Empire Forestry; G. A. Barton, ‘Sir Albert Howard and theForestry Roots of the Organic Farming Movement’, Agriculture History, 75:2 (2001), 168–87; G. A. Barton, ‘AlbertHoward and the Decolonization of Science: From the Raj to Organic Farming’, in Science and Empire: Knowledgeand Networks of Science in the British Empire 1800–1970, edited by B. M. Bennett and J. M. Hodge (Basingstoke:Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).

SWAIN’S VISION OF FOREST MODERNITY 137

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Swain’s life reveals strong links between imperial environmental planning and modernenvironmentalism.13 He argued passionately for the conservation of ‘virgin’ forests for psycho-logical and aesthetic purposes and also to protect ecologically ‘the balance of nature’, but hesaw no contradiction in asking foresters at the 1947 Empire Forestry Conference to takecontrol of land-use planning for large swaths of the world. Ultimately, Swain’s beliefs, whichoften seem paradoxical from a present-day political perspective, require historians to reassessthe intellectual history of British imperial environmental planning in the first half of the twentiethcentury. Scholars might find that the intellectual history of imperialism and modern environment-alism are more closely related than previously thought.

AN AUSTRALIAN IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE

In 1883, E. H. F. Swain was born into a lower middle-class family living in the Glebe neighbour-hood of Sydney. After successfully passing a state civil service examination in 1899, he made theself-described ‘romantic’ choice to join the forestry branch of the New South Wales Departmentof Lands as a cadet at the age of 16.14 During this time, Swain worked as clerk in Sydney and atthe Gosford Nursery before J. H. Maiden, the renowned botanist and Director of the NationalHerbarium of New South Wales, accepted Swain as a student to work under him at the RoyalSydney Botanic Gardens in 1904. Swain studied Australia’s native trees, especially the genusEucalyptus, which Maiden was studying intensely at the time.15 After leaving Sydney heserved mostly across northern New South Wales in locations such as Bellinger River, CoffsHarbour, Cootamundra, Grafton, Nambucca River and Woolgoolga. He often worked alone inlarge areas of forest, isolated from well-maintained roads and railways and far from Sydney,the bureaucratic heart of New South Wales.

The fact that Swain learned forestry first by working in forests and studying botany withMaiden partly explains his lifelong disdain for the curriculum of ‘academic’ forestryscience then taught in forestry schools in Europe and Britain. He taught himself the principlesof German and French forestry by going to the library and copying William Schlich’sfive volumes, Manual of Forestry, the basic texts of Oxford University’s forestry certificate.Swain strongly rejected the principles of continental forestry because he believed thatthe emphasis on working plans, which used statistics to model and regulate the managementof forests, lacked an ecological basis and was not driven by the market forces of ‘profitand loss’.

Although he strongly rejected Oxford’s curriculum, he closely followed and corresponded withforesters from around the British Empire over his lifetime. Rather than seeing a monolithic ‘con-tinental paradigm’ dominating forestry, foresters participated in divergent scientific and careernetworks without any single centralized locality of power. Empire forestry encompassed anamalgam of individuals and separate policies bound together by a common imperial traditionand political allegiance to Britain. Swain rejected aspects of forestry as practised in India andEurope but he did not disdain the British Empire. He felt a strong affinity to Britain and the

13 Swain was not alone in his beliefs. See, for example, the publications of the forester Richard St. Barbe Baker and theSouth African ecologist John Phillips.14 N. Foote, E.H.F.S.: Being a Selection from the Papers Left by E.H.F. Swain on his Death on 3rd July, 1970 (Sydney:Government Printer, 1971), 11.15 E.H.F.S., 15.


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British Empire and he participated in two Empire Forestry Conferences, the first in Australia in1928 and the second in London in 1947.

Swain’s experiences of working in rural northern New South Wales in the late 1900s and early1910s influenced his larger views on forestry. Swain particularly criticized local agriculturalistsand dairy farmers for needlessly cutting down the unique forests of the sub-tropical forests, or‘brush’.16 A 1912 report published by Swain described the larger history of how agriculturalistscut down the forests near the Bellinger River. The theme of deforestation caused by agriculturerecurred throughout his writings and later ideas. He argued that despite once having an abundanceof trees, a prosperous timber industry never developed in the region because it ‘labours under thisinevitable disadvantage – it has had to give way before the advance of settlement’.17 As hestressed again and again, settlers in Australia had cut first-rate forests to make second-ratefarms, allowing for the growth of a powerful agricultural lobby. Subsidies for dairy farmerskept the rural industries alive, but Swain believed that timber plantations would be moreprofitable.18

Swain developed the belief that many of Australia’s under-utilized native tree species could beused to substitute for imported softwoods. He noticed that native small softwood trees grew abun-dantly in the sub-tropical forests. Settlers cleared these trees to make way for farms and pastures.At the same time that settlers wasted useful timber, Australians had to import timber from abroadbecause of a shortage of softwoods. In 1912, Swain wrote:

It provokes some sense of resentment to see useful woods […] filling our brushes and rotting for wantof a market, or being swept down by a ‘drive’ in hundreds, and unconcernedly destroyed in clearingoperations, whilst every year we are importing into Australia inferior softwoods from over the seas to avalue of £2,000,000 sterling, from a source that is steadily drying up.19

Swain’s desire to use indigenous softwoods to substitute for imported softwoods remained one ofhis lifelong interests.

Swain suffered professionally by working in the remote regions of New South Wales. In 1916,he resigned his position as a district forester in New South Wales to take a lower paying job as adistrict forest inspector for Queensland’s Forestry Branch, then under the direction of NormanJolly, a former South Australian Rhodes Scholar who had studied forestry at Oxford University.Swain resigned because R. D. Hayes, the first Forestry Commissioner in New South Wales,rejected Swain’s request to join the newly founded Forestry Commission in 1916.20 Swainalso disliked the ‘convict’ mentality of the New South Wales government, which he saw asbeing overly focused on formulaic interpretations that stifled innovation.21

In 1915, Swain briefly visited Montana to study forestry and tour its forests and forestindustries. From his studies in the United States he returned to Queensland and penned a book,An Australian Study of American Forestry, published in 1918.22 He praised the economically

16 For a description of the environmental history of the north coast, see the essay ‘The North Coast Story’, in E. Rolls,From Forest to Sea: Australia’s Changing Environment (St Lucia: The University of Queensland Press, 1993), 125–60.17 E. H. F. Swain, The Forests of the Bellinger (Sydney: Government Printer, 1912), 14.18 Foote, E.H.F.S., 26.19 Swain, The Forests of the Bellinger, 8.20 Swain, The Forests of the Bellinger, 42.21 Swain, The Forests of the Bellinger, 31.22 Swain, An Australian Study of American Forestry (Brisbane: A. J. Cummings, Government Printer, 1918).


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efficient foresters in the United States, criticized foresters in Europe and India and offered hiscandid opinions on forestry in Australia. He rejected the wholesale importation of Europeanand Indian silvicultural practice and management into Australia because the continent ‘has aforest flora peculiar to itself and silvical conditions quite unlike those existing in any othercountry’.23 More pessimistically, he warned that Australia’s inland forests would be ‘extermi-nated’ if ‘unrestricted exploitation’ continued.24 Swain believed Australia’s forestry policiesremained mired in a ‘frontier’ mentality bent on agricultural development at all costs. Australia’snatural forests grew on the best and most accessible agricultural land, whereas in the United Statesvaluable forests often grew in less arable mountains.25 He noted that in Australia, ‘climate, con-figuration, and location are such as to make in Australia even comparatively poor lands desirablein the eyes of the settler and the land speculator’.26

Swain offered a broad vision of forestry that combined ecology, economics and management.In the book he laid out his lifelong disdain of European ‘academic’ working plans that intricatelycreated long (often over one-hundred-year-) forest management plans that failed correctly tocalculate diverse forest ecologies and were based upon steady revenue instead of the motivationof profit and loss.27 He sought to create a new system of forestry that provided profits, steadyrevenue and a liveable income for Australian timber cutters, saw millers and professional fores-ters.28 This egalitarian system of forestry would be radically ecological and economic: naturalsystems would be harnessed for maximum productivity, but large areas of natural ‘virgin’forest would be set aside for psychological and spiritual purposes. To make forestry profitablefor workers in the remote regions of Australia, he encouraged a sliding scale royalty on stumpage– how much someone was paid to cut down a tree on state property – that allowed cutters furtherfrom markets to pay fewer royalties than cutters closer to markets owing to the former’s lowerprofits because of high transportation costs.29 His economic theories merely formed part of hisvision of forestry. Swain also included ecology and climatology as two of the most importantcore parts of forestry education and practice.30

Swain’s book argued that Australia’s states should create strong forestry departments toconserve forests against the encroachment of agriculture and the axe of settlers who sought tocut and run without replanting or properly managing forests. Despite being fiercely democratic,he envisioned forestry departments with extensive powers for land use planning extending farbeyond the boundaries of forests. He recognized the fundamental difficulties in maintainingdemocracy and protecting forests – this tension beguiled him throughout his career. Ironically,his belief that states should create powerful forestry departments fundamentally agreed withthe views of his arch-enemy, Charles Lane Poole, who quit his job as the Conservator offorests in Western Australia in 1921 because the Premier would not let him reserve many ofthe large Jarrah (Eucalyptus marginata) forests.31 Both men were stand-offish, one of thereasons why they hated each other, but beyond the core belief in the profound importance of

23 Swain, American Forestry, 4.24 Swain, American Forestry, 66.25 Swain, American Forestry, 84.26 Swain, American Forestry, Recommendation VII.27 Swain, American Forestry, 91.28 Swain, American Forestry, 100.29 Swain, American Forestry, 105–6. Also see Carron, A History of Forestry, 16–18.30 Swain wanted to add ‘climatology and ecology’ to the Oxford forestry curriculum. Foote, E.H.F.S., 6.31 Dargavel, The Zealous Conservator, 63–77.


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forestry more generally, Swain often had little in common with other professional foresters inAustralia who worked within the cultures and institutions of state governments. His open and con-tinual rejection of the status quo in both science and politics gave his ideas freshness, but ulti-mately made it difficult to implement them.

From 1918 to 1924, he chaired the Queensland Provisional Forestry Board, first a branch of theLands Department that in 1924 became provisionally independent. Swain created a strong cultureof research among Queensland’s state foresters. Like most foresters in Australia at the time, Swainworried about Australia’s dependence on imported softwood timbers, used for construction andpulp. He emphasized the planting of the native softwood Araucaria cunninghamii, the Hoop Pine,publishing a pamphlet on its silviculture in 1924.32 He imported trees, such as the Slash Pine(Pinus elliottii) from Florida, from climatically similar regions. He emphasized decentralizedresearch, creating a strong forestry research tradition in Queensland that lasted into the 1960s.Looking to other tropical countries, Queensland’s foresters experimented with shifting cultivationand growing crops, such as maize, alongside plantations in the early stages of growth.33 Swainestablished a forest products division in 1924 to find valuable uses to Australia’s many unusednative hardwood timbers. His ‘universal’ classification system for timber made his namewidely known among foresters throughout the world after the 1928 Empire Forestry Conferencein Australia.34

Swain fought hard to create policies that ensured the protection of native forests andthe maximum profit and livelihood for all people involved in that industry. He helped create aProvisional Forest Board and Queensland Forest Service in 1924 that was not under the directcontrol of the Lands Department. Swain succeeded in using Forestry Service powers to reservelarge native hoop pine forests in the Mary and Brisbane Valleys.35 In 1925, he helped reservethe forests of Fraser Island as a multiple-use area.36 Swain believed strongly in the importanceof state control and management of forest land, whereas pro-development Queenslanderswanted to open up Crown land for private ownership and development. However, Swain’s con-tinual efforts to protect and reserve native forests and to create a powerful, scientifically orientedforestry department made him many enemies with pro-development Queenslanders who believedthat the state already had too many trees.37

In 1931, the Queensland government appointed a Royal Commission for the Developmentof North Queensland to investigate the possibilities of opening the northern hardwoodforests for logging and settlement. Swain believed that officials opened the inquiry partlyas a result of his constant attempts to reserve and strictly conserve forests, something thatmany pro-development boosters saw as antithetical to economic growth.38 Swain opposedthis development because he felt that the plan recklessly risked forests and originated

32 E. H. F. Swain, Notes on the Silviculture of Hoop Pine, Bulletin No. 2 (Brisbane: Queensland Forest Service, 1924).Swain’s Notes on the Silviculture of Hoop Pine was widely read. The South African government circulated his pamphletto its foresters. See National Archives South Africa, Cape Town, FBT 1/4 52/5 ‘Araucaria Cunninghammi’.33 Report of the Provisional Forestry Board For the Year Ended 30th June 1926 (Brisbane, 1926), 66–7.34 E. H. F. Swain, A Universal Index to Wood, Bulletin No. 7 (Brisbane: Queensland Forest Service, 1927); E. H. F. Swain,The Timbers and Forest Products of Queensland (Brisbane: Queensland Forest Service, 1928).35 The Mary Valley was the centre of the Hoop Pine experiments and plantings. See Report of the Provisional ForestryBoard For the Year Ended 30th June 1926 (Brisbane: Queensland Forest Service, 1926), 82.36 Powell, An Historical Geography of Australia, 167.37 For northern Queensland development, see Frawley, ‘Queensland Rainforest Management’, 219–39; Hutton andConnors, A History of the Australian Environmental Movement, 54.38 Connors, A History of the Australian Environmental Movement, 54.


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short-term thinking and profiteering. He did not see it as a genuine attempt responsibly tomanage the forests for posterity. This followed the logic of his youth when he wrote:‘When a considerable area of forest is clearly of great economic value’ but changing landusage ‘might result in an irreparable disaster’ then ‘it should be retained’.39 The RoyalCommission inquired about the possibility of opening up the forests for ‘closer’ settlement,timber development and agriculture.40

Swain countered with a report written by a ‘commission’ of his forestry staff. Theycompiled at breakneck speed a document calling for the protection of the forests entitled,‘An Economic Survey of the Cabinetwood Forest region of North Queensland’. Over atwo-day period he sat before the Royal Commission, reading his report. He lambasted thecurrent land management policies of the Queensland government for failing to conserve thestate’s natural resources at the expense of a short-sighted development.41 After being readat for days, the Royal Commission dismissed Swain and his arguments.42 The members ofthe Commission disliked Swain’s approach, his tone and his message. Some Commissionmembers sought to have him punished by being put in gaol; they asked Queensland’sAuditor General to review the facts contained in Swain’s report, and then to charge himwith perjury. A private review by the Auditor General confirmed the factual accuracy ofSwain’s report, but the Royal Commission in the end chose not to publish the vindication.The new Deputy Premier and Minister of Lands, Percy Pease, soon dismissed Swain fromhis job.

Swain found employment in 1933 as a consultant for the South Australian governmentand the Australian Paper Manufactures Ltd., eventually producing a report on the ailingPinus radiata plantations in south-eastern South Australia. He recommended a stringentprogramme of thinning and cutting to improve the profitability and health of the plantations.His recommendations followed similar silvicultural developments in South Africa, but werehotly contested by Lane Poole.43 The report further established Swain’s reputation as one ofthe nation’s leading foresters and helped him to live between jobs in Queensland and NewSouth Wales.

THE FORESTRY IMPERATIVE, 1935–1948

In 1935, the Parliament of New South Wales and the Forestry Minister Roy Vincent appointedSwain as the Forestry Commissioner, a position he held from 1935 to 1948.44 The job posedmany institutional and financial challenges. New South Wales’s economy remained stuck in adeep depression in the mid-1930s. The Forestry Commission, subsequently, had little power ormoney to pursue expansive projects on the grand scale that Swain envisioned. Prison labourers

39 Swain, An Australian Study, IX.40 As quoted in P. Holzworth, ‘Forest Conservancy and Alienation’, 76. Also see State Library of Queensland, LandsDepartment File 1484, Report of the North Queensland Land Enquiry Committee. For an analysis of the debates also,see L. T. Carron, A History of Forestry in Australia (Canberra: Australian National University, 1985), 106–8.41 Holzworth, ‘Forest Conservancy’, 77. See An Economic Survey of the Cabinetwood Forest Region of North Queensland(Brisbane: Provincial Forestry Board, 1931).42 For an analysis of the debates, also see Carron, A History of Forestry in Australia, 106–8.43 Dargavel, The Zealous Conservator, 154–5. Eventually Swain’s ideas were verified by the late South Australian fores-ter, Normal Lewis. Personal communication, John Dargavel, 7 February 2011.44 Dargavel, The Zealous Conservator, 159–60.


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and poor whites working under relief programmes constituted the largest part of the forestworkforce. Swain came back to a New South Wales wracked by agricultural failure, causedpartly by the settlement of returning soldiers on marginal agricultural lands.45 Coal exports, alarge part of the state’s economy, declined and prices halved.46

He implemented a research and management agenda based upon his beliefs in the economicand ecological basis of forestry as a tool for urban and rural development. As in Queensland,Swain established a wood products investigation division to identify valuable native timbers.47

He planted native hoop pine in northern New South Wales, explored sites to plant Pinusradiata in the south and emphasized the importance of selecting exotic species based uponclimatic comparison.48 He supported his former junior colleague and ecologist, W. A. W. deBeuzeville, encouraging de Beuzeville to create new arboreta and parks that showcased indigen-ous flora while exploring the potential to plant foreign species with economic potential.49 Swainadvocated keeping parts of the Blue Mountains ‘primitive’ for psychological purposes and soughtto declare multiple-use national forests (under the Forestry [Amendment] Act 1935) to ‘conservethe wildlife in the bush – and maintain the balance of nature’.50 To promote the development of astronger rural forestry sector, Swain tried to implement a sliding scale stumpage fee system as inQueensland. He continued his fights with Lane Poole, the Principal of the Australian ForestrySchool in Canberra from 1927 to 1945, by not sending any new students from New SouthWales beginning in 1936.51

The onset of the Second World War in 1939 changed the landscape of Australian forestry forthe following decade. Softwoods and hardwoods were called to the service of country and empire.Three major issues confronted foresters during and after the war: supplying softwoods, findingnew technological uses for Australian timbers and creating the economic conditions for post-war growth and resettlement. Wood, especially softwood, remained in high demand during thewar because shipments of foreign softwoods could not be sent to softwood-deficient Australiaowing to blockades and shipping shortages. The Australian government set up forestry commit-tees to discuss the supply and uses of timber during the war.52 Many predicted that a resourcecrunch could potentially stifle post-war growth.53

Swain’s writings from 1942 must be viewed within the context of larger conservation andplanning discussions that ran throughout the war. In 1943, the Commonwealth Governmentopened an inter-state Rural Reconstruction Committee focused on post-war development. Thelatter’s published and unpublished reports focused on agriculture, housing, health, economics

45 D. Wood, ‘Limits Reaffirmed: New Wheat Frontiers in Australia, 1916–1939’, Journal of Historical Geography, 23:4(1997), 459–77.46 B. Kingston, A History of New South Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 143.47 See L. T. Carron, ‘A History of Forestry and Forest Products Research in Australia’, Historical Records of AustralianScience, 5:1 (1980), 7–57 at 11–12.48 Beuzeville finalized Swain’s original climatic mapping. See W. A. W. de Beuzeville, The Climatological Basis of For-estry New South Wales (Sydney: Forestry Commission of New South Wales, 1943). See the reports for Forestry Commis-sion of New South Wales (Sydney: Forestry Commission of New South Wales, 1939); Forestry Commission of New SouthWales, 1940 (Sydney: Forestry Commission of New South Wales, 1939).49 W. A. W. de Beuzeville, Australian Trees for Australian Planting (Sydney: Forestry Commission of New South Wales,1947).50 Forestry Commission of New South Wales 1939, 2.51 See Bennett, ‘Imperial, National, and State Debate’, 234; Dargavel, The Zealous Conservator, 162–4.52 Australian War Memorial, AWM60/878, ‘Timber for War Purposes’, 1942.53 NAA, A11719/17, ‘Timber Supply-Post War’, 1944; A11719/22, ‘Timber Supply-Post War’, 1944.


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and the environment.54 Swain contributed to this discussion by writing an unpublished reportentitled Forestry and the Conservation Imperative in Reconstruction that laid out many of hisideas about the future of Australian forestry.55 His ideas about agricultural failure and ecologicaldegradation mirrored those of other people. Fears of soil erosion permeated discussions aboutagriculture in the 1930s to 1940s. He imagined forestry as part of an integrated managementsystem not unlike that which arose in New South Wales’s Department of Conservation (whichintegrated forestry, water management and soil conservation) created in 1944. However,Swain’s views, as it becomes apparent, differed in their strength and emphasis on forestry asthe centrepiece of post-war conservation and planning.

In 1943, Swain produced a report titled Forestry and the Conservation Imperative in Recon-struction that he hoped would change land-use not only in New South Wales, but across all ofAustralia. The report and all subsequent reports he wrote should be read as Swain’s personalvision of forestry. He freely spoke his mind in 1943 because he knew that the government inNew South Wales would not reappoint him when his contract came up because of his politicaland personal disputes with the government.56 Swain’s lengthy fight against Wallace Wurth, theDirector of the Public Service Commission, led the Premier, William McKell, to ask him toresign in 1942.57 His policy of using a sliding royalty for stumpage fees during the war incensedthe Commonwealth Government price-fixer in 1943. Swain’s contract ran until 1948. With thewriting on the wall, he used the rest of his career to push for a forestry revolution in Australianand the British Empire.

In this report, he argued that humans needed to shift from the current age of intensive agricul-ture and resource extraction to an age of sustainable, ecologically sensitive and intensive for-estry.58 Swain envisioned a mixed economy of state intervention and market forces, balancedbetween urban and rural areas and based more heavily on forestry and less on agriculture andnon-renewable resources. Forestry could contribute to creating full employment after the warended by reshaping land usage, the economy and society. Swain argued passionately that theage of reckless agriculture should end because it depleted the earth’s finite resources. In Australia,the lessons lay for all to see. Poor agricultural methods and an extension of agriculture in marginallands led to soil erosion, the loss of fertility, deforestation and sometimes even regional climatechange and desertification.59

Swain’s extensive travelling throughout the less prosperous countryside of northern New SouthWales and southern Queensland formed many of his impressions on Australia’s agricultural anddairy sectors. Seeing the rural poverty of small farmers and the extensive deforestation agricultureleft in its wake, he argued that the economics of sustainable forestry made it more valuablethan agriculture and dairy in much of New SouthWales and Queensland.60 He argued that forestry

54 See A. W. Martin and J. Penny, ‘The Rural Reconstruction Commission, 1943–47’, Australian Journal of Politics andHistory, 29:2 (1983), 218–36; T. Whitford and T. Boadle, ‘Australia’s Rural Reconstruction Commission, 1943–46: AReassessment’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 54:4 (2008), 525–45.55 The commission did publish W. A. W. de Beuzeville’s non-controversial The Climatological Basis of Forestry NewSouth Wales in 1943.56 Foote, E.H.F.S., 59.57 Foote, E.H.F.S., 59–61.58 SLNSWMLMSS 2071, E. H. F. Swain, ‘Forestry and the Conservation Imperative in Australian Reconstruction’, 1943, 2.59 Swain’s views on this can best be seen in W. A. W. de Beuzeville’s book, Australian Trees for Australian Planting(Sydney: Forestry Commission of New South Wales/A. H. Pettifer, Government Printer, 1947). Swain wrote theintroduction.60 Foote, E.H.F.S., 26.


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could ‘dispose of our unemployment nuisance in hill-billy settlements’, helping to settle peoplewho had hitherto subsisted ‘on the bones of destroyed forests to raise a poor-white posterity’,which he believed would become ‘a new unemployment problem’ after the war ended.61

In order to reclaim much of the Australian continent for forestry, he argued that the unemployedand returning soldiers should be marshalled to bring the ‘abandoned hills’ of Australia once againinto forests.62 Plantations and regenerated forests would create industry, jobs, food and industrialmaterial in rural areas that lacked an existing strong economy.Developing rural forests for aestheticpurposes would also serve the ‘intense desire, also, of the city dweller to seek his own momentaryescape back to Nature’.63 This imperative would result in a ‘stable and balanced and watered coun-tryside, essentially Australian […] a rest-cure and a higher standard of living for our own industri-alised populations: as a theatre of the world’s newest, greatest secondary industry of tourism’.64

He sought to turn forests into centres for food production.65 Forestry, he believed, couldproduce some food products – such as sugar – equal to or better than agriculture. Unliketraditional methods of agriculture, forests protected instead of exhausting the land, maintainingan organic cycle of nutrients and creating humus. Forests also produced honey, nuts, fruits,edible oils and fibres for food. His vision looked forward to the day when a forest-basedsociety could ‘cradle a new race, of Quality, which rejects the Oriental-Mediterranean degreeof agrarianism’.66 He did not entirely reject agriculture, but he saw the economic and socialdependence upon agricultural systems as both detrimental to the environment and as a socialill that alienated humans from forests.

During the war, he tried to implement the basic building blocks of his vision. He enthused attimes that Australians seemed to take more interest in forestry. He noted in 1944 that ‘[d]uring theyear there was an increased demand for information regarding forestry’.67 The ‘genesis of thisrecrudescence of public feeling for the long-suffering tree can probably be traced in the mainto a protracted dry spell accompanied by salutary examples of wind erosion’.68 In addition toseeing a new public interest in forestry, Swain helped to broker a deal regarding royalties andprices between timber industries and state foresters in New South Wales, Queensland, Victoriaand Tasmania at the Eastern States Timber Industries Stabilization Conference.69 The timberproducts division of the Forestry Commission continued to test wood-based synthetics, plastics,aircrafts and other industrial products made from timber.70 He worked closely with the SydneyFederation of Bushwalkers and the Confederated Forest League to conserve resources, advocatethe preservation of parks and bring together industry and nature lovers.71

61 Swain, ‘Forestry and the Conservation Imperative’, 6.62 Swain, ‘Forestry and the Conservation Imperative’, 9.63 Swain, ‘Forestry and the Conservation Imperative’, 9.64 Swain, ‘Forestry and the Conservation Imperative’, 11.65 Swain, ‘Forestry and the Conservation Imperative’, 11.66 Swain, ‘Forestry and the Conservation Imperative’, 6–7.67 Annual Report, 1944–45 of the Forestry Commission of New South Wales Fiscal Year: 1st July, 1944 – 30th June, 1945(Sydney: Forestry Commission of New South Wales, 1945), 23.68 Annual Report, 1944–45, 23.69 Annual Report, 1944–45, 24.70 Annual Report, 1944–45, 29–30.71 E. H. F. Swain, The Seven Services of the Bushlands: Based on an Address Given by E. H. F. Swain to the Sydney Fed-eration of Bushwalkers, 18th May, 1945 (Sydney: Forestry Commission of New South Wales, 1945); E. H. F. Swain,SLNSW ML MSS 2174, 2/12, W. A. W. de Beuzeville, ‘New Forests for Old: An Address to the Nov 1944 Conferenceof the Confederated Forest League’.


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After the war ended, Swain continued to publish widely on his ideas. He believed that animpending decline in the production of fossil fuels and minerals and the ecological damagedone by agriculture helped his ideas slowly to gain steam. In a post-war report on forestryhistory and policy in New South Wales, he told the government that the world continued tomove away from a ‘Phase of Exploitation to a Phase of Conservation’. It has yet, ‘neithershape nor mechanism’, and has only half emerged with partial measures on water reclamation,forest policy, and ‘new desert-land rehabilitation’ to ‘remedy old land exploitations’. This newhope, this healing programme of conservation, hinged upon ‘positive re-creation by the restor-ation of forests’. What would then emerge would be the goal of all governments around theworld: ‘Decentralization, Rehabilitation, and Full Employment’. How was this new world poss-ible? Because ‘in this new Technological Age, “Anything can be made from Wood”’.72 As ifforging the preamble of a new constitution he intoned:

And, whereas, mineral resources come to an end in the Phase of Exploitation, forests can be renewed toreplace the ‘Vast Potentialities’ we have lost; and to provide the raw materials of new industrial enter-prises. The Future belongs to those Countries which can grow forests.73

He argued that only a radical programme of reforesting and afforestation could save Australiafrom a bleak future. Wood, he believed, provided the only way to fuel the growing economiesof the world. In another unpublished report from 1947, on the world’s timber supply, Swainargued that wood would remain ‘as the hope of the world when coal, metals and petroleum[…] have been mined out, and except as recovered scrap, have vanished from the earth’.74

Swain, like many others, saw how the two World Wars had changed the technological utilizationof wood: ‘Modern technology has discovered wood as a new engineering and chemical substance.New industries and technologies converted wood into steel-like trusses, textiles, cattle fodder,alcohol, munitions and plastics’.75 Australians also used wood to build airplanes during thewar effort. In the burst of technological enthusiasm brought about by war scarcity, Swain sawthe kernels of a new age of wood technology.

Until the end of his term in 1948, Swain extolled his vision to whoever would listen. Swainflew across the world in 1947 while travelling to the Empire Forestry Conference in London. Hetravelled from Australia to Indonesia, Burma, India, Egypt, England and eventually to Americaand Canada before flying back to Australia. When he came back from London he gave a radiointerview on ABC National Radio on 12 October 1947 that focused on his recent trip andideas.76 Much of the post-war world faced a desperate shortage of wood, especiallysoftwoods. This message was perfectly tailored to post-war Australians who faced a housingshortage because of limited softwood supplies. He told Australians about the use of timberas a food substitute in North America: ‘In Canada and the United States, I saw wood-wastebeing converted into Molasses, and, by the addition of yeast, into alcohol and proteins, andthence towards the synthetics.’77 After visiting with leading foresters at the Empire Forestry

72 SLNSW ML MSS 2071, E. H. F. Swain, ‘Forestry Policy in N.S.W. and the Administration 1916–1946’, 1946.73 Swain, ‘Forestry Policy in N.S.W.’, i–iii.74 SLNSWML MSS 2071, E. H. F. Swain, ‘World Timber Supply In Relation to the Possibility of Increasing the TimberSupply For New South Wales’, 1947, 17.75 Swain, ‘World Timber Supply’, 18.76 SLNSW ML MSS 2174, 2/12. W. A. W. de Beuzeville, Transcript of ABC Broadcast of 12 October 1947.77 Beuzeville, ‘Transcript of ABC Broadcast’.


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Conference, Swain said that ‘I come back convinced that the long range future of theworld belongs to those countries which can grow wood, the stuff from which anything canbe made’.78

After his appeal to the nation of Australia in late 1947, he realized that he could not create achange in the forestry policies by himself. In 1948, his term ran out and would not berenewed. The ability to implement his vast plan of reconstruction in Australia relied upon theconsent of a democratic electoral system that favoured agriculture and existing industry. Thesame democratic values that he extolled in his book on American forestry made it difficult toimplement his radical vision of society in Australia. Post-war reconstruction by the Governmentof New South Wales included the creation of more softwood timber plantations, neededespecially for housing, but did not de-emphasize the dominance of the agricultural and pastoralsectors of the economy.79 Swain’s plans for large parks found little support among the NewSouth Wales foresters: foresters and the timber industry devised new ways of pulping andwood-chipping previously unproductive Eucalyptus forests.80 To implement the change hedesired, Swain recognized in 1947 that he had to appeal to other British imperial foresters whocould help to achieve his goal of increasing the power of forestry.

SWAIN AT THE 1947 EMPIRE FORESTRY CONFERENCE

In 1947, he attended the Fourth Empire Forestry Conference in London on behalf of the NewSouth Wales government. The Empire Forestry Conferences began in 1920 as a way of bringingtogether foresters from throughout the British Empire to discuss common problems, offer newfindings, and also to help encourage an empire-trading block to compete with America,Germany and Russia. London hosted the first conference in 1920. Others followed in 1923,1928, 1935 and 1947.81

Following upon the heels of a destructive war that had used up extensive forest resources,empire foresters championed the importance of forestry as a pillar of post-war reconstruction.Foresters feared that the world faced a timber shortage because of overcutting during theSecond World War and the high demands for wood required for post-war construction. Inaddition to worrying about timber shortages, foresters remained highly critical of agriculture. For-esters and agriculturalists throughout the British Empire – from India to Australia and SouthAfrica – had criticized each other at varying levels of intensity throughout the past seventyyears.82 Of all conferences, the previous 1935 Empire Forestry Conference in South Africa fea-tured the most heated debates between the two groups. Foresters felt an even more heightened

78 Beuzeville, ‘Transcript of ABC Broadcast’. His emphasis.79 Hutton and Connors discuss briefly how forestry changed after Swain’s retirement, A History of the Australian Environ-mental Movement, 149; Carron, A History of Forestry, 19–27. For a modern reflection on the social function of agriculturein Australia, see C. Muir, ‘Feeding the World’, Griffith Review, 27 (2010), 59–73.80 Dargavel, Fashioning Australia’s Forests, 57–9.81 J. M. Powell examines these conferences in ‘“Dominion Over Palm and Pine”’. Each conference and country publishedmultiple volumes on the proceedings.82 See discussions of friction between foresters and agriculturalists. J. M. Hodge, ‘Colonial Foresters versus Agricultur-alists: The Debate over Climate and Cocoa Diseases in British West Africa, 1925–1950’, Agricultural History, 83:2(2009), 201–20; G. A. Barton and B. M. Bennett, ‘Environmental Conservation and Deforestation in British India,1855–1947’, Itinerario: International Journal of the History of European Expansion and Global Interaction, 32:2(2008), 83–104, at 89.


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antipathy towards agriculture and agricultural researchers after the war’s end because of chronicshortages of timber in England and throughout the empire.

Swain travelled to London and chronicled the event in an extensive, detailed diary. His diaryreveals a great deal of detail and interpretive material missing from the dry summation of speechesprinted in the 1947 Empire Forestry Conference. Throughout his diary he carefully noted whoagreed and disagreed with him. He took great pains to paint the atmosphere of the conferenceand recreate the inner workings of imperial conservation. Swain felt at home at the Empire For-estry Conference, this time without Lane Poole’s presence. He supported the then-controversialviews on the quantification of thinning and spacing for plantations by the South African forester,I. J. Craib, against the views of older foresters who supported a more managerial, European modelof forest management. But despite some internal technical arguments, a greater sense of common-ality of purpose pervaded the conference than previous ones. For Swain the conference, asexpressed by the Canadian delegate, W. J. LeClair, ‘was an oasis of brotherhood in a worlddesert of frustration and dissention’.83

Enthused by the increased investment brought on by the Colonial Development and WelfareAct of 1945, which provided money to fund development projects in the British colonies, fores-ters advocated more aggressive and sizeable forestry policies across the empire. Lord Roy Robin-son, the elected chair of the conference, expressed the view that as civil servants ‘nearest the soil’,foresters had the land-use of the world in their care. ‘Vast sums have been found for Empire devel-opment’ but he believed that foresters must now take the lead in these development endeavours.New funds must be channelled into the Colonial Forest Service, which he believed was ‘inade-quately organised for the works committed to its charge’. The imperial forest mandate ‘mustbe brought to fruition’.84

However, greater power would be needed. Swain and other foresters agreed on this point. TheIndian delegate, A. P. Hamilton, argued that ‘We [foresters] require T.V.A. [Tennessee ValleyAuthority] powers of control’.85 Another forester argued that it was a battle of ‘agricultureversus forestry’ and that they needed to engage in a ‘laborious requisition’ of land.86 This requiredchanging the terms which foresters used. As Hamilton pointed out, taking the podium again,foresters had been ‘looked on as land grabbers and forest police’ but, he argued, they shouldrather be seen as ‘land managers’.87 Swain echoed these sentiments. In his speech, he couldnot help letting loose at the conference the same kind of vision of social change, accompaniedby a bush-fire rhetoric. Swain called on the delegates to resist the dominance of agricultureand place forestry back at the centre of land management:

[W]e foresters have been dispossessed by the agriculturalists from our traditional suzerainty of the earth[…] At the very beginning of things indeed, man existed without agriculture, he subsisted upon theforests. It was the agriculturists who dispossessed the forest and who raped the earth wherever theywent […] There are great sins to be laid against past agriculture […]. Forestry now has to make theresponsibility of replenishing that earth […] I suggest that forestry should resume its place of being

83 See SLNSWML MSS 2071, E. H. F. Swain, By The Way: Pepysian Jottings Empire Forestry Conference 1947, 1947,162.84 Swain, Pepysian Jottings, 122.85 Swain, Pepysian Jottings, 78.86 Swain, Pepysian Jottings, 80.87 Swain, Pepysian Jottings, 81.


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the complete conservationist […] only by the expression of the utmost energy of the Forest Servicesboth in defence and offence can we redeem our traditional responsibilities of the earth.88

It is clear from the conference that Swain’s desire to assert forestry as the most important area ofland management found a broad consensus among a large segment of empire foresters who soughtto redefine forestry’s future; yet Swain still held stronger views than other foresters. Foresterscriticized the tendency of agriculture to encroach on forestry, but the published proceedings ofthe 1947 conference recorded only a moderate criticism against agriculture in the resolutions:

We should point out that the widespread tendency of agriculture is to encroach upon the forests and tomonopolise the marginal types of land which can more profitably be utilised for the growing of timberand should be so used in the national interest.89

Rather than seeking to take over agriculture, the report suggested creating a ‘supreme land useauthority having adequate forest representation’ with the ‘power and funds’ to carry out thejob as needed, backed by ‘vigorous comparing of education and publicity’.90 This mass planningmodel included forestry but was not dominated or directed by foresters.

Swain’s call for the forestry takeover of land management never came to pass in Australia orthe British Empire. The Colonial Office heavily favoured agrarian development over forestryduring the 1940s–1960s.91 Forestry projects never received the equivalent Colonial Officefunding of the Tanganyika groundnut scheme of 1947–51 or had the ability to create newsocio-economies as did the 1954 Swinnerton Plan in Kenya. Other environmental scientists chal-lenged the central beliefs of foresters that justified their claims to control nature. The lobbyingability of foresters had slowly declined from the late nineteenth century owing to a decline inthe belief that deforestation caused desiccation, and also because most colonial governmentshad already set aside large areas of forest reserves.92 An increasing number of ecologists stronglycriticized the dominant belief among foresters that most ecosystems, if left undisturbed, usuallyled to climax communities of forests.93 After decolonization, former colonial nation-statesemphasized rapid economic development at the expense of environmental protection.The United Nation’s Forestry and Agricultural Organization’s foresters, many who came fromthe Colonial Service or the Indian Forest Service, could only advise on how to create large-scale exotic plantations. Grand forestry projects – such as reclothing the Sahara – died withthe decolonization of Africa in the 1950s and 1960s.

CONCLUSION

At the age of sixty-five, and after over twelve years as the Forestry Commissioner, Swain retiredin early 1948. As Forestry Commissioner, Swain had helped to create and expand native and

88 As quoted by Powell in ‘“Dominion Over Palm and Pine”’, 872–3.89 Proceedings and Resolutions of the Fifth British Empire Forestry Conference, 1947 (London: HMSO, 1948), 33–5.90 Fifth British Empire Forestry Conference, 33–5.91 See Hodge, Triumph of the Expert.92 American anti-desiccation science played an influential role in the decline of concerns about desiccation in Australia andNew Zealand. Beattie discusses this in his forthcoming book, Empire and Environmental Anxiety.93 See, for example, Jan Smut’s criticisms of foresters who saw forests as the ‘climax community’ of most ecosystems.Powell, ‘“Dominion Over Palm and Pine”’, 869.


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exotic softwood plantations, studied the properties of native timbers, supported ecologicalresearch, encouraged the set-aside of lands as primitive parks, helped to create strong relation-ships between the saw millers and state foresters and tried to make a more prosperous ruralNew South Wales. For most foresters, this would be a career’s worth of accomplishments, butSwain left his job with his grand hope unfinished.

Over time, Swain’s ideas slowly faded and now they are largely forgotten. This amnesia hashappened partly because he devised solutions to problems that never happened. The worstfears of Swain never came to pass. Coal and oil did not run out. Instead of facing a softwoodsshortage, some scholars suggest that Australia may in fact face a glut of softwood as the resultof large plantations created in the 1960s–1980s.94 In Australia, agricultural interests remainedpowerful and new projects, like the Snowy Mountains Scheme between 1949–1974, helped toentrench agriculture’s position vis-à-vis the Forestry Commission. Swain’s eccentric personalityand ideas turned off many professional foresters in Australia. Lastly, Swain was ahead of mostforesters in seeking to preserve large swaths of forests for parks while pushing for more inten-sively managed plantations. This meant that neither foresters nor environmentalists recognizedSwain as their own. Ironically, while Swain’s ideas found little support, if Swain’s ideas hadtaken root in the late 1940s and 1950s, perhaps the first battles that raged during the ForestWars of the 1970s and 1980s might have been avoided.

Swain’s life reveals the richness of intellectual thought surrounding imperial environmentalmanagement that is not reflected by most interpretations of the environmental history of theBritish Empire. Most scholars have been unable to understand the diverse intellectual strainsthat characterized environmental planning in the first half of the twentieth century. This ispartly because environmental history developed out of the environmental movement andshares many of its tendencies to celebrate its own history while distancing itself from its earlyconservation origins. However, it should come as no surprise that Swain’s ideas were democraticand imperial, utilitarian and preservationist, state-centred and decentralized. These ideas are onlyincoherent or paradoxical within a modern political spectrum that sees democracy as incompatiblewith imperialism and preservation and conservation as opposing movements. Swain’s ideasreflect the unique intellectual history of the inter-war years and the Second World War. Hisideas developed in a world under siege from war. This made him acutely aware of the realityof resource shortages. We should remember that organic farming, the protection of flora andfauna for human appreciation and ecological sustainability, and fears of climate change – allthemes championed by modern environmentalism – were prominent issues during Swain’s life.Historians should now turn their attention to the transition during the middle of the twentiethcentury when empires turned into diverse nation-states and self-proclaimed environmentalistsforgot or dismissed the ideas of people like Swain. Perhaps we will find that many of Swain’sseemingly paradoxical beliefs, such as his advocacy of democracy and environmental imperial-ism, continue to underpin environmental activism today.95

The Australian National University and University of Western Sydney

94 J. Ajani, The Forest Wars (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2007).95 Post-1960s environmentalism has long had its own champions of ‘imperial’ planning, including population control andthe present-day movement to create global structures to regulate human action to stop or slow global warming.


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edward harold fulcher swain's vision of forest modernity

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