Mallee Country: Land, People, History

by Richard Brooome, Charles Fahey, Andrea Gaynor, Katie Holmes

Overview

Mallee Country tells the powerful history of mallee lands and people across southern Australia from Deep Time to the present. Carefully shaped and managed by Aboriginal people for over 50,000 years, mallee country was dramatically transformed by settlers, first with sheep and rabbits, then by flattening and burning the mallee to make way for wheat. Government backed settlement schemes devastated lives and country, but some farmers learnt how to survive the droughts, dust storms, mice, locusts and salinity – as well as the vagaries of international markets – and became some of Australia’s most resilient agriculturalists. In mallee country, innovation and tenacity have been neighbours to hardship and failure. Mallee Country is a story of how land and people shape each other. It is the story of how a landscape once derided by settlers as a ‘howling wilderness’ covered in ‘dismal scrub’ became home to citizens who delighted in mallee fauna and flora and fought to conserve it for future generations. And it is the story of the dreams, sweat and sorrows of people who face an uncertain future of depopulation and climate change with creativity and hope.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781925523126
Publisher:	Monash University Publishing
Publication date:	12/02/2019
Series:	Australian History
Edition description:	None
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Richard Broome is Emeritus Professor in History at La Trobe University and President of the Royal Historical Society of Victoria. He is the author of 14 books on Indigenous and Australian history. Charles Fahey taught history at La Trobe University, Melbourne until his retirement in 2018. His research explores Australian labour, rural and mining history. Andrea Gaynor is Associate Professor of History, Chair of the History Discipline Group and Director of the Centre for Western Australian History at the University of Western Australia. Her research focuses on environmental history. Katie Holmes is Professor of History and Director of the Centre for the Study of the Inland at La Trobe University. Her work integrates environmental, gender and oral history and seeks to understand the experience of Australian settlement.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Mallee Country vii

Part 1 Mallee Aborigines and European Intruders to 1880 1

Chapter 1 Deep Time 3

Chapter 2 Aboriginal Homelands 11

Chapter 3 An Impracticable Country 46

Chapter 4 Pastoral Adventurers 65

Part 2 Transforming the Mallee 1880-1945 101

Chapter 5 A Land for Farmers 103

Chapter 6 Developing Mallee Farms 1914-1925 129

Chapter 7 Troubled Times 1926-1945 158

Chapter 8 Camping and Working on Country 190

Part 3 The State and Mallee Lands 1945-1983 207

Chapter 9 Modernising Mallee Farms 209

Chapter 10 New Mallee Farms 242

Chapter 11 Conserving the Mallee 271

Part 4 Living with the Mallee 1983 to the Present 309

Chapter 12 Sustaining Mallee Farms 1983-2018 311

Chapter 13 Reinventing the Mallee 346

Epilogue 378

Appendix 385

Note on Measurements 387

Acknowledgements 388

Select Published Sources 392

Index 399

About the Authors 417