Agricultural History Review, Volume 69 Part 2 (2021), p. 317

Australia’s mallee country in the States of Victoria, South Australia, and Western Australia had a distinctive ecological history of woodlands and bushlands, of flora and fauna, that had evolved and flourished in semi-arid climatic conditions characterized by low and variable rainfall. After noting that these regions were named after an indigenous Aboriginal word for the mallee eucalyptus plant, Richard Broom, Charles Fahey, Andrea Gaynor and Katie Holmes elaborate on how, over some 50,000 years, the Aborigines had integrated themselves economically and culturally with the land.

Explorers and surveyors opened the way for a pastoral economy based on hundreds of thousands of sheep that catered for the British wool market. This resulted in armed resistance by and massacres of Aborigines, who were denied access to what was redefined as Crown land, on which, the authors demonstrate, pastoralists had an incentive to maximize short-term returns within the limitations of their annual licences. Hence, they over-grazed their sheep on native vegetation and eroded the soil under the impact of droughts that devastated sheep numbers and drove many pastoralists to the wall.

By the end of the nineteenth century, pastoralism had been replaced by wheat farming on land leased to settlers by colonial and State governments. As is the case throughout what is a model regional history, Broom, Fahey, Gaynor and Holmes draw parallels and make connections between government policies, ecological constraints, scientific discoveries and technological innovations. They point out that new wheat varieties resisted rust disease and thrived in hot Australian conditions, whilst the invention of the mallee roller and the stump-jump plough enabled the expeditious and low-cost clearing away of tough mallee vegetation before planting and harvesting could go ahead.

On the one hand, doing away with scrub that held soil together increased the intensity and frequency of dust storms and soil drift, which were worsened by drought. On the other hand, the advantage was the speed with which a crop could be obtained and delivered to market on government constructed railways, when compared with the years settlers required to chop and slash their way through dense forests in other regions before farms could be established. But the vulnerability of mallee land to drought was still underestimated and misunderstood until it caused a retreat of the wheat settlement frontier that made governments realise that a reliable water supply from dams and irrigation channels was essential.

During the First World War, mallee farmers were able to turn their backs on past disappointments and losses as a result of some good seasons and the British government’s acquisition of the entire wheat crop at a guaranteed price. Broom, Fahey, Gaynor and Holmes cast fresh light on how, after the improved conditions of the war years, economic rationality was distorted by political ideology when State governments believed that farming required the attributes of pioneering resilience and masculine independence, whilst rural family homes, where women provided housework and childcare, were the basis of a loyal citizenry and a prosperous nation. Consequently, when State government agencies selected settlers, including returned servicemen under soldier settlement schemes, too much weight was given to character traits and not enough to farming know-how and savings.

Even though the authors do not provide a coherent statistical analysis of class structure based on farm sizes and debt levels, they do show that, once global prices for wheat collapsed in the 1930s, the average debt owed to agricultural banks by inexperienced mallee settlers was 17 times the annual urban wage. Confronted with the prospect of discontented poor farmers getting poorer, governments and agricultural banks wrote off or rescheduled the debts of efficient farmers, while marginal smallholders beyond rescue were paid their equity when they packed up their lives and left the land.

All this resulted in bigger farms that were suitable for mechanization and diversification, so that in the 1950s and 1960s, when the price of wheat was high and farms were profitable, the area cleared and cropping increased. The authors describe how farmers could afford to improve their water supply with the installation of dams and bores, whilst they acquired new tractors which could work with disc ploughs and harvesters. They drew on research when they planted rotation crops to arrest soil drift, introduced trace elements to curb diseases and used fertilizers such as superphosphate.

However, by the early 1970s, the prices for farm inputs rose while prices for farm products fell. In response, the authors report, farmers looked to improve the productivity of their land. They formed Mallee Sustainable Farming and adopted the Landcare Movement, not only to curb erosion, but also to limit salinity caused by the cutting and pulling out of deep-rooted scrub, which had prevented the elevation of the water table and the salt that rose with it. Following on from this shift in farmer attitudes to the landscape, the next step for the authors could have been to apply modelling, such as that outlined by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, to a quantitative historical measurement of the interconnections between human economic systems and non-human ecosystems; between financial accounts and environmental accounts; between monetary and non-monetary indicators of the value of productive natural resources, such as land and water, when they were degraded or depleted.

Nevertheless, Broom, Fahey, Gaynor and Holmes provide a commendable survey of how changes in public appraisals, motives and interests caused governments to end major land releases and to create and enlarge national parks. Despite the emergence of a conservationist consensus, the authors add that conflicts and compromises persisted over the relative merits of recreational tourism, wilderness experiences and agricultural projects. Importantly, Aboriginal communities, who had worked on or remained attached to their traditional land and had affirmed their identity with it, were able to run indigenous ranger and heritage programmes.

If proof was required that all was not well, the severity of recurrent droughts since the 1980s accelerated the use of no-till farming, which, the authors explain, mitigated the effects of drought, dust storms and soil drift because it replaced the use of fallowing or repeated cultivation of the soil as the way to remove nutrient-consuming and water-absorbing weeds. Instead, no-till farming depended on machinery to sow into undisturbed soil, mechanical seed crushers and herbicides to control weeds, as family-owned farms with inter-generational knowledge continued with mixed success to adapt technology to ecology under the pressure of climate change and unstable export markets.