Endurance: Australian Stories of Drought

By Deb Anderson

Endurance presents stories of ordinary Australians grappling with extraordinary circumstances, providing insight into their lives, their experiences with drought and their perceptions of climate change.

The book opens with the physical impacts, science, politics and economics of drought and climate change in rural Australia. It then highlights the cultural and historical dimensions — taking us to the Mallee wheat-belt, where researcher Deb Anderson interviewed farm families from 2004 to 2007, as climate change awareness grew. Each story is grouped into one of three themes: Survival, Uncertainty and Adaptation.

Illustrated with beautiful colour photographs from Museum Victoria, Endurance will appeal to anyone with an interest in life stories, rural Australia and the environment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: CSIRO PUBLISHING
• Release date: Nov 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9781486301225

Book preview

ENDURANCE

AUSTRALIAN STORIES OF DROUGHT

To my parents, farmers Wendy and David Anderson, whose stories, hopes and fears for rural Australia inevitably have shaped my thinking

ENDURANCE

AUSTRALIAN STORIES OF DROUGHT

DEB ANDERSON

© Deb Anderson 2014

All rights reserved. Except under the conditions described in the Australian Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, duplicating or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Contact CSIRO Publishing for all permission requests.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Anderson, Deb, author.

Endurance: Australian stories of drought/Deb Anderson.

9781486301201 (paperback)

9781486301218 (epdf)

9781486301225 (epub)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Droughts – Social aspects – Victoria – Mallee.

Droughts – Social aspects – Australia.

Rural population – Victoria – Mallee – Social conditions.

Rural population – Australia – Social conditions.

Climatic changes – Social aspects – Victoria – Mallee.

Climatic changes – Social aspects – Australia.

Mallee (Vic.) – Social conditions.

Mallee (Vic.) – Rural conditions.

Australia – Rural conditions.

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Front cover and title page: ‘Mr and Mrs Smith celebrating the end of the drought at Mount Fraser Homestead’ (photograph taken to illustrate a story in the Sun newspaper), c. 1931, ‘The Biggest Family Album in Australia,’ Museum Victoria, MM 004318.

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Contents

Preface and acknowledgements

Introduction

Map showing interview sites

CLIMATE, CULTURE AND CONTEXT

One: Drought as a cultural concept

Endurance: a test of character

Mediating rurality: a defining story of national identity

What of the experience of drought?

Two: Redefining drought

Rural drought: the overarching context

Myths of nature

Climate cycles and the legacy of weather lore

Australian drought science: early developments

Deciles and the statistical regulation of drought

El Niño and the rise of climate prediction

The evolution of Australian drought policy

Drought as a natural disaster

Drought as a production risk

Drought policy as a tool of rural adjustment

Exceptional Circumstances

Positioning subjects: discourse of risk and self-reliance

The political economy of drought

Three: Making histories in the Mallee

A history of Mallee exceptionalism

Exodus, ‘excess’ and economic strife

Of memory and oral history in the Mallee

Drought ‘makes who we are’

Dwelling in uncertainty

Listening for change

‘We’ll all be rooned’: how narrative sets up its own ending

Definitional struggles

ORAL HISTORIES OF DROUGHT

Four: Survival, making sense of crisis and ‘making do’

Andrea Hogan: ‘drought’ as a loss of people who want their story heard

Robert and Yvonne McClelland with Bev Cook: on crisis and historical continuity

Greg and Dot Brown: ‘we become Mallee farmers through the weather’

Pam Elliott: remembering ‘the way things were’

Concluding remarks

Five: Reconciling uncertainty, cycles and change

Brent and Melissa Morrish: ‘what the Powers That Be don’t see’

Lynne Healy and Gwen Cooke: innovative ways to reach people in need

Maree, Des and Andrew Ryan: cycles of climate, grim humour and hope

Robert, Merle and Michael Pole: between bare ground and the bank account

Concluding remarks

Six: Adaptation in response to climatic risk

Ivan Mock: drought and the language of risk

Jim Maynard: ‘we can’t let climate change become a negative’

Ben and Noreen Jones: signs of economy and evolution

Hubie Sheldon: awaiting a ‘new generation of pioneers’

Concluding remarks

Conclusion

Works cited

Index

Preface and acknowledgements

Although drought is a pervasive aspect of its climate, Australia has no permanent, major museum exhibition devoted to the topic. In 2005, the National Archives unveiled what was then the closest thing to it: ‘Just Add Water: Schemes and Dreams for a Sunburnt Country’, a touring exhibition depicting a story of the non-Indigenous struggle to manage water on the driest inhabited continent. Drawn from several-hundred kilometres of government files, photographs, maps and other records, this curation of history and memory spoke to the preoccupations of contemporary Australians. As curator Jay Arthur reflected: ‘The topic was chosen because water and its management is becoming one of the issues of the twenty-first century and I wanted to show the relevance of the Archives’ historic collection to arguments about water management today.’¹ Arthur’s words acknowledged the dialogue between past and present, thus the significance of the historical and cultural dimensions of climate, shaping ways we imagine the future. I was two years into this drought collection, and recall how those words cut to the heart of its preoccupations, too.

In 2003 this work began under a four-year grant, jointly sponsored by the Australian Centre (then a vibrant hub of teaching and research at the University of Melbourne) and the institution responsible for the state’s scientific and cultural collections, Museum Victoria. That Melbourne Research Scholarship reflected a unique partnership, founded to further understanding of critical historical and contemporary issues in Australian agriculture. The idea was for a researcher to engage with Museum Victoria’s extensive collections relating to the rural past. In that respect, the project developed in ways not nearly as straightforward as first envisaged.

Museum Victoria has been gathering material and conducting research since 1854 (then as the National Museum of Victoria) and acquired major collections of international standing. Among its vast storehouses of history and memory, the bulk of material culture relating to agriculture is held within the ‘Sustainable Futures Collection’. A primary focus is on histories of technology, cross-referenced in a monumental assemblage of trade literature and other collections such as ‘The Biggest Family Album in Australia’ (more than 9000 photographs dating from the 1870s to the 1950s). Prize elements include one of the most significant industrial heritage collections in Australia, relating to manufacturer H. V. McKay, as well as models of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century machinery, steam and traction engines, early samples from the Australian whaling, sealing, timber and economic botany industries, a wind turbine and a rather mesmerising collection of barbed wire – samples of innovation fuelled by Enlightenment ideas of progress, reconstructed on Australian soil.

When I began with the Museum as a research associate, several observations stood out. Little of its collections relating to the agricultural past was on display at Melbourne Museum or Scienceworks, the two main exhibition halls in the Victorian capital. Perhaps ideas about Australian rural culture were present in this very condition of preservation, with the agricultural past, for the most part, left out of sight. Meanwhile, some of what was on display – then including a beautiful exhibition of agricultural show heritage – confirmed that recollections of a golden age of agriculture loom large in Australian rural historiography.²

Also striking were prevailing themes of survival, uncertainty and adaptation. In some instances, such themes were explicit in the dry and drought-prone landscapes featuring as backdrop for imagery and text. Or they were more implicit, for example as impetus for the engineering of technologies viewed as hallmarks of Australian innovation, items such as the stump-jump plough whose blade was set to ride over the top of tree stumps – welcomed in the early twentieth century by farmers whose blocks of land had been newly created from the wholesale clearance of native bush, in places such as the Victorian Mallee. Certainly, Museum Victoria’s collections sparked my interest in that beguiling, drought-prone region of inland Australia, where a history of endurance is thrown into sharp relief.

The Museum’s collecting activities are ongoing of course, and its more recent acquisitions present alternative storehouses of agricultural history and memory. For instance, ‘Future Harvest’, an interactive digital collection with an educational focus, documents a variety of responses to the social-environmental challenges of land stewardship. So too does the ‘Victorian Women on Farms Gathering Collection’, a moving compendium of interviews, photographs, videos and items of material culture that symbolise the meaning of place and contemporary issues impacting rural areas. Both of these collections elevate voice. Indeed, it seems the active engagement of rural people in the development of these collections has fostered a sense of new possibilities for history making at the Museum.³ They foreground the unique method and ethic of the oral history enterprise – of ‘sharing historical authority’, reflecting a growing bid to open the interpretation of history to the public.⁴ They offered me a valuable entry point for doing oral history, too.

The result, on which this book is based, is the creation of the ‘Mallee Climate Oral History Collection’, which will reside in perpetuity with Museum Victoria as a public resource. This collection presents a particular people’s lived experience of drought and perceptions of climate change in a particular place and time, yet represents a dialogue between past and present. Certainly, it speaks to ongoing Australian concerns with issues of water management (in 2013, the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House in Canberra unveiled another touring exhibition tapping into similar themes, ‘Beyond Reasonable Drought’). But this work speaks also to the preoccupations of contemporary museum practice and history making. The University–Museum partnership proffered a challenging avenue for research, which in turn became a driving force for me to reach beyond immediate context, to acquire new forms of knowledge. In this endeavour, both institutions have only ever been encouraging and supportive.

This book would not have been possible without the 22 Mallee residents whose oral histories lie at its core. These people gave generously of their time, over multiple recording sessions and several years, sharing vivid stories of life on the land and extending the kind of warm hospitality that reminded me of home.

At Museum Victoria, I sincerely thank Liza Dale-Hallett, whose motivation and historical curiosity are like a force of nature, and Jon Augier, whose photography I am privileged to draw upon as illustration. At the University of Melbourne, I am indebted to Kate Darian-Smith, who helped guide this cross-disciplinary, ambitious project with patience and kindness. Other academics at various institutions who offered timely advice and encouragement include David Goodman, Michelle Duffy, Richard Trembath, Graham Willett, Corinne Manning, Tom Griffiths, Michael Frisch, Gordon Waitt (who enlightened me with the term ‘life narrative’), Al Thomson and significant mentors Peter Christoff, Fay Anderson and Philip Chubb.

The support of the Australian Centre PhD cohort was incredible; my gratitude to Jane Button, Andrea Lemon, Carla Pascoe, Olivia Guntarik, Natalia Radwyl, Georgia Shiells, Pamie Fung and Caitlin Nunn. Thank you also to friends who over the years offered me so much encouragement: Natasha Beattie, Darrin Bennett, Simon Castles, Amy Bartlett, Louise Poland, Jinna Tay, Andrew Herrington, Alison Raw and Lee Peters. I particularly thank Jackie Bos, for her careful editing of the book. And my deepest thanks go to Aneta Podkalicka and Tom Bamforth for the many years of talking, listening, reading and exploring ideas.

Finally, I thank my family, whose contributions to my life and this book are beyond measure: Wendy and David Anderson, Maurice Anderson, Lana Phillips and Andrew Muir, and especially Jan Anderson-Muir, whose ongoing, patient feedback reflected intellectual rigour and compassion, the most admirable of qualities, as well as an unflinching belief in the value of rural cultural research. Hugs to Wallaby, my feline companion from start to finish.

I wish to acknowledge the Writing Centre for Scholars and Researchers (University of Melbourne) and the School of Media, Film and Journalism (Monash University) for generous publication support, as well as Museum Victoria, Michael Leunig, Don Wilhite and Peter Nicholson for their very generous donation of illustrative material, greatly enhancing this book. Thank you CSIRO Publishing, for believing in this work, and my editors Ted Hamilton, Lauren Webb and Tracey Millen, who were wonderful to work with.

Parts of this work have been published in Traffic (2007), Australian Humanities Review (2008), Rural Society (2009), Cultural Studies Review (2010) and Hecate (2012) and are due for publication in the edited book A Cultural History of Climate Change (2015).

Ecosystems in flux: a view heading west of Ouyen (2007). Mallee Climate Oral History Collection, Museum Victoria, Jon Augier.

Introduction

… the more the future impinges on and predefines our present the more intense seems to become our concern with the past …

– Barbara Adam⁵

Sheep scatter as a little blue car burls past a wheat-stubble-lined paddock, where barely a century ago someone’s predecessors staked out an isolated existence, then rolled and burned much of their block of mallee ‘scrub’.⁶ It’s 39°C, it’s February. Earlier in the day I had embarked on what felt like a drive to the end of the Earth to reach this blip on the map of Victoria’s north-west – a now memorable point on a learning curve through the band of semiarid country that demarcates the edge of Australia’s commercial cropping zone, the Mallee. Scooting west of the wheat-belt town of Ouyen, from my car window I note the outward signs of ecosystems in flux: a patch of dryland salting, soil erosion and sand-drift bringing a line of fence posts to their knees. Then abruptly the sand hills slope away and flatten into a vast, quiet expanse of earth.

In late summer, this part of the Mallee is bold in magnitude yet subtle in colour. Converging plough-lines force the eye to traverse seemingly endless layers of white-beige, rust-pink and orange-tan soil of sand, limestone and clay. Freestanding eucalypts dot the distant streams of barbed wire that skirt these colossal grain-cropping beds. Occasional dark-olive clumps of remnant or replanted bush punctuate great swathes of pastel dirt and stubble, forming scant pockets of shade for sheep as the searing heat bakes the wheat belt pale.

I admit, by the hour I reach Hubie Sheldon’s farm, my thoughts have turned to an infamous account of the Mallee – the 1878 Royal Commission of Inquiry into Crown Lands’ description of ‘sand, scrub and mallee below, the scorching sun and bright blue sky above, and not a sound of life to break the solemn silence’.⁷ Such words formed the narrative bed, so to speak, for colonial engineer Alfred Kenyon’s futuristic 1912 Story of the Mallee, a pioneering battle saga of Australian rural establishment – of men with ‘hearts like lions’, new methods and ever-more-advanced machines who would make this country ‘profitably productive’.⁸ Yet my thoughts are coloured by how that story has been retold with time. As environmental historian Tom Griffiths wrote towards the end of the twentieth century, the word ‘Mallee’ was to become ‘synonymous for heroic, even bloody-minded settlement’.⁹

Unlike Kenyon with his evocative oratory, however, or Griffiths with his compelling history – or me, here with a voice recorder, capturing a dialogue between the past and present – Sheldon knows this place as ‘home’. Tellingly, he calls Mallee country ‘forgiving’.¹⁰

Not far from Ngallo (‘a spring’) and a shearing shed shy of the South Australian border lies the remote wheat–sheep property where Sheldon lives on his own. He has spent most of his life here, as did his father and mother before him – and his father’s parents before them, having selected and cleared their block before the First World War, back in 1910. Almost a century later, across an old kitchen table, in an ageing farmhouse cornered by several-hundred acres of tilled soil, Sheldon picks up the threads of his story of the Mallee. He draws upon a multi-generational ‘archive’ of memories – oral testimony of a way of life, preserved on grounds of enduring cultural, historical and evidentiary value – to speak of the lived experience of drought. It’s a story he had begun to share with me in the summer of 2005, then expanded upon in summer 2006. This instalment, in a warmer-than-average summer of 2007, brings my annual Mallee crossing to a close.

The story begins in an all-too-familiar Australian saga of rural pioneering endurance. This is a boom-and-bust tale of backbreaking work, told with grim humour, of survival through sporadic environmental extremes: severe droughts, monster dust-storms, ‘nasty’ frosts, ‘hellishing’ heatwaves and biblical plagues of rabbits and mice. Anchored in that wide-brown-horizon version of the past, Sheldon’s tale twists into a period of rural decline and restructuring to depict an agro-industrial present. This is a landscape of uncertainty, underwritten by the near-autonomy of enterprise expansion and scientific and technological advance. As the story darkens with the loss of community, anxieties amplified by prolonged drought are heightened by recent, growing public debate on the impacts of global warming on dryland Mallee futures.

Then the plot thickens. The scene itself – of climate in the wheat belt – shifts in ways that defy generations of lived experience. That final straw, so to speak, prompts a reflexive idealisation of history as the future. A grand narrative of possibility emerges in confounding form, as a battler history of endurance is rewritten with a message of ecological enlightenment. In the end, Sheldon says, it will be ‘a new generation of pioneers’ who will ‘survive’ by learning, within country, to ‘pull back’.¹¹

Listening across diverse realms of experience: interviewing Hubie Sheldon at Ngallo (2007). Mallee Climate Oral History Collection, Museum Victoria, Jon Augier.

Sheldon’s story is as much about the Australian climate, his local environment and his changing relationship to it – his conversation with it, if you will – as it is about a collective conversation, too. ‘When you look at Australia and its history,’ he says, ‘while we’ve been here a coupl’a hundred years, we’ve probably only really developed the country in the last hundred, and more particularly in the last 50.’ He looks at me intently:

That’s a very, very brief time. And we’ve altered this landscape a hell of a lot in a short period o’ time. And if that’s gonna change our weather patterns – which it, well, it looks like it is – we need to look at what we’ve done in the past and try and learn.¹²

Cultural engagement with climate is under constant renegotiation – as oral historical research is apt to reveal. Amid the groundswell of interest in recent decades among humanities scholars in addressing issues of climate change and other ecological problems, a cultural turn obliges us to rethink existing means of historical understanding. Oral history has already challenged the historical enterprise, if not the hegemony of scholarly authority, in various ways – generating heated debate over the relationship between memory and history, past and present.¹³ Through the spontaneity of oral narrative, animated interchange of dialogue and compulsion to ‘share authority’ when working with living memory, how might we broaden and deepen the national climate conversation ‘beyond’ the belief politics shrouding the science?

When it comes to drought, the Australian psyche remains ‘dominated by dreams of water’, scientist John Williams lamented in 2003.¹⁴ Williams, then head of the Land and Water division of Australia's national science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (or CSIRO), noted in particular the persistence of mythic notions of ‘drought-proofing’ the land. Some eight generations on from British colonisation of the continent, Australians still struggled to grasp the role of water in the environment, or respond to it in an ‘Australian’ way. ‘The critical need is not to drought-proof the inland, for that is impossible,’ Williams wrote. ‘It is to myth-proof Australians.’¹⁵

About the same time, the nation’s foremost scholarly anthology on the topic, Beyond Drought, put forward a multi-disciplinary argument that Australia’s need to develop a more sophisticated climate literacy was dire.¹⁶ To its editors, Linda Courtenay Botterill and Melanie Fisher, this was an overdue aspect of ‘learning to be Australian’.¹⁷ ‘Ideally,’ they wrote, ‘the term drought itself should be struck from the national language and replaced with climate variability – or perhaps not be the subject of discussion at all!’¹⁸ In contradistinction, historians have argued that ‘recognising the power of myth’ can open the door to a broader, more nuanced historical approach, if not also the power of time and chance as agents in research.¹⁹ Indeed if, as Australian historian Tim Sherratt wrote, ‘climate and culture create each other across a shifting, permeable frontier’, then those words formed a near-maxim for the dynamics of research that shaped this book.²⁰

An extensive oral history collection was conducted in rural Australia for Museum Victoria from 2004 to 2007 – a series of annual recordings with 22 members of wheat-belt communities dotted across the semiarid Victorian Mallee, through the peak of the millennium drought. Discursive themes emerged early in the recordings: of drought anchored in the celebratory remembrance of past survival; of uncertainty as ongoing change in the Australian countryside posed a threat to Mallee livelihoods; and of putative adaptation as local communities sought solace in a historicised capacity to cope with trying social-environmental conditions.

Meaning is seldom static, however, for memory is innately revisionist. Fortuitously, the timing of the research coincided with a momentous shift in Australian public awareness of climate change. That shift, to me, formed a moment of big history, foregrounding how people live with stories over time. The ‘Mallee Climate Oral History Collection’ captured significant moments of reflection and self-reflexivity on the meaning of drought, revealing contestation over expertise and experience as inherently partial forms of knowledge, exposing the core interpretive problems of climate change. Despite shifts in climate change perception, however, each Mallee oral history represented a historical, battler narrative of endurance, revealing both livelihoods and identities at stake.

This book thus examines the notion of the self-preservative power of narrative and oral tradition for a rural culture under threat. Framed by discourse analysis, it allows space for the richness of detail that oral history offers – illuminating the other types of history that oral stories can tell, in their distinctive transference at the interstices of history, biography, culture and place. Amid divisive debate over rural futures, it sheds light on what stories of drought mean for Australian identity in a climate-change world – in this case, forming both a cultural legacy and a shield from anxieties about the future. For in the face of imminent change in the dryland Mallee, people were gearing up to endure more.

This is not historical work per se. Its interpretive approach also draws from ethnography and long-form cultural journalism, each of which method grasps at the logic and customs of a group and seeks to comprehend the world in the group’s own terms.²¹ Cross-disciplinary, if unconventional, in its use of sources and analysis, the book is presented in two parts. The first establishes a rationale and context for this investigation of climate and culture in Australia, and on the ‘margins of the good earth’.²² The second presents life narratives grounded in oral history, illuminating the cultural and historical dimensions of drought and climate change. Each part speaks to the life narrative of this book, which became, in itself, a shifting site of storytelling, breaking new ground through its longitudinal reach.

Through an examination of how the past shapes present understandings of climate, Chapter One explores drought as a cultural concept, whose primary connotations are less related to rainfall than to an overarching, mythic narrative of endurance. As sociologists Brad West and Philip Smith contend, drought retains ‘a unique place among Australian natural disasters as the generator of a national solidaristic narrative’.²³ Here we explore dominant Australian drought discourses and their mediation – the reliance upon a stark iconography of drought, language of war and tendency to amplify the pathos of drought suffering – drawing attention to the functions of language and narrative as the expression of identity. Questions remain of the impact of drought media coverage, given the increasing disconnect between the lived experience of their largely urban audience and the rural people their disaster stories depict.

Certainly, disaster discourse has long shaped Australian drought policy; geographer Les Heathcote termed it ‘basically crisis management’.²⁴ The fact it persists despite government pledges since 1989 to implement a policy model of self-governance is evidenced in the escalation of drought relief funding. In 2002, for instance, the Federal Government and the states offered the rural sector combined drought aid of $728 million.²⁵ In 2007 the Commonwealth allocated more than $1.1 billion in funding for drought-affected regions, with many deemed ‘in crisis’.²⁶ Surely, drought recurrence has tested not only the boundaries of its social definition but also the limits of policy. Chapter Two charts how ‘drought’ has been redefined, and subjects repositioned, in key institutional and social contexts over time. This sheds light on how official discourses on drought can obscure the realities of its lived experience, and the structures of subjugation and power that drive markets, institutions and labour.

Drought has had a rather colourful history of redefinition in Australia. The ‘enigma’ of drought has kept landholders guessing at the skies for rain, politicians addressing the nation for votes, planners and policymakers redressing the rules for aid, scientists compressing data for research, priests blessing and people confessing and praying for divine intervention and a host of public commentators messing with the public imagination in the name of schemes to drought-proof the wide brown land. Drought in the Victorian Mallee has even led to a lot of undressing – with 500 women staging a naked rain-dance in 2003 (we’ll get to that).

Indeed, rural histories of the drought-prone Mallee have presented spirited sagas of community perseverance in enduring a harsh climate. Where stories of drought have been integral to the making of regional identities, this wheat-belt region proffered a striking site for recording drought stories over four years. Chapter Three outlines the historical and contemporary context for the oral history making process, mapping the social, environmental and political context for this dialogue between past and present.

Chapters Four through Six present 12 life narratives on drought. Stories have been grouped together under three discursive themes that emerged through the making of oral history – survival, uncertainty and adaptation. These themes complicate, yet represent, a meta-narrative of endurance. The method of analysis used is in a sense pragmatic: discourse analysis is inherently political, drawing attention to the naturalising function of discourse and the partial, contingent nature of knowledge on climate – making clear that oral histories of lived experience do not simply reflect the world, but rather construct representations of it. That said, the decision to present these stories as life narratives is instrumental, if demonstrative of the fact the ongoing recording of oral history garnered much more than ‘drought stories’ per se. Rather, they present discourse on climate grounded in totalising biographical narratives of the experience of rural life.

Historian Michael Frisch argues there is critical value in allowing the time and space for ‘a deeper and more sustained dialogue’: there is so much to be gained in ‘talking and really listening across diverse realms of experience’.²⁷ In taking up that challenge, this book reflects upon the broader power and application of oral history. The problems of climate change have been branded ‘wicked’, a term anthropologist Steve Rayner qualifies as ‘a way of describing problems of mind-bending complexity, characterised by contradictory certitudes and thus defying elegant, consensual solutions’.²⁸ In this respect, oral history has much to offer. Not only does it illuminate the significance of the cultural and historical dimensions in understanding issues of climate; it also seeks to understand the tensions implicit in the ways experience, memory and history act on lives over time.

In their enigmas and inconsistencies, then, these Australian drought stories serve as a reminder of the density of life stories as cultural artefacts. Although translated onto the page and crammed in a book, they afford us a new opportunity to listen. On the one hand, they oblige us to rethink existing means of historical understanding – in order to broaden and deepen the national climate conversation beyond the belief politics that shroud the science. On the other, they remind us that even as oral history can mediate change or promote a more widely shared historical consciousness, oral tradition may form a source of resistance to it.²⁹ As historian Marjorie Shostak notes: ‘It is just this tension – the identifiable in endless transformation – that is the currency of personal narratives, as they reveal the complexities and paradoxes of human life.’³⁰

Endnotes

1 Jay M. Arthur, ‘Tracking Water through the National Archives of Australia,’ Altitude 7 (2006), accessed 5 January 2010, .

2 Graeme Davison and Marc Brodie, ‘Introduction,’ in Struggle Country: The Rural Ideal in Twentieth Century Australia, ed. Graeme Davison and Marc Brodie (Melbourne: Monash UeP, 2005), accessed 12 January 2006, .

3 Museum Victoria, ‘Victorian Women on Farms Gathering Collection,’ Museum Victoria, accessed 28 March 2014, .

4 The seminal work is: Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral History (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990).

5 Barbara Adam, ‘Detraditionalisation and the Certainty of Uncertain Futures,’ in Detraditionalisation: Critical Reflections on Authority and Identity, eds Paul Heelas et al. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 139.

6 Mallee ‘blocks’ are 640 acres, or roughly a square mile, but can stretch to 700 acres or 280 ha. Jill Nickolls and Ann Angel, Mallee Tracks: A Wanderer's Guide to the South Australian and Victorian Mallee, Second ed. (Pinnaroo, SA: Jill Nickolls and Ann Angel, 2003), 90.

7 In Geoffrey Blainey, A History of Victoria (Melbourne: Cambridge UP, 2006), 147.

8 The first Kenyon quote is from: Robin Bromby, Unlocking the Land: The Saga of Farming in Australia (Melbourne: Lothian Publishing, 1986), 55. The second: Alfred S. Kenyon, The Story of the Mallee: A History of the Victorian Mallee Read before the Historical Society of Victoria, 18 March 1912, ed. Ian Wood and Keith Hofmaier (Rainbow, Victoria: Brentwood, 1982), 1–2.

9 Tom Griffiths, ‘Mallee Roots: A Brief History of Victoria’s Northwest,’ Park Watch 178 (1994): 21.

10 Anthony Sheldon, interview by Deb Anderson, 14 February 2005, transcript, ‘Mallee Climate Oral History Collection.’ Museum Victoria.

11 Anthony Sheldon, interview by Deb Anderson, 13 December 2007, transcript, ‘Mallee Climate Oral History Collection.’ Museum Victoria.

12 Sheldon, 2005.

13 Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, ‘Introduction to Second Edition,’ in The Oral History Reader, Second ed., ed. Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson (London: Routledge, 2006), ix–xiv.

14 John Williams, ‘Can We Myth-Proof Australia?’ Australasian Science 24, no. 1 (2003): 40.

15 Williams, ‘Can We Myth-Proof Australia?’ 42.

16 Linda Courtenay Botterill and Melanie Fisher, eds, Beyond Drought: People, Policy and Perspectives (Collingwood, Victoria: CSIRO, 2003).

17 Linda Courtenay Botterill and Melanie Fisher, ‘Introduction,’ in Beyond Drought: People, Policy and Perspectives, ed. Linda Courtenay Botterill and Melanie Fisher (Collingwood, Victoria: CSIRO, 2003), 3.

18 Botterill and Fisher, ‘Introduction,’ 3.

19 Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson, ‘Introduction,’ in The Myths We Live By, ed. Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson (New York: Routledge, 1990), 21.

20 Tim Sherratt, ‘Human Elements,’ in A Change in the Weather: Climate and Culture in Australia, eds Tim Sherratt et al. (Canberra: National Museum of Australia Press, 2005), 4.

21 S. Elizabeth Bird, ‘The Journalist as Ethnographer? How Anthropology Can Enrich Journalistic Practice,’ in Media Anthropology, ed. Eric Rothenbuhler and Mihai Coman (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005), 302.

22 This phrase was coined by geographer D. W. Meinig for his history of Mallee settlement further west, in the South Australian wheat ‘frontier’. Donald Meinig, On the Margins of the Good Earth: The South Australian Wheat Frontier, 1869–1884 (Adelaide: Rigby, 1962).

23 From the abstract to: Brad West and Philip Smith, ‘Natural Disasters and National Identity: Time, Space and Mythology,’ Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology 33, no. 2 (1997).

24 R. Les Heathcote, Braving the Bull of Heaven: Drought Management Strategies, Past, Present and Future, Geography Monograph Series (Milton, Queensland: Royal Geographical Society of Queensland, 2002), 19.

25 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Agricultural Policies in OECD Countries (Paris: OECD, 2003).

26 Significantly, that included $150 million in ‘exit grants’ for farmers. AAP, ‘Govt Boosts Drought Aid by $714 Million,’ Yahoo News, 25 September 2007, accessed 30 September 2007, .

27 Michael Frisch, ‘Working-Class Public History in the Context of Deindustrialisation: Dilemmas of Authority and the Possibilities of Dialogue,’ Labour, no. 51 (2003), accessed 14 February 2007, .

28 Rayner in Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), xxi–xxii.

29 Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (Buffalo: SUNY Press, 1990), xxii, 2.

30 Marjorie Shostak, ‘What the Wind Won’t Take Away: The Genesis of