Mallee Country

MalleeCountry tells the powerful history of mallee lands and people acrosssouthern Australia from Deep Time to the present. Carefully shaped and managedby Aboriginal people for over 50,000 years, mallee country was dramaticallytransformed by settlers, first with sheep and rabbits, then by flattening andburning the mallee to make way for wheat. Government backed settlement schemesdevastated lives and country, but some farmers learnt how to survive thedroughts, dust storms, mice, locusts and salinity as well as the vagaries ofinternational markets to become some of Australia's most resilientagriculturalists. In mallee country, innovation and tenacity have beenneighbours to hardship and failure.

MalleeCountry is a story of how land and people shape each other. It is thestory of how a landscape once derided by settlers as a 'howling wilderness'covered in 'dismal scrub' became home to citizens who delighted in mallee faunaand flora, and fought to conserve it for future generations. And it is thestory of the dreams, sweat and sorrows of people who face an uncertain futureof depopulation and climate change with creativity and hope.

'...a rich compendium that exposes the roots of many callous policies that continue state-sanctioned assaults on people and ecosystems. As tales of mass fish death, of drought-relief packages, and of billions of dollars allocated to dams and pipelines inundate the news, Mallee Country is a sobering reminder that we've seen it before. What is different now is the scale and urgency of the problems. Mallee Country is an urgent environmental history for these troubled times. As the authors forewarn, the super-imposition of rapid climate change will bring longer-term and wider-reaching consequences to the Mallee...Mallee Country can be read as a history for the future; a warning of what happens when we forget to remember.' - Lilian Pearce, Australian Book Review

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, his most recent being A Naga Odyssey: Visier’s Long Way Home (2017) with Visier Sanyü, and Aboriginal Australians: A History Since 1788 (2019, 5th edition). Charles Fahey taught history at La Trobe University, Melbourne until his retirement in 2018. His research explores Australian Labor, rural and mining History. With Alan Mayne he published Gold Tailings: Forgotten Histories of Family and Community on the Central Victorian Goldfields (2010). 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. An environmental historian, she seeks to use the contextualising and narrative power of history to help address environmental problems. Katie Holmes is Professor of History and Director of the Centre for the Study of the Inland at La Trobe University, Melbourne. Her work integrates environmental, gender and oral history, and seeks to understand the experience of Australian settlement. Her most recent book is Between the Leaves: Stories of Australian Women, Writing and Gardens (2011).

MalleeCountry tells the powerful history of mallee lands and people acrosssouthern Australia from Deep Time to the present. Carefully shaped and managedby Aboriginal people for over 50,000 years, mallee country was dramaticallytransformed by settlers, first with sheep and rabbits, then by flattening andburning the mallee to make way for wheat. Government backed settlement schemesdevastated lives and country, but some farmers learnt how to survive thedroughts, dust storms, mice, locusts and salinity - as well as the vagaries ofinternational markets - to become some of Australia's most resilientagriculturalists. In mallee country, innovation and tenacity have beenneighbours to hardship and failure. MalleeCountry is a story of how land and people shape each other. It is thestory of how a landscape once derided by settlers as a 'howling wilderness'covered in 'dismal scrub' became home to citizens who delighted in mallee faunaand flora, and fought to conserve it for future generations. And it is thestory of the dreams, sweat and sorrows of people who face an uncertain futureof depopulation and climate change with creativity and hope. '...a rich compendium that exposes the roots of many callous policies that continue state-sanctioned assaults on people and ecosystems. As tales of mass fish death, of drought-relief packages, and of billions of dollars allocated to dams and pipelines inundate the news, Mallee Country is a sobering reminder that we've seen it before. What is different now is the scale and urgency of the problems. Mallee Country is an urgent environmental history for these troubled times. As the authors forewarn, the super-imposition of rapid climate change will bring longer-term and wider-reaching consequences to the Mallee...Mallee Country can be read as a history for the future; a warning of what happens when we forget to remember.' -- Lilian Pearce, Australian Book Review

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