Synopsis
Mallee Country tells the compelling 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 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 reveals how land and people shape each other. It explains how a landscape once derided by settlers as a ‘howling wilderness’ covered in ‘dismal scrub’ became home to people who delighted in mallee fauna and flora and fought to conserve it for future generations. 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.
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, 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).
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