The Farming of Australia: A Saga of Backbreaking Toil and Tenacity (Making of a Nation) - Softcover

Bromby, Robin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0987403826 ISBN 13: 9780987403827

Publisher: Highgate Publishing, 2014

Synopsis

The story of farming in Australia has always been one of drama--two steps forward and then three steps back. From the days of the First Fleet through to modern farming of today, the industry has been beset by drought, floods, rabbit plagues, crop diseases, depressions, and disappearing markets. Triumph over a dry, hot and often infertile land. Australia's farmers have overcome difficult terrain and the tyranny of distance to make the country an important food bowl. This is the story of 200-plus years of ups and downs - savage droughts and daunting challenges but also the triumphs of irrigation and imagination and inventiveness.

About this title

From the Author:

This is just one of many colourful anecdotes in my book:Drovers were not usually the kind of people to keep a record of their lives or feats, but one who did was Alexander Buchanan. With seven others, he set out from Sydney to take sheep overland to South Australia as a speculation. Buchanan kept a detailed diary of the trip, and it provides a wonderful record of early overlanding. They set out from Sydney on 11 July 1839. After five days, one of the drovers (an ex-convict) had run away and a man had to be on guard all night to watch for bushrangers. The country was well populated by mounted police, mainly to hunt down those bushrangers. Six miles from Goulburn they passed a chain gang of 200 men making a new road. After riding through Yass they had to make their way along an unformed track, the road going no farther. Each day began early as the horses had to be rounded up; they were hobbled each night to prevent their taking long steps, but even so they could stray for two miles in search of feed. On 26 July the men were up at daybreak but it took until nine o'clock for them to find all the saddle horses. The drays set out an hour earlier. After Yass the journey became even slower as the cart-horses had to be let out to feed in the middle of the day, the stop being made wherever there was grazing, there being no longer any commercial stables to provide feed. At Howe's property on the Murrumbidgee (the same property from which John Hepburn had set out for Port Phillip Bay three years earlier) the young entre­preneurs collected their 4,023 sheep for the journey to South Australia.

From the Inside Flap:

An unhappy experiment: that was soldier settlement scheme after the Great War where, partly to avoid large numbers of ex-servicemen becoming unemployed after the war, Crown land was divided up into farms that were (mostly) too small to be economic. The endeavour to create a new class of small farmers was probably the most short-sighted, not to say stupid, aspect of the whole soldier settlement episode. Putting inexperienced people on the land had been tried before in Australia, and had failed miserably. Failure was an inbuilt element of the whole scheme and, even if all the men had been hard working, skilled and practical farmers, they could still not have succeeded.

About this edition

• Publisher: Highgate Publishing
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0987403826
• ISBN 13: 9780987403827
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 166