A circular conundrum 150 years of cropping and complexity in north-west australia

Abstract

Cropping plays an extremely minor role in north-west Australia, barely contributing to economic production. Since colonisation however, broad-acre cropping regularly appears in the political and public discourse about northern development, often in an optimistic light. I label this the 'circular conundrum' - a cycle of publically expressed expectation for northern Australia to produce food and fibre through broad-acre cropping, and the failure of this to occur at the scale envisaged despite many attempts, significant investment and much research. This circular conundrum begins with high expectations, moves to cropping attempts, then usually to failure, and back around to high expectations. This thesis is a response to my curiosity about this phenomenon. What is this cycle? Why does it continue when many cropping attempts fail? What does this tell us about Australia's relationship with northern Australia? It is through reawakening the stories of cropping attempts and collecting them in one place in some detail that a broader and deeper picture can emerge, revealing both shared and unique features of the attempts, and patterns through time and across locations. The drivers become visible as do the variables that lead to failure, impacting at a range of scales from the individual farm to national policy. Additionally the narratives reveal emerging and persistent themes, including race, learning and relationship with place. The three parts of the thesis address portions of the circular conundrum: Part I 'Ideas of North' (Chapters 2-5) explores changing perceptions of northern Australia, the high expectations of cropping, and the drivers of the circular conundrum; Part II 'Stories of Northern Cropping' (Chapters 6-10) describes a suite of cropping attempts over the last 150 years; while Part III 'Caught in a conundrum' (Chapters 11-12) explores the variables that contribute to these failures, and the relationship between failure and continuing high expectations - the mystery of the continuing circular conundrum. This final step reveals how the cycle is perpetuated through hindered learning. This is expressed through our slow and intermittent journey in developing landscape literacy, reliant upon acknowledging the north as a cultural landscape; and our even slower journey to developing complex systems literacy, including a capacity to deal with variability and complexity. Place does have power, and remains the fundamental agent in these narratives. The concept of 'A Circular Conundrum' provides useful insights more generally on what hinders learning and how barriers to learning can be seeded in the situation itself.