Broken country : science, agriculture, and the 'unfulfilled dreams' of inland Australia, 1880 to present

Abstract

Modern agriculture in Australia is often viewed as utilitarian and neutral on the one hand, or as a destroyer of 'pristine' environments on the other. It is either a story of steady progress in technique and technology, of 'science with its sleeves rolled up', or one of disastrous environmental consequences of industrialisation and capitalism. Scientific agriculture in Australia is taken for granted as being about food, fibre and income, but these have not been its main purposes. Agriculture's social and cultural purposes, and its environmental purposes, have been more important factors shaping its advocacy and development.

Broken Country explores how the explosion of knowledge in biology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - entangled with cultural ideas about civilisation, inheritance, race and population - shaped modern agriculture in Australia. It examines the wider history of knowledge for agriculture and place through the story of the Darling and Macquarie River country after European agriculture first came to the semi-arid plains of western New South Wales. As the pastoral industry began collapsing at the end of the nineteenth century, colonial governments pushed agriculture based on scientific principles as a solution to anxieties about the effects of space and distance on civilisation, as well as a means to address the exploitative environmental culture of settlers on the inland plains. In the 1940s large engineering projects and the integration of the management of people and environment was supposed to address the social and environmental problems of the 1930s agricultural crisis, after World War II, it became a means of defending Australia from a hungry Asia and for preventing the spread of communism.

How successful has scientific agriculture been in achieving these big fixes? How has it fared as the main vehicle for the changing environmental management philosophies of wise use, balance, integration, optimisation, sustainability, and recently, resilience? Is it a triumphant project that has made incredible increases in yield to feed a burgeoning global population, or has it left us precariously at risk of ecological collapse and left a billion people starving? What do scientific agriculture's cultural foundations say about our relationships with our environment each other, and what is Australia's role in this system?