'We are a farming class': community, class and place in Dubbo's farmlands, 1870-1950

Abstract

This study examines how people in the farming districts in central-western New South Wales constituted their communities. It responds to gaps in historians' understanding of settler society beyond the country towns, and contributes to the literature on rural Australia's disproportionate influence on politics and a national mythos.

This study is bounded by the arrival in the 1870s of a disparate array of isolated households intending to acquire land under laws designed to encourage smaller-scale agricultural settlement. It concludes in 1950 on the cusp of the long economic boom, as a range of social and economic forces began to disrupt rural communities. The study draws on government, private, corporate and voluntary associations' archives to investigate how 'farmlands' people formed, sustained and defined communities through their engagements with government, creditors, labour, political representatives, one another, and through their constructions of vernacular local histories. It examines transport and communications technologies' effects on constructions of community, and on people's connections to other places. As a local study, this project brings a particular focus to people's quotidian exchanges to develop broader conclusions about how these previously under-researched people related to their own place, to farming people more broadly, and to the wider world with which they became ever more intimately connected.

The study focuses on two factors influencing farming people's ideas of what or who constituted their communities. One consisted of intimate, experiential communities of place and belonging: of where people lived and socialised. These were fragile constructs, formed and re-formed with successive waves of closer settlement, and as space was constantly disrupted by people's increasing mobility. A second form of community consisted of an imagined, pan-rural farming 'class'. Class in this context arose not so much from everyday relationships between capital and labour, but rather from farming people's implied compact with government. In this scenario, farmers were cast as contributing, through their labour, to a national project to sustain a productive and morally worthy agrarian society. Farmers and their representatives argued that in response governments were obliged to use their control of land, infrastructure, financing and markets in farmers' favour. In the increasingly homogeneous farmlands, place and class were mutually reinforcing. Show more