Today, as Jones points out, Australian farms and the 157,000 people who run them are ‘increasingly characterised as anachronistic’ in an urbanised nation. Her approach to their history, culture, and futures is anything but. The author set the tone – a blend of compassion and dispassion – with her first book, a history of organic farming and gardening in Australia, Green Harvest (2010), which underscored the dependence of human health on the non-human environment. Similarly, a humanist ethic and willingness to genuinely engage with rural people and land, to grapple with human and non-human nature, frames this account of the challenge of farming sustainably in drought-prone and highly variable climates.

At its heart, Slow Catastrophes tells the stories of eight farming and grazing families based in south-east Australia from 1870 to the 1950s, the driest period in the meteorological history of the south-east. It does so principally through seven farm diaries – some of them records for the entire household as well as the individual – which is itself a humbling feat, if underrated for the patience it demands of the historian. The shortest diary Jones accessed spans sixteen years; the longest, half a century. Day by day, month by month, year by year, she pieced together what she describes as a ‘deluge of the everyday’: ledgers of weather, cropping, finance, and stock, of daily activity, achievement, and events near and far, as well as of reflections and feelings. There are other methods of researching the dynamics of experience, if more mediated by memory; longitudinal oral history, for instance, can by design embrace the critical narrative act of retelling. But the farm diary is inimitable for its capacity to reveal what happened before, after, and between droughts, which, Jones shows, is as important as drought itself.

Rain-making equipment, Charleville, 1947. The ‘Stiger-Vortex-Gun’ was conceived by Clement Wragge, a Queensland meteorologist. Ten guns were built in Brisbane and then placed around Charleville. On 2 September 1902, gunpowder was emptied into the breech of each gun and then detonated. No rain fell. (John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland via Wikimedia Commons)Indeed, what she makes of these diaries is as fascinating and evocative as the book’s title. Stories of family, property, and community – hope, loss, and renewal – are presented, inside and outside of drought. The focus on private lives and inner thoughts follows in the footsteps of the likes of Katie Holmes’s Spaces in Her Day: Australian women’s diaries of the 1920s and 1930s (1995), Andrew Hassam’s Sailing to Australia: Shipboard diaries by nineteenth-century British emigrants (1995), and Bill Gammage’s The Broken Years: Australian soldiers in the Great War (1975). So too Jones values the roles the handwritten artefact served for its author as a practical tool: both a record of existence and a statement of transition – of learning. In this case, we gain intimate insights into farming as a work in progress, thus a rare glimpse of how lived experience builds up over time, in the formation of symbolic and cultural capital. Where health and social scientists and agricultural economists have valued rural diaries as a tool of measurement – to home in, for example, on the gendered division of farm labour – in contrast, here we are encouraged to recognise the wide sweep of social, environmental, and temporal circumstances in which humans respond to drought.

The first section of the book convincingly relates the rhythms and patterns of ‘living with drought’ – of people enduring but also seeking to adapt. Anchored in those stories, the second section teases out the complexity of intellectual, practical, physical, and emotional responses to drought that emerge, including discussions with contemporary farmers and pastoralists, too. Intriguingly, here Jones explores two competing, parallel understandings of Australian climates over the past 150 years: of drought as an aberration (of ‘normal’ climate as predictable) and of drought as recurrent reality. In this respect, Slow Catastrophes fosters its own story of hope, by considering the ways that drought has formed a catalyst for individual and collective social and environmental renewal. Strategies that farmers and graziers have used historically to endure periods of low production and adapt to drought include wild harvesting, self-sufficiency, mobility, and off-farm work. That said, the implications for the debt-laden farmers of contemporary industrial agriculture, whose systems are structured around continuous production and require predictability, raise the spectre of loss of local knowledge and culture. ‘Adaptations,’ Jones states, ‘which helped so many farmers ... in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, may no longer be economic options today.’

 Lake Hume (photograph by Tim J. Keegan via Wikimedia Commons)

A real strength of this book (and its capacity to inspire) is revealed in the final chapters, which make a carefully reasoned argument for enquiry into environmental history and emotion. ‘Droughts bring their own sensations,’ Jones reminds us: the feel of dry heat on the skin, the smell of rain, the sound of leaves crackling underfoot, even the taste of dust on the tongue. How might emotion hinder or propel change? From uncertainty to confusion, torpor to inaction, solidarity to escape, Slow Catastrophes brings the ‘emotional landscape’ of drought to the fore, through diaries making abstract speculations more personal and concrete. In turn, Jones spotlights historical cultural norms that have enabled adaptation in response: flexibility, frugality, community, emotional engagement, and humility. If at times understated in its reflective reverence of the farm diary as witness ‘to the act of life being lived’, her book argues that we must take seriously the role of sentiment in farming and in deep structural and philosophical change. This is an astute call to come to grips with the social-environmental reality of the Anthropocene and thus the dynamic ways in which climate shapes culture and culture shapes climate.