The Mallee is shaped by the presence and absence of water. Go far back enough in time to the Miocene and an inland sea really did exist. Progressively, vast tracts of exposed earth were leached of minerals and massive salt reserves accumulated underground. The First Peoples of the Mallee were sustained by the rich life-giving rivers, while in arid areas their ‘mastery of their environment’ allowed both fixed and mobile settlement. The Mallee lignotuber, among other plants, provided important water storage that supplemented collection – for the Ngargad through dug-out ‘soaks’ in surface clays; for the Nyungar through gnamma holes in granite outcrops. Water also navigates devastating tales, the Murray River being the site of multiple frontier massacres and ongoing violence to Indigenous peoples.

Written by Richard Broome, Charles Fahey, Andrea Gaynor, and Katie Holmes – four esteemed academics specialising in fields of Aboriginal, agricultural, and environmental history – Mallee Country is ambitious. Structured in four parts – Mallee Aborigines and European Intruders to 1880; Transforming the Mallee 1800–1945; The State and Mallee Lands 1945–1983; and Living with the Mallee 1983 to the Present – its 392 pages are densely packed with attentive scholarship. It recounts nuanced stories that complicate simplistic histories. It is a welcome contribution to a growing body of work by Australian historians offering critical perspectives on agricultural Australia (for example, Deb Anderson’s Endurance: Australian stories of drought [2014], Cameron Muir’s Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress: An environmental history [2014], and Rebecca Jones’s Slow Catastrophes: Living with drought in Australia [2017]).

Entering The Mallee, on the Sunraysia Highway, Victoria (photograph by Longhair/Wikimedia Commons)

The biophysical realities of the Australian continent made the impact of settler-colonialism unique in its calamity. The combined forces of rabbits, sheep, horses, diseases, crops, machinery, rails, roads, and water-diverting technologies desecrated large tracts of inland Australia, leaving soils fragile and devoid of an exoskeleton. Time and again, the land resisted through droughts, floods, salt and dust storms, locusts, aphids, mice, poison plants, and other afflictions worthy of Old Testament vengeance.

An often devastating environmental history, Mallee Country exposes the frictions between ecological definitions of Mallee ecosystems and social constructions of Mallee country. Since European colonisation, the Mallee has been pushed to extremes by a succession of negligent land-allocation schemes informed by national dreams and anxieties, trust in the promise of science and technology, and the volatility of world wars and neoliberal markets. Desperate measures were taken. Resilience and tenacity are still celebrated in those who waged war on the Mallee and persevered. Yet those who held on thinly to ‘success’ do so through the misfortune of others, human and otherwise. As Ron Brown, Gnowangerup Shire president and farmer stated in 1981: ‘We have won the battle against the Mallee but lost the war against nature. We have to learn to live with our environment and stop fighting it.’

Multiple royal commissions found irresponsible settlement schemes and inappropriate farming practices. These moments of clarity provided occasion to change direction, yet governments repeatedly failed to learn from the past. Instead, they drove farmers further inland and further into debt, while eating away at ecological life-support systems. How this manifested differed by state, demonstrating the various ways that local policies and local environmental particularities intersect.

In the past thirty years, the neoliberalisation of economic systems has completely dominated what has happened to the environment, to farming, and to Mallee communities. Historically supported through finance, knowledge, machinery, and infrastructure schemes, Mallee farmers now (for the most part) are being left to battle alone. Even the conservation of Mallee ecosystems, emerging from the early 1900s as a social good, is increasingly being delivered by not-for-profit private organisations. Growing interest in mineral sands mining portends further trouble for Mallee country.

Mallee Country provides detailed accounts of daily lives from personal diaries and land-title archives, while sculpting a story pertinent to understanding contemporary national identity and ecological and climate catastrophe. With such a history in hand, the broader forces that rural communities operate within can be discerned. These forces, their roots ensnared in colonisation and global neoliberal markets, continually insist on the need for greater endurance in the people of the Mallee and greater sacrifice of country, while those in power evade responsibility. Threats are imminent, enduring, and devastating.

This book elicits astonishment and anger. It is a rich compendium that exposes the roots of many callous policies that continue state-sanctioned assaults on people and ecosystems. As tales of mass fish death, of drought-relief packages, and of billions of dollars allocated to dams and pipelines inundate the news, Mallee Country is a sobering reminder that we’ve seen it before. What is different now is the scale and urgency of the problems.

Mallee Country is an urgent environmental history for these troubled times. As the authors forewarn, the super-imposition of rapid climate change will bring longer-term and wider-reaching consequences to the Mallee. The resilience and creativity demonstrated from communities today is a tribute to all people who care for the Mallee, but overall this is an honest, not hopeful, story. No quick modernist fix can bring us out of the mess we are all in. Reflective and generous social change that attends to a collective deep-time history is required.

Now, more than ever, we must learn from the past and identify alternative pathways. Mallee Country can be read as a history for the future; a warning of what happens when we forget to remember.