Anderson, Deb
‘Drought, endurance and ‘The way things were’: the lived experience of climate and climate change in the Mallee‘, Australian Humanities Review, 45, November 2008
Oral history piece on how experience of regular drought came together with experience of climate change.
Droughts, much like floods, bushfires and cyclones, have punctuated Australian rural, regional and national histories. As Neil Barr and John Cary write, Australian land use since the import of European agriculture has been a 200-year struggle to “green” a brown land – “from the early attempts to recreate England in the land of exiles, through the dreams of a sturdy yeomanry and of turning the coastal streams inland, to the search for new crop and pasture species better suited to our climate”.
Now, climate change adds a new layer.