Mallee Country: Land, People, History by Richard Broome, Charles Fahey, Andrea Gaynor and Katie Holmes

Book Description

Secondhand. Very good condition. Ex library copy with all external stickers removed. Minor wear to book corners and edges.

Mallee Country tells the powerful history of Mallee lands and people across southern Australia from Deep Time to the present.

Carefully shaped and managed by Aboriginal people for over 50,000 years, Mallee country was dramatically transformed by settlers, first with sheep and rabbits, then by flattening and burning the mallee to make way for wheat. Government backed settlement schemes devastated lives and country. Still, some farmers learnt how to survive the droughts, dust storms, mice, locusts and salinity – and the vagaries of international markets – to become some of Australia’s most resilient agriculturalists. In Mallee country, innovation and tenacity have been neighbours to hardship and failure.

Mallee Country is a story of how land and people shape each other. It is the story of how a landscape once derided by settlers as a ‘howling wilderness’ covered in ‘dismal scrub’ became home to citizens who delighted in mallee fauna and flora and fought to conserve it for future generations. It is the story of the dreams, sweat and sorrows of people who face an uncertain future of depopulation and climate change with creativity and hope. (back cover)