Drought, Endurance and Climate Change 'Pioneers': Lived Experience in the Production of Rural Environmental Knowledge

Deb Anderson

doi:10.5130/csr.v16i1.1439

Abstract

This article explores the politicisation of environmental knowledge on rural Australia, in an analysis of discourse on the lived experience of drought. It draws on research conducted in dryland farm communities in the Mallee wheat-belt of Victoria – where rural histories have presented spirited sagas of community perseverance in ‘battling’ a harsh climate – during a period of marked shift in public awareness of climate change (2004-07). Indeed climate change projections have intensified debate over rural futures in Australia, where droughts have played a powerful role in the mythologizing of rural battlers and landscapes, and where drought discourse has been dominated by the language of war. Cultural engagement with climate is, however, under constant renegotiation, as rural cultural research is apt to reveal.

Highlights

James O’Connor, The Meaning of Crisis[1]    This  is  a  story  of  drought  and  climate  change
pull back'.3 A battler history of survival is rewritten with a message of ecological enlightenment
Sheldon’s story, an account  of the experience of dwelling in uncertainty, formed an active reconstruction of the  past in a bid for renewal—a compelling bid to retraditionalise a social environment  that  drew  attention  to  existential  crisis  as  rural  change  (socio‐economic,  structural,  political and environmental) posed a threat to the identity of Mallee dryland farming  people.[83]  Certainly,  insofar  as  this  paper  sheds  light  on  an  affirmation  of  and  challenge  to  a  narrative  of  rural  ‘pioneering’  in  light  of  climate  change,  drought  discourses attest to the power and pervasiveness of battler histories of endurance in  Australian rural culture