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This paper examines self-sown crops as agents in the agricultural development of Australia's southern mallee lands from the 1890s to the 1940s. Self-sown crops suggested ways to farm and provided the enticement of an occasional windfall. They assisted with expansion and consolidation of holdings and provided moral lessons in the value of persistence. In the context of the rise of modern, scientific farming characterized by strict regimes of crop rotation and fallowing, self-sown crops encouraged farmers to maintain more adaptive, less regimented approaches. Ultimately, modernist systems triumphed, and by the mid-twentieth century self-sown crops were all but excluded from mallee agriculture. For a time, however, these plants played a significant role in shaping approaches to farming in the mallee lands and sustaining agricultural enterprise there. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1926 and 1935 the Better Farming Train made seven trips to the Victorian Mallee region. Modeled on North American examples, the mission of the Train was to spread the "doctrine of better farming" to this wheat-growing region. The Train carried to the Mallee ideas about the promise of science and the hopes of modernity. It championed particular ideas about agricultural development, settlement, and the role of female labor in carrying out the yeoman ideal of the small farmholding. Although the product of a specific time and place, it also tapped into a long-standing belief that the mallee lands could be developed through correct settlement, the advances of technology, and the application of science. The Train was more than a moving collection of exhibits; it also freighted a way of imagining the Mallee that saw in the prospect of golden fields of wheat a way of redeeming the land and forging a modern nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1890s agricultural settlers moved into the Victorian Mallee, an area characterized by low rainfall and a deep-rooted eucalyptus mallee scrub. By rolling, cutting, and burning this scrub, large areas could be rapidly brought under cereal crops. The key to success on this agricultural frontier was cheap land and the cropping of broad acres using labor-saving cultivation and harvesting machinery. From the 1890s to the early 1920s, settlers successfully farmed the southern regions of the Mallee. In the 1920s settlement pushed north into drier regions, but settlers were allocated blocks too small to be viable, and in the 1930s world commodity prices collapsed. From 1938 to 1944 settlers across the Mallee experienced a run of very dry years, and dust storms became a feature of Mallee life. Government intervention resulted in the consolidation of blocks, which enabled settlers to less intensively cultivate their land and to combine cropping with sheep farming. Government research encouraged new methods of cultivation in the 1940s to arrest sand drift. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agricultural societies have precursor societies that can be misrepresented in the process of writing agricultural history. Also, the interest in environmental history on labor and nature is rarely applied to Indigenous workers. This article addresses these two issues in the context of Aboriginal people of the Murray River in the region of the Victorian Mallee in southeastern Australia, now premier wheat country. It argues through a close examination of work within a "geography of labor" along the river, that Indigenous people at European contact in the 1840s and long before, labored in a far more successful and sustainable manner than humans did for most of the farm history of this region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights the important function of family and kinship networks in the pastoral industry of the Port Phillip District and Victoria, Australia, during the nineteenth century. Using the core case study of the extended Cameron family--or the Cameron "clan" from the Scottish Highlands--in the Western District of Victoria, it demonstrates how family networks assisted in the accumulation and consolidation of large pastoral properties and enterprises and thus aided the agricultural entrepreneurialism of migrants who saw greater commercial opportunities throughout the Empire than at home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The wheat-farming industry developed rapidly in the British Australian colony of Victoria between the late 1840s and early 1860s. Contrary to prevailing academic views, this paper demonstrates that the 1851 gold discoveries set up favorable economic conditions for commercial domestic crop growing, including wheat production. The spread of wheat farming was especially rapid in the hinterland Central Victorian goldfields region. The undeveloped system of overland transportation granted newly established local farmers immunity from outside competition, whilst cheap land and application of labor-saving harvesting machinery lowered the production cost of wheat. By the early 1860s the colonial wheat frontier had moved far inland to the edge of the vast virgin plains bordering Central Victoria to the north. This shift would greatly simplify later large-scale northern agricultural settlement, when Victoria turned into a large wheat exporter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]