Mallee Country: Land, People, History by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781925523126
Google: lnaQswEACAAJ
Publisher: Monash University Publishing
Published: 2019-11-15T23:22:02.711953+00:00

Rural Reconstruction

In 1941, John Curtin’s new federal Labor government began to plan for postwar reconstruction and a better, more equitable Australia.1 The plight of rural Australia looked stark, and a Rural Reconstruction Commission was established in March 1943. Its four members—the Hon. Frank Wise, James F. Murphy, Professor Samuel Macmahon Wadham and Cecil Ralph Lambert— had two terms of reference.2 The first was to foster a rural economy geared to ‘the effectual prosecution of the war’, the second to re-organise and rehabilitate this rural economy for the post-war period.3 The commission recognised and documented problems created by the overly optimistic agricultural expansion of the 1920s, the collapse of prices in the Depression, wartime needs, and a dry period, most critically the 1944–45 drought. These problems were acute across mallee lands in three states.

Wadham and Lambert drove the commission. Wadham’s investigations continued his long-standing contribution to understanding rural life and developing rural policy. Professor of agriculture at Melbourne University from 1926 and an ex-soldier, Wadham represented Victorian soldier settlers in 1929 on a state government board dealing with settlement in the Mallee region, arguing successfully for an increase in farm sizes. He then served on the royal commission into the wheat industry in 1934, and he was well known in country districts for his radio broadcasts. With Lambert, Wadham wrote the commission’s analysis of the history and place of rural industries in Australia and the factors that influenced costs of production such as soils, rainfall, technical services, credit, transport and labour. They criticised irrigation policy and management and the ongoing commitment of governments to farms that were too small.4

Wadham believed success in post-war rural life demanded access to health services, comfortable housing, community centres, education and electricity. He commissioned several path-breaking studies of Victorian country towns, wheat farms, and orchards in the Sunraysia district. He also mentored a student undertaking a doctorate in rural sociology at the University of North Carolina on the Victorian dairy industry. These studies pioneered statistical sampling to elicit information from farm households, survey techniques that informed the empirical methods of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, created from recommendations of the Rural Reconstruction Commission. From the late 1940s, the bureau, and its successor bodies (today ABARES) surveyed farms to determine the costs of production and to analyse farming life.5

Wadham recruited the services of a young public servant, Alan J. Holt, to study Victorian wheat farms. His slim volume, Wheat Farms of Victoria, laid bare the rudimentary nature of domestic farm life compared to that of urban Australia, the disparity in part a result of the long period of declining prices of farm produce and drought.6 In the metropolitan areas of Victoria, sewerage, fresh water, town gas and electricity had from 1900 become a normal part of domestic life for most. In the bush, and most particularly in the Mallee, the farmers’ standard of living had fallen far behind that of their city contemporaries. Holt’s survey revealed that most farmers took the radio for granted (battery operated), and they generally owned cars.

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