“It’s the Devil You Know”: Environmental Stories from the Victorian Mallee

Abstract

The Mallee region of south-eastern Australia is a semi-arid area with a distinct social and environmental history. Adapting to the demands of farming in this environment has required, so the narrative goes, highly responsive farmers who also possess great personal resilience. Their stories of adaptation and resilience, however, are striking for the conflicts they reveal about their attitudes to farming in the Mallee environment. This chapter uses life history interviews to explore different narratives about environmental change in the Mallee and considers the ways individual lives can disrupt and challenge the meta-narratives of colonial and national progress, of pioneering and the frontier, at the same time that those meta-narratives shape the ways in which individuals seek to frame their (gendered) life story and anticipate their future.