Picturing the Victorian Mallee, 1840-1945
Picturing the Victorian Mallee, 1840-1945
Picturing the Victorian Mallee, 1840-1945
Picturing the Victorian Mallee, 1840-1945
RHSV Past President Andrew Lemon with Professor Katie Holmes.
When Europeans first encountered the land
we now know as the Mallee, they saw it as
desolate, featureless, and hostile to human
habitation. Fifty years later they were exultant
about the
‘miracle of the Mallee’ as they
celebrated its transformation into a vast field
of golden grain. The
‘Howling Wilderness’
had become the
‘Promised Land’. But as
the Federation Drought took hold, dreams
of golden fields gave way to realities of dust,
drought and despair. In the inter-war years,
as Soldier Settlement Schemes floundered,
the struggle for survival became, in the
words of the Argus,
‘the story of a warfare,
no less exacting, no less fierce, not a whit less
decisive, than the war from which most of the
settlers have come’.
History Week continued last Tuesday Professor Katie Holmes took the attentive audience through the different ways in
which the Victorian Mallee has been depicted
and imagined – in maps, images and words –
and the impact these imaginings had on the
settlement history of this region. Several people in attendance had personal stories to tell about the Mallee.