On citrus orchards in the Riverland (South Australia) in the late 1960s salinity caused trees to defoliate, decreased, fruit yields and decreased farm income. Industry newsletters and newspaper reports reveal the narratives through which growers understood these unwelcome changes on their farms. Salinity was experienced as both a chronic and a crisis situation by citrus farmers, who sought to navigate at times conflicting visions of environmental improvement and profit, against increasing environmental limits and concern. The sources show how new technologies were marketed to growers; technologies which had been researched and designed in the USA and Australia in part to improve outcomes for the local farm environment but would also improve water use efficiency to benefit the Murray system generally. Contemporaneous academic appeals for Australian policy makers to heed environmental observations and warnings, and to seek out additional safeguards, were in line with concerns expressed by growers, who foresaw continuing if not worsening conditions which threatened their futures. This paper reconnects the experience of growers and their local conditions with the political and ecological context of the late 1960s, as environmental limits and governance came up against moral and economic visions of agrarian prosperity inherited from earlier times.
Amanda Wells, University of Newcastle (Australia)
This is the abstract that I submitted for my paper at the 2022 Australian Historical Association Conference, held at Deakin University.
Amanda Wells 