EXPERIMENTS IN THE RANGELANDS - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 108

wheat varieties to suit the conditions of the New World lands. They made vast
tracts of 'virgin' territory available for cultivation of European plants, consolidating
the 'Great Grain Invasion' which saw the harvests of those plants shipped back to
Europe, and which lowered the price of grain foods and devastated the farmers of
Europe (Olmstead and Rhode, 2006). Growing wheat at the Coolabah experiment
farm would use place in two ways. It would allow the plant-breeders to select seeds
based on which plants survived the extreme conditions, and they hoped the plants
would adapt to the conditions through their interaction with the environment.
Peacock would need to collaborate with the Department's specialist staff to
make it possible to grow wheat in an environment where 'the absence of rain' had
made it impossible (Anon, 1897a). Coolabah at that time was 150 miles beyond
the limits of the wheat-belt. Rainfall in one year barely totalled 80 millimetres. If
crops grew here, they would grow anywhere. The Minister instructed the
American-born plant pathologist Dr Nathan Cobb to 'undertake exhaustive
experiments with a view of selecting a wheat that will adapt itself to the climate,
and be sufficiently early to benefit by the rainfall' (ibid.). The independent wheat-
breeder William Farrer, by then on the Department's topics, began wheat trials
using the conditions at the Coolabah farm to produce drought-tolerant wheat
varieties.
The Department's timing for the establishment of the Coolabah Experiment
Farm was unfortunate. Experimentalists began cultivating their wheat plots just as
eastern Australia entered what became known as the Federation Drought. Farrer
was frustrated with the low yields of the 'Macaroni', or durum wheat, he had
selected for the dry and hot conditions in the interior. He tried North African,
Mediterranean, West Asian and Central European wheats with little success
(Peacock, 1904a). The wheat trials did not fare any better when the rains returned.
Typical of the extreme variability of the western country, when the drought broke,
it was with fierce storms and flooding. The farm's manager, Peacock, reported that
in September 1903 heavy rain caused a nearby cowal to overflow and flood some
of the trial plots, and strong winds bent many of the wheat plants. The next month
hail storms tore up the plants, and with the unusual amount of rain, rust set in. The
rain turned the broken and bare ground hard. With so much rain after such a long
drought the grasses and shrubs boomed, but so did the wildlife, including mouse
populations. The mice climbed the wheat stalks and attacked the grain, they used
the string bands of the sheafs to make their nests, and 'after wheats were sown they
would follow the drills, and scratch and devour the grain' (ibid.: 1120). When the
remaining seeds germinated, they ate the shoots off to the level of the ground. They
also destroyed the haystacks, ate the insides out of the melons and pumpkins, and
polished off a crop of cowpeas before they ripened. The mice 'appeared to be
everywhere, in houses, barns, stables and fields, and would eat almost anything'
(ibid.). Peacock's reports were rarely positive.
Robert Peacock knew dry country. He was a self-taught generalist raised on a
mixed farm near Bathurst. He knew the soils in the west ranged between poor red
sandy loams and richer but difficult to cultivate black cracking soils. He knew