EXPERIMENTS IN THE RANGELANDS - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 112

the closure was confirmed, there were still 'millions of acres yet untouched in this
state which must be broken by the wheat-farmer's plough' (Anon, 1908a). Sutton
was determined to continue the wheat experiments in an effort to extend the
wheat-belt. The Coolabah farm closed and the wheat experiments withdrew to a
new experiment farm at Nyngan.
The country at Coolabah forced a new imperative. Instead of formulating a
system in which to carry out the transformation of idle scrublands into orderly
agricultural fields, Peacock felt his first priority was to 'reclaim these wastelands
and, if possible, bring them to a semblance of their former condition' (Peacock,
1900a: 652). His task became one of rescue, not revolution. This is the pattern
Australian science for agriculture followed in its early days. The small Department
of Agriculture was pulled between the demands of popular development rhetoric
and the need to respond to the on-the-ground circumstances of settler farming and
Australian environmental conditions.
At the end of the nineteenth century the government was concerned that the
resources it held were being depleted, primarily in pastoral operations, but also in
the way burgeoning crop farming was being practised. The main attraction of
scientific agriculture was its promise of allaying some of these environmental
problems, along with its potential civilising influence on the culture of inland
settlement. Some public figures, however, perhaps influenced by the popular press,
and perhaps speaking to popular sentiment, persisted with dreams of whole-scale
and widespread transformation of the dry interior. This kind of talk was allur-
ing and infectious, and often the Department positioned itself as the institution with
the knowledge and expertise to make such projects a reality. Their funding
depended on the results being relevant to policy. Generally, however, the early
experimentalist staff were practical in their work and its scope.
Despite the public anxiety to settle for cultural and political reasons, many of
the experimentalists and other Department staff were sensitive to place. They were
critical of environmental over-exploitation and farming practices that tried to profit
only in the short term. In The Delicate and Noxious Scrub , retired CSIRO scientist
Jim Noble has argued that Peacock's work 'probably represent[ed] the first formal
rangelands research undertaken in Australia' (1997: 36). Peacock was not alone in
seeing the agricultural project as a restorative one. In response to the drought and
harvest failure in the Russian Steppes in 1891, agricultural scientist Vasilii
Dokuchaev began researching the effects of human exploitation of the plains. He
was critical of exploitative farming practices and devised plans to repair the
environmental degradation of the Steppes (Moon, 2005). In the United States,
agricultural reformers such as Theodore Roosevelt strived to establish a con-
servation ethic that treated 'wise-use' and aesthetic preservation as belonging to the
same long-term civilising project (Tyrrell, 2012/2013).
Landholders continued to clear and over-stock semi-arid woodlands over the
course of the twentieth century. In 1938, biologist Francis Ratcliffe published his
classic Flying Fox and Drifting Sand , based on his travels across the rangelands. He
criticised graziers for over-stocking and the destruction of native vegetation it