REMAKING WETLANDS - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 220

inhabitation of increasing numbers of farm dams (Curtin and Kingsford, 1997: 32;
Kingsford et al ., 2000: 4).
Similarly, as we have seen, ducks have been attracted to flooded rice fields both
as drought refuges and as aquatic habitat during local floods. In the words of
ecologists Alison Curtin and Richard Kingsford, '[w]hen rice is flooded, it creates
a wetland' (Curtin and Kingsford, 1997: 31). However, the sharing of space and
resources by agriculture and wildlife in Australia has rarely been a matter of easy
coexistence as many species, like ducks, have been and continue to be hunted or
targeted in other ways as agricultural pests (see Main, 2005: 16-56). In the late
1990s, the irregular and large variations in duck populations, which change with
droughts and floods, were put forward by managers as a major reason why
management solutions for sharing these landscapes could not been found (Curtin
and Kingsford, 1997: 9-10). This was in contrast to the more effective management
in other countries (albeit contested and highly politicised), like the creation of
wetland reserves in Californian rice growing areas, which catered for the more
regular seasonal migrations of waterfowl (Wilson, 2012: 10-15).
All of these recent circumstances are underlain by complex histories, and are
tied to the intensification and expansion of agriculture in the twentieth century.
While rivers had been dammed and diverted before this, the rapidity and scale of
agricultural expansion in the twentieth century were new and in that century many
of the large dams that now stand in the Murray-Darling Basin were built; in the
year 2000 these numbered 105 (Kingsford, 2000: 118). The Murrumbidgee was an
important site for these projects and, as historical geographers Trevor Langford-
Smith and John Rutherford noted, by the mid-1960s the Riverine Plain had 'by
far the greatest concentration of irrigation development' (1966: 1) in Australia. This
expansion was motivated by a range of political and cultural ideas and events. At
the turn of the twentieth century these included: long-held ideologies of 'closer
settlement' (or densely settled farming communities) for more intensive production,
particularly of food; the economic fallout of what is now known as the Federation
Drought (approximately 1895 to 1902); and the new legal framework of the
national Constitution following Federation in 1901, which facilitated co-operation
between different states for river engineering along the shared waterways of the
Murray system (for a more detailed overview, see O'Gorman, 2012: 119-134).
Rice and the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area
Within these contexts, the MIA began operation in 1912 as a state government-
administered irrigation area that was intended to produce food from small, inten-
sively cultivated farms, and the original production plans included horticulture,
dairying, lucerne and raising pigs and fat lambs. The scheme was motivated by
broader ideologies held by Australian governments of creating a 'yeoman' class of
small-scale farmer and these racially-motivated ideas about 'desirable' immi-
grants were reflected in the recruitment of farmers from the USA and Europe, as
well as elsewhere in Australia (Langford-Smith and Rutherford, 1966: 25-29,