The February 1983 dust storm reached 320 metres – twice the height of the Collins Place towers, then the tallest buildings in Melbourne’s CBD. It would forever change the way much of the Mallee was farmed.
It rolled over Melbourne just before 3pm. The enormous red-brown wave reached 320 metres – twice the height of the Collins Place towers, then the tallest buildings in the CBD.
In fact, mallee – the eucalypts and the woodlands – can be found right across the continent, all the way to Esperance in south-west Western Australia. But in much of north-west Victoria and the bordering lands of South Australia, the woodland is no more. Much of what was once an extraordinarily diverse ecosystem has been reduced to a single crop - wheat or canola or legumes - or to grazing land for cattle or sheep.
But the devastation caused by sheep and rabbits was nothing compared to the impact of clearing the land for farming, Broome says. “Sheep destroyed particular areas, but they didn’t have the wide-scale impact of the brutal methods used to clear large areas of country for farming on an industrial scale.”Professor Katie Holmes
“The settlement schemes were just a disaster,” Holmes says. “You look at it now and think ‘how could they let this happen?’ It ended up costing the state many millions of dollars buying out settlers and amalgamating blocks.”Drought and dust storms were part of Mallee life from early on. The Federation Drought started in the late 1890s and lasted till 1903. The land baked so hard it became impossible to plough.
After some short stints of drought in the early 1970s, the land started to dry again. By 1982 the Mallee was in severe drought. But even though the number of dust storms has dropped significantly since most Mallee farmers started using no-till methods, the technique has major drawbacks. Weeds that were once ploughed into the ground are instead killed with large quantities of herbicide; herbicide-resistant weeds are becoming a significant concern. The machines that plant between last year’s rows are massive. “That has led to further clearing,” says Holmes.
“The first 15 years were just taken up with getting rid of rabbits and weeds,” she says. The couple planted and nurtured thousands of plants, saplings and grasses, watering them weekly to give them a start in the badly degraded soil. Revegetation seemed successful.
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