ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Australian country life, 'crisis' and sustainability through discourse on the lived experience of drought, illuminating the self-preservative power of narrative for a culture under threat. The project bore witness to a sharp politicisation of environmental knowledge and divisive debate over rural futures. Farm lobbyists and some scientists said Australian farmers were among the world's most efficient yet 'caught in a natural disaster of unimaginable proportions'. As Neil Barr and John Cary write, Australian land use since the import of European agriculture has been a 200-year struggle to 'green' a drought-prone, brown land: 'from the early attempts to recreate England in the land of exiles, through the dreams of a sturdy yeomanry and of turning the coastal streams inland, to the search for new crop and pasture species better suited to our climate'.
