ABSTRACT
It is a “stump-jump” plough, an Australian invention developed in the 1870s by brothers Richard and Clarence Smith, South Australian farmers. In the Australian colonies, the 1870s was a period of land reform, closer rural settlement, railway expansion and commercial development. Farmers sought new technologies and methods to swiftly transform diverse biological communities, often dominated by eucalyptus trees, into simplified monocultures of imported crop species. They hastily cleared scrubland, burned what timber they could, then used horses to drag
stump-jump ploughs through their new, ashen paddocks, strewn with stumps, roots, and the many stones that characterize the old, shallow soils of Australia. The new plough’s great innovation was a linkage mechanism that allowed each individual ploughshare to lift over roots, stumps, and rocks, thereby avoiding damage to horses and equipment. The stump-jump plough became a national icon, celebrated for its powerful capacity to
transcend, to jump over, stumps and stones, the particular characteristics of Australian places, for its powerful ability to overcome natural limitations to export oriented agricultural production. A rough sketch by inventor Clarence Smith of his first stump-jump plough featured in the 2005 exhibition National Treasures from Australia’s Great Libraries, at the National Library of Australia in Canberra. Modern, industrial desires to overcome natural, ecological constraints drove the
imposition of European agricultural systems onto Australian terrain. Since the emergence of agricultural science late in the nineteenth century, a belief that humans could defy natural limits and boost primary production through the simplification and strident transformation of local ecologies defined the discipline. “No one argued that we should accept this poor, old continent for what it was,” remembered agricultural scientist David Smith. “It was ours to improve, to manage. We were to take what was and use our knowledge to make gain for our nation and humanity.”1
