ABSTRACT
The large-scale new forest clearance was on the other side of the continent, a new frontier in the wet sclerophyll Karri forests of south-western Western Australia. Published just as World War One came to end, Australia Unlimited vigorously promoted the idea that Australian farmlands were, ‘highly fertile and unlimited in area’. In Australia Unlimited, Brady forecast that wheat-growing could be greatly expanded and predicted that in Victoria, wheat acreage could be doubled, with production perhaps tripled. In 1930, strongly influenced by the vision outlined in Australia Unlimited, the Federal Scullin Government introduced the ‘Grow More Wheat Campaign’. The centrepiece of this policy was the promise of a guaranteed price of 56 pence per bushel. The biggest area of expansion after World War One was into the high rainfall forests of south-western Western Australia. In stark contrast to successful areas were a group of rainforest regions which, the war, became increasingly marginal and in some cases, the sites for wholesale abandonment.
