Abstract
This chapter investigates three common ‘narratives’ that farmers in the Victorian Mallee tell about their relationship with weeds. I explore a key concern of environmental history: how has this seemingly natural world been shaped by the images, words and ideas that humans bring to it? A subject as deceptively simple as weeds can carry a host of meanings, colouring approaches to weed control and broader responses to the non-human world. Particular attitudes lead to particular actions, in turn creating particular ecological landscapes. In the face of the tendency to conflate the subtleties of human-nature interactions in agricultural communities into one dominant narrative, oral testimony allows a more nuanced picture of adaptation and adjustment, overtly shaped by family, community, inter-generational history and the lived experience of farming the land.
This work was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship. I would like to thank participants in the 2015 “Telling Environmental Histories” workshop in Melbourne for their careful consideration and discussion of an early version of this article. I am also grateful to Professor Katie Holmes for invaluable comment and suggestions on successive drafts.
Similar content being viewed by others
Bibliography
Anderson, Deb. Endurance: Australian Stories of Drought. Collingwood: CSIRO Publishing, 2014.
Cadzow, Allison, Denis Byrne. Heather Goodall with Stephen Wearing. Waterborne: Vietnamese, Australians and Sydney’s Georges River, Parks and Green Spaces. Parklands: Culture and Communities project UTS Press, 2011. http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/nswcultureheritage/PlaceMakingGeorgesRiver.htm.
Coates, Colin M., ed. Canadian Countercultures and the Environment, Canadian History and Environment Series. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2016.
Evans, Clinton. The War on Weeds in the Prairie West: An Environmental History. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2002.
Fiege, Mark. “The Weedy West: Mobile Nature, Boundaries, and Common Space in the Montana Landscape.” The Western Historical Quarterly 36, no. 1 (2005): 22–47.
Friederici, Paul, ed. What Has Passed and What Remains: Oral Histories of Northern Arizona’s Changing Landscapes. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010.
Gimmi, Urs and Matthias Burgi. “Using Oral History and Forest Management Plans to Reconstruct Traditional Non-Timber Forest Uses in the Swiss Rhone Valley (Valais) Since the Late Nineteenth Century.” Environment and History 13, no. 2 (May 2007): 211–46.
Goodall, Heather. “Telling Country: Memory, Modernity and Narratives in Rural Australia.” History Workshop Journal, no. 47 (April 1999): 160–90.
Goodall, Heather. “The River Runs Backwards.” In Words for Country: Landscape & Language in Australia. Edited by Tim Bonyhady and Tom Griffiths, 31–51. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2001.
Goodall, Heather, Denis Byrne. Allison Cadzow and Stephen Wearing. Waters of Belonging: Al-Miyahu Tajma’unah: Arabic Australians and the Georges River Parklands. Parklands: Culture and Communities Project, UTS Press, 2012. http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/books/waters-belonging.
Griffiths, Tom and Christine Hansen. Living with Fire: People, Nature and History in Steels Creek. Collingwood: CSIRO Publishing, 2012.
Harker, K. Neil and John T. O’Donovan. “Recent Weed Control, Weed Management, and Integrated Weed Management.” Weed Technology 27 (2013): 1–11.
Heap, I. The International Survey of Herbicide Resistant Weeds. http://www.weedscience.com/ [accessed 3 Feb 2017].
“Herbicide Resistance,” Integrated Weed Management Hub, Grains Research and Development Corporation. https://grdc.com.au/Resources/IWMhub/Section-1-Herbicide-resistance [accessed 17 Feb 2017].
Holmes, Andrew and Margaret Pilkington, “Storytelling, Floods, Wildflowers and Washlands: Oral History in the River Ouse Project,” Oral History 39, no. 2 (2011): 83–94.
Hamilton, Paula. “Oral History and the Senses.” In The Oral History Reader, 3rd ed., edited by Alistair Thomson and Robert Perks, 104–16. New York: Routledge, 2016.
International Soil and Water Conservation Research 2, no. 1 (March 1, 2014).
Isenberg, Andrew C., ed. The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Jones, Rebecca. Slow Catastrophes: Living with Drought in Australia. Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2017.
Keeling, Arn and John Sandlos, eds. Mining and Communities in Northern Canada : History, Politics, and Memory. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2015.
Koleva, Daniela. “Narrating Nature: Perceptions of the Environment and Attitudes Towards it in Life Stories.” In The Roots of Environmental Consciousness: Popular Tradition and Personal Experience, edited by Stephen Hussey and Paul Thompson, 63–75. London, New York: Routledge, 2000.
Lane, Ruth. “Remembering Past Environments: Identity, Place and Environmental Knowledge in the Tumut Region of New South Wales.” Aboriginal History 21 (1997): 148–61.
Llewellyn, Rick and F.H. d’emDen. Adoption of No-Till Cropping Practices in Australian Grain Growing Regions. Kingston: Grains Research and Development Corporation and CSIRO, 2010.
Llewellyn, R.S., R.K. Lindner, D.J. Pannell and S.B. Powles. “Grain Grower Perceptions and Use of Integrated Weed Management.” Australian Journal of Experimental Agriculture, 44 (2004): 993–1001.
Mabey, Richard. Weeds: How Vagabond Plants Gatecrashed Civilisation and Changed the Way We Think About Nature. London: Profile, 2010.
MacEachern, Alan and Ryan O’Connor, eds. “Special Issue: Talking Green: Oral History and Environmental History.” Oral History Forum d’histoire orale 30, online journal of the Canadian Oral History Association (2010). http://www.oralhistoryforum.ca/index.php/ohf/issue/view/36/showToc [accessed 3 Feb 2017].
Main, George, Heartland : The Regeneration of Rural Place. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2005.
McCann, Joy. “History and Memory in Australia’s Wheatlands.” In Struggle Country: The Rural Ideal in Twentieth Century Australia, edited by Marc Brodie and Graeme Davison, 3.1–4.15. Clayton: Monash University ePress, 2005.
McRobert, Jencie and Lauren Rickards. “Social Research: Insights into Farmers” Conversion to No-till Farming Systems.” Extension Farming Systems Journal 6, no. 1 (2010): 43–52.
Moodie, Jane. “The Moral World of the Waikite Valley.” In Remembering: Writing Oral History, edited by Anna Green and Megan Hutching, 39–57. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2004.
Nugent, Maria. “Mapping Memories: Oral History for Aboriginal Cultural Heritage in New South Wales, Australia.” In Oral History and Public Memories, edited by Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes, Critical Perspectives on the Past Series, 47–64. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008.
Parker, Tony and Studs Terkel. “Studs Terkel with Tony Parker: Interviewing an Interviewer.” In The Oral History Reader, edited by Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, 3rd ed., 147–52. New York: Routledge, 2016.
Parr, Joy. Sensing Changes: Technologies, Environments, and the Everyday, 1953–2003. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010.
Perks, Robert and Alistair Thomson, eds. The Oral History Reader. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge, 2016.
Portelli, Alessandro. “What Makes Oral History Different.” In The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories; Form and Meaning in Oral History, 45–58. New York: State University of New York Press, 1991.
Riley, Mark and David Harvey. “Oral Histories, Farm Practice and Uncovering Meaning in the Countryside.” Social & Cultural Geography 8, no. 3 (June 2007): 391–415.
Ritchie, Donald A., ed. The Oxford Handbook of Oral History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Robertson, Hugh and Tara McGee. “Applying Local Knowledge: The Contribution of Oral History to Wetland Rehabilitation at Kanyapella Basin, Australia.” Journal of Environmental Management 69, no. 3 (November 2003): 275–87.
Robin, Libby and Tom Griffiths. “Environmental History in Australasia.” Environment and History 10, no. 4 (November 2004): 439–74.
Rossi, Leena. “Oral History and Individual Environmental Experience.” In Thinking through the Environment: Green Approaches to Global History, edited by Timo Myllyntaus, 137–55. Cambridge: The White Horse Press, 2011.
Sanders, A. Oral Histories Documenting Changes in Wheatbelt Wetlands, Occasional Paper 2/91, 2/91. Como: Department of Conservation and Land Management, 1991.
Schultz, Mark R. “Conversations with Farmers: Oral History for Agricultural Historians.” Agricultural History 90, no. 1 (Winter 2016): 51–69.
Scott, A. “The Ecology of the Tuggerah Lakes: An Oral history.” Technical Report 40/98. Canberra: CSIRO Land and Water, 1998.
Setten, Gunhild. “Farming the Heritage: On the Production and Construction of a Personal and Practised Landscape Heritage.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 11, no. 1 (January 2005): 67–79.
Sinclair, Paul. The Murray: A River and Its People. Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 2001.
Storrie, A.M., ed. Integrated Weed Management in Australian Cropping Systems. Kingston: Grains Research and Development Corporation, 2014. https://grdc.com.au/~/media/DBEC6B817E9942DFBD86C0706E2EBB35.pdf [accessed 3 Feb 2017].
Thomson, Alistair. “Memory and Remembering in Oral History.” In The Oxford Handbook of Oral History, edited by Donald A. Ritchie, 77–95. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Thomson, Alistair. Moving Stories: An Intimate History of Four Women Across Two Countries. Kensington: University of New South Wales Press, 2011.
Thompson, Paul. “Wivenhoe Landscapes Remembered: From a Working River to Romanticized Nature.” In Place, Writing, and Voice in Oral History, edited by Shelley Trower, 107–26. Palgrave Studies in Oral History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Tittensor, Ruth. From Peat Bog to Conifer Forest: An Oral History of Whitelee, Its Community and Landscape. West Sussex: Packard Publishing, 2009.
Trower, Shelley, ed. Place, Writing, and Voice in Oral History. Palgrave Studies in Oral History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Walker, Melissa. Southern Farmers and Their Stories: Memory and Meaning in Oral History. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2006.
White, Richard. “Are You An Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?” In Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, edited by William Cronon, 171–85. New York: WW Norton & Co., 1995.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Twigg, K. (2017). “Another Weed Will Come Along”: Attitudes to Weeds, Land and Community in the Victorian Mallee. In: Holmes, K., Goodall, H. (eds) Telling Environmental Histories. Palgrave Studies in World Environmental History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63772-3_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63772-3_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-63771-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-63772-3
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)