Thwarting Imperial Agricultural Development: The Spectre of Drifting Sands, 1800s–1920s

Abstract

Desert and spreading sands represented the antithesis of all that settlement promised. They were terrible, un-Christian, an evil to be remedied. Threatening not only settler economies, they also made a mockery of Christian injunctions to make land fertile, to turn land to productive use. Destroying productive land through deforestation, as previous chapters noted, impelled conservation and tree planting as well as the establishment of forest bureaucracies in some parts of South Asia and Australasia. Evidence that human activities were literally creating desert by encouraging sand drift elicited a similar language of fear. Officials and individuals viewed spreading sand as an ‘evil’ imperilling fertile plains and prosperity, but believed that environmental redemption could follow through well-organised reclamation. Acknowledging the role of humans in deforesting or overstocking coastal and inland areas, initiatives involved local measures—and occasionally legislation—undertaken by private individuals and local bodies. By the twentieth century, fears of sand drift contributed to the extension of state bureaucratic, legal and scientific solutions (not invariably successful) to meet a range of environmental anxieties. While couched as a response to concerns about the loss of agricultural land, most successful sand drift reclamation actually took place in urban areas, which had a higher rating value.

Ascending one of the sand ridges I saw a numberless succession of these terrific objects rising above each other to the east and west of me … The scene was awfully fearful, dear Charlotte. A kind of dread came over me as I gazed upon it. It looked like the entrance to hell.¹

Charles Sturt

Private owners … would only be too glad … if they could discover some cheap and easy method of converting the desert into a Garden of Eden.²

F. Codrington-Ball, 1894