Paper short abstract:

Intermittent severe drought is a feature of the south eastern Australian climate. Using long term farm diaries to understand adaptation to drought, this paper explores farmers’ resilience and change in response to climate variability in the past, suggesting insights for future climatic events.

Paper long abstract:

Intermittent, severe drought is a feature of the south-eastern Australian climate. In the past 150 years alone, this region has experienced eleven serious droughts. Drought has shaped the soil, vegetation and animals, shadows communities and holds an iconographic place in Australian identity. Its social, economic and emotional impact is profound, but its recurrence and persistence has meant that people have, in the long term, found ways to adapt. How have they done this?

'Slow catastrophes' explores the deliberate, creative and at times surprising strategies people have used to adapt to drought from the 1870s to the 1940s. It focuses on farmers and graziers in south eastern Australia who are amongst the people most profoundly impacted by climatic extremes. Long term farm diaries, some spanning over fifty years, reveal the way farmers have responded before and after, as well as during drought. They provide a window into cultural, social and agricultural change over time and, from this, a rich picture of the lived experience of adaptation to climatic extremes emerges. The way people understood drought and integrated it into their lives, their actions and their physical and emotional responses promoted and hindered proactive responses to drought.

This environmental history applies sociological, psychological and socio-ecological ideas of resilience to explore responses to drought through social historical sources. It contributes insights into the process of resilience to environmental events in the past 150 years and suggests ideas for responding to drought in the present and future.