The Road from Coorain Read Free

prosper on the plains except where pockets of heavy soil and low-lying land allowed for more luxuriant grass and the reliable saltbush. They, too, were bred to calve in the spring, nursed through their first summer, and then shipped away to some richer land where they could be fattened for the butcher. The calculus of risk in raising them was simple. It might not rain enough in the winter to produce the long grass they required. If it did not, the cows would be only marginally fertile, their calves stunted, and few would survive the heat of summer. Those that did would be less valuable because of the scrawny muscles builtranging long distances to find nourishment. They would be sold to meat canners at a marginal price. Moreover, in their struggle for life they would degrade the land in one progression of seasons. Sometimes the saltbush they chewed to the roots did not return for decades. Sometimes the land eroded so badly that the treasured saltbush was gone for good. No matter how one planned to coax an increase from the land, it was a gamble in which the odds could suddenly change drastically.
    The first generation of settlers took up vast tracts of land. Two hundred and fifty thousand acres, three hundred thousand, half a million acres; such tracts allowed an owner to graze thirty to forty thousand sheep, and a good-sized herd of cattle, while still possessing some room to rotate the grazing of the flocks and herds. Wool was light in relation to its value, easy to transport to distant markets, and after the invention of refrigeration, meat was also a profitable export to densely populated Europe. Those who planned their enterprises well grew rich enough to see out the lean years of losses or low earnings during recurring cycles of drought. Even so, many gambled on the wrong hunches about the seasons, and saw their lands fall into the hands of the land and finance companies who had been their bankers and mercantile agents. As much as forty percent of the plains was held by banks and land companies after the great drought of the 1890s and the fearful agricultural depression which accompanied it. There it remained until after 1900, when politicians in the newly federated Australia had to wrestle with the concentration of land ownership. One of the recurring themes in Australian political life was the longing of the landless for the independence of the family farm, and their hatred for the privilege they saw accruing to the owners of huge grazing properties. While the nature of the land and the economics of its exploitation required large holdings and considerable capital investment, voters clung to the myth that small-scale farming was possible and they regularly elected state governments committed to breaking up and reallocating large holdings. By 1914, much of the richer land in more fertileand well-watered areas had been broken up into smaller holdings, and all that remained were the great grazing leases on the western plains. In 1919, a grateful country turned to allocating land from these leases to the soldiers who had made the Australian name legendary for valor during the First World War.
    In 1919, land and grazing was the traditional source of wealth for a nation which had achieved one of the highest per capita incomes in the world from the growth and export of wool and wheat. Land ownership was the principal source of status. Families that had grown rich in commerce progressed quickly to the life of gentlemen farmers. The large acreages of graziers carried more status than the struggling family farms of wheat farmers. The work of the grazier might be lonely and arduous, but he was seen as living life on a heroic scale, while the settled life of the wheat farmer returned less profit and seemed domestic and lacking in adventure. The great sheep and cattle stud properties where the best bloodlines were preserved and the greatest breeding animals were carefully tended carried the names of ancient great estates in England