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Farmers, Government, and The Environment: The Settlement of Australia’s ‘Wet Frontier’, 1870–1920
Author(s) -
Frost Warwick
Publication year - 1997
Publication title -
australian economic history review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.493
H-Index - 16
eISSN - 1467-8446
pISSN - 0004-8992
DOI - 10.1111/aehr.371002
Subject(s) - frontier , redress , settlement (finance) , agriculture , government (linguistics) , natural resource economics , agricultural economics , geography , economics , political science , archaeology , finance , linguistics , philosophy , law , payment
Historical studies of Australian agriculture have tended to concentrate on the difficulties of farming in a dry environment. The extension of farming into high–rainfall, densely forested regions (what I term the wet frontier ) has been almost completely overlooked. This article is an attempt to redress this imbalance. It concentrates on the settlement of the wet frontier between 1870 and 1920. Up to about 1890 settlement was slow and often unsuccessful because of the high cost of forest clearance, environmental problems, deficiencies in transport, and government hostility and indifference. However, after 1890 increased demand for butter and improvement in dairy production technology transformed the wet frontier into a highly productive agricultural region.