MalleeCountry tells the powerful history of mallee lands and people acrosssouthern Australia from Deep Time to the present. Carefully shaped and managedby Aboriginal people for over 50,000 years, mallee country was dramaticallytransformed by settlers, first with sheep and rabbits, then by flattening andburning the mallee to make way for wheat. Government backed settlement schemesdevastated lives and country, but some farmers learnt how to survive thedroughts, dust storms, mice, locusts and salinity - as well as the vagaries ofinternational markets - to become some of Australia's most resilientagriculturalists. In mallee country, innovation and tenacity have beenneighbours to hardship and failure. MalleeCountry is a story of how land and people shape each other. It is thestory of how a landscape once derided by settlers as a 'howling wilderness'covered in 'dismal scrub' became home to citizens who delighted in mallee faunaand flora, and fought to conserve it for future generations. And it is thestory of the dreams, sweat and sorrows of people who face an uncertain futureof depopulation and climate change with creativity and hope. '.

a rich compendium that exposes the roots of many callous policies that continue state-sanctioned assaults on people and ecosystems. As tales of mass fish death, of drought-relief packages, and of billions of dollars allocated to dams and pipelines inundate the news, Mallee Country is a sobering reminder that we've seen it before. What is different now is the scale and urgency of the problems. Mallee Country is an urgent environmental history for these troubled times. As the authors forewarn, the super-imposition of rapid climate change will bring longer-term and wider-reaching consequences to the Mallee.Mallee Country can be read as a history for the future; a warning of what happens when we forget to remember.' -- Lilian Pearce, Australian Book Review.