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In the 1890s agricultural settlers moved into the Victorian Mallee, an area characterized by low rainfall and a deep-rooted eucalyptus mallee scrub. By rolling, cutting, and burning this scrub, large areas could be rapidly brought under cereal crops. The key to success on this agricultural frontier was cheap land and the cropping of broad acres using labor-saving cultivation and harvesting machinery. From the 1890s to the early 1920s, settlers successfully farmed the southern regions of the Mallee. In the 1920s settlement pushed north into drier regions, but settlers were allocated blocks too small to be viable, and in the 1930s world commodity prices collapsed. From 1938 to 1944 settlers across the Mallee experienced a run of very dry years, and dust storms became a feature of Mallee life. Government intervention resulted in the consolidation of blocks, which enabled settlers to less intensively cultivate their land and to combine cropping with sheep farming. Government research encouraged new methods of cultivation in the 1940s to arrest sand drift.

The last agricultural frontier in the Australian state of Victoria, the Mallee, was opened up for settlement in the four decades from 1890 to 1930. Located in the northwest of the state, the Mallee before European settlement was an area of dense eucalyptus woodlands with low and often unreliable rainfall (Figure 1). The first two decades of Mallee settlement took place during a period of rapid change in Australian agriculture. New techniques of wheat/sheep farming, developed in the earlier settled Wimmera and Northern Plains, increased crop yields and farm profitability and encouraged settlers to take up farms in the southern Mallee. In these two decades this model of broad-acre wheat/ sheep farming was challenged by a long-held belief-largely emanating from Victoria's capital, Melbourne-that the state should be populated by yeomen farmers, intensely cultivating small farms and producing horticultural and dairying commodities. Under this yeoman model, large pastoral properties were compulsorily acquired by the state and large investment was made in dams and water reticulation infrastructure. In the years before World War I, "closer settlers" were encouraged to take up small estates. The rural optimism of closer settlement was extended after the war with the settlement of the northern and northwestern areas of the Mallee, often with returned soldiers financed...

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