Mixed Blessings: Narratives of Inheritance in Farming and Writing

In this paper I suggest a focus on previous generations' experience of inheritance within the natural world for its relevance to environmental devastation and climate change. Schlunke combines what he knows of First Nations society and economy with enumerating species decline and land degradation inflicted by European agriculture-by his own rapacious and hypocritical colonists: Schlunke himself, as farmer, was responding to damage caused by persistent ploughing and overstocking in the Riverina, seeing local wind and water erosion adding to the vast dust storms that swept across eastern Australia in the 1940s (Speirs 144; Henzell 128). In 'A House in the Country' he referred again to Indigenous care while somewhat parodying his own views and practices through his farmer character, Alec Salter: Briefly, [Salter's] idea was that the less you did to your land the better, that the whole secret of success lay in doing none of the things that were standard farming practice, and that the quickest road to national ruin was to follow the recommendations of the leading agricultural scientists.