THE current drought is the worst on record since European settlement; even worse than the much-vaunted Federation drought from 1895 to 1903.
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The Federation drought is etched into my family's history. My father, born in 1891, told the story of having to pull the thatch off farm outhouses to feed the stock on their hay farm on the Adelaide plains at Pooraka.
My mother's family's property was at Hallett, inside the Goyder line, on the edge of the lower Flinders Ranges, not all that far from the famous Collinsville Stud in the semi-arid zone.
OTHER RECENT ECO NEWS COLUMNS:
Both the Goldneys' and McDonalds' reporting on the Federation drought described devastating losses of wildlife, dead rabbits and stock everywhere, completely bare paddocks, massive dust storms and bushfires, and abandoned small townships and settlements, some buried in shifting sand.
Goyder was the famous South Australian Surveyor-General who drew a line on the map in 1865 that separated reliable rainfall and dryland farming country from the arid zone.
Goyder produced Australia's first predictive climate model and staked his reputation on it. He gathered his data on horseback, racking up more than 5000 miles, using just his very observant eyes.
Some wetter than usual years post-1861 caused some South Australians to ridicule Goyder and farmers moved east of the Goyder line to farm.
Within four decades, these science-denying farmers would all literally walk away from their "farming" properties when rainfall returned to normal arid zone patterns.
As children, we visited these abandoned properties - one- or two-room stone cottages with galvanised iron roofs, whitewashed calico ceilings, rough wooden tables with tablecloth and crockery and cutlery still on the table, a Coolgardie Safe in the kitchen corner.
The occupants walked out and left their meagre possessions behind.
The Bathurst district still bears reminders of the Federation drought - the large and deep gullies that are prevalent in the landscape.
When we arrived in Bathurst in 1972, we attended the Methodist Church in William Street.
I talked with older farmers about the Federation drought and one told me, in haunting words: "We woke up one morning following drought-breaking rains and our floodplains had disappeared overnight."
That farmer's name now escapes me, but he was describing the sudden collapse of the common swampy meadow systems that once drove mega-production in our farming landscapes, producing our many gully systems.
The current drought is not a matter of "we have always had droughts" - but more on that in a future article.
