By Ed Thexton
IN 1983, I quit work and took a year to learn more about ecology at Roseworthy Agricultural College in South Australia, then celebrating its centenary year. Natural resources management rather than agricultural production was my preferred study, and my thesis was about trees on farms.
Remember 1983? The defining moment of the drought was the dust storm that blacked out Melbourne, followed on February 16 by the Ash Wednesday bushfires that swept from Adelaide through Victoria.
On February 17 I drove to South Australia. It was still hot, and I cooked the motor of my tiny Mazda 1000 ute at Talem Bend and hitch hiked through the ravaged Adelaide hills to begin my studies.
For a farm boy from the high rainfall Yarra Valley, the flat windswept wheat and sheep farms, in the driest, most cleared state in the world’s driest continent, were a shock.
IN 1983, I quit work and took a year to learn more about ecology at Roseworthy Agricultural College in South Australia, then celebrating its centenary year. Natural resources management rather than agricultural production was my preferred study, and my thesis was about trees on farms.
Remember 1983? The defining moment of the drought was the dust storm that blacked out Melbourne, followed on February 16 by the Ash Wednesday bushfires that swept from Adelaide through Victoria.
On February 17 I drove to South Australia. It was still hot, and I cooked the motor of my tiny Mazda 1000 ute at Talem Bend and hitch hiked through the ravaged Adelaide hills to begin my studies.
For a farm boy from the high rainfall Yarra Valley, the flat windswept wheat and sheep farms, in the driest, most cleared state in the world’s driest continent, were a shock.