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“Another Weed Will Come Along”: Attitudes to Weeds, Land and Community in the Victorian Mallee

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Telling Environmental Histories

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in World Environmental History ((PSWEH))

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Abstract

This chapter investigates three common ‘narratives’ that farmers in the Victorian Mallee tell about their relationship with weeds. I explore a key concern of environmental history: how has this seemingly natural world been shaped by the images, words and ideas that humans bring to it? A subject as deceptively simple as weeds can carry a host of meanings, colouring approaches to weed control and broader responses to the non-human world. Particular attitudes lead to particular actions, in turn creating particular ecological landscapes. In the face of the tendency to conflate the subtleties of human-nature interactions in agricultural communities into one dominant narrative, oral testimony allows a more nuanced picture of adaptation and adjustment, overtly shaped by family, community, inter-generational history and the lived experience of farming the land.

This work was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship. I would like to thank participants in the 2015 “Telling Environmental Histories” workshop in Melbourne for their careful consideration and discussion of an early version of this article. I am also grateful to Professor Katie Holmes for invaluable comment and suggestions on successive drafts.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia

    Karen Twigg

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  1. Karen Twigg
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Correspondence to Karen Twigg .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Archaeology and History, La Trobe University, Bundoora, VIC, Australia

    Katie Holmes

  2. School of Communications, University of Technology Sydney, Broadway, NSW, Australia

    Heather Goodall

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Twigg, K. (2017). “Another Weed Will Come Along”: Attitudes to Weeds, Land and Community in the Victorian Mallee. In: Holmes, K., Goodall, H. (eds) Telling Environmental Histories. Palgrave Studies in World Environmental History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63772-3_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63772-3_9

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-63772-3

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