Abstract
This book is set in and specifically relates to Northern Australia, but it is not a story of Northern Australia. It is a story of the people who both live and farm there, and their resilience strategies to cope with the region’s inherent social and physical uncertainties. A dominant agricultural paradigm operates in Australia (and many other parts of the developed world) that is in keeping with Descartes insistence that facts and values must be kept in separate worlds, and so agricultural discussions are often in the context of facts, figures, yields, production schedules, contribution to GDP, seasonal forecasts and return on investment. Talk of humanity in agriculture is often missing or discounted to a subheading, particularly when new development is the focus. This is social research and as such stands at the intersection of a number of disciplines in an attempt to ground individuals, and the events that affect them, into the broader social context of humanity.
The question of questions for mankind – the problem which underlies all others, and is more deeply interesting than any other – is the ascertainment of the place which Man occupies in nature and of his relations to the universe of things.
Huxley (1863)
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Notes
- 1.
A vignette (written on a vine leaf) in literature means a short impressionistic scene which gives particular insight into a character, idea or setting. Here, the vignettes are differentiated from the main body of text by different font and line spacing.
- 2.
Around 1.3 million people – or 5% of Australians – live in the north (ABS 2015).
- 3.
An often used but loosely defined term, increasingly associated with community and individual response to adversity, and which will be considered at length in this book.
- 4.
The United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction defines disaster as a ‘serious disruption of a community or a societies functioning, causing widespread human, material, economic and/or environmental losses which exceed the ability of the affected community or society to cope using its own resources’ (ISDR 2006, p. 5).
- 5.
Rambutan (Nephelium lappaceum) is the fruit of a medium-sized tropical tree in the family Sapindaceae, native to the Malay-Indonesian regions of tropical Southeast Asia.
- 6.
A Western Australian Aboriginal Corporation.
- 7.
In June 2011, the Federal Government suspended live cattle exports from Australia to Indonesia following the ABC’s Four Corners programme on 30 May 2011 showing brutal slaughtering methods and mistreatment of cattle inside an Indonesian abattoir. While the ban lasted less than a month, its impacts continue to affect the beef industry today through a combination of narrowed market options compounded by drought conditions across much of Northern Australia. The unexpected market loss and resulting price plummet confused established drought management strategies of producers, and the impact of the ban extended to beef producers far beyond those directly dependent on the live export trade.
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Noble, K., Dennis, T., Larkins, S. (2019). Agriculture as a Human Endeavour. In: Agriculture and Resilience in Australia’s North. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8355-7_1
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