Conclusion: “Just a ‘Bloody Duststorm’?”

Abstract

This conclusion describes how each of the chapters of this book have tracked the circulation of the “dust bowl” idea in World War Two and early post-war Australian print, film, broadcast, and rhetorical narratives. It describes how together, these chapters examine the political influences behind the proliferation of a vast collection of highly dramatic transnational “dust bowl” imagery. To help, as he writes from the dust-laden battlefields of the Middle East not long after the fall of Singapore, in 1942, Australian pastoralist and soil conservationist Jock Pick is reintroduced. The conclusion summarizes the impact and the meaning of the US national narratives of the Dust Bowl, the TVA, and the dams of the US Bureau of Reclamation, to World War Two and early post-war Australia.

Jock Pick (AIF), “Dust-Storm and Bedouri,” Chronicle (Adelaide, SA: 1895–1954) May 7, 1942