RESEARCH ARTICLE Perceptions of ‘normal’ climate in Queensland, Australia (1924–34) Margaret Cook Post-thesis fellow, University of Queensland Email: mcookhistory@gmail.com Abstract The concept of ‘normal’ climatic conditions reflects the complexities of human understandings of the environment. Scholarship on settler societies has explored how culture, science and state imperatives com- bine to construct a notion of ‘normal’ climate. This study of the Callide Valley settlement (1924–34) in northern Australia, draws on government propaganda, farmers’ submissions to a 1934 government inquiry and meteorological data to reveal the discrepancy between rainfall reality and expectations. Promised fer- tile soil, plentiful water and an ideal climate by the government, new settlers flocked to the Callide Valley, many without farming experience or knowledge of the region’s subtropical climate. Drought and flood soon challenged the promises of a bountiful climate. These confused understandings of a normal climate continue today to shape agriculture in central Queensland. Introduction The lands in the Callide Valley in central Queensland, Australia ‘offer one of the most excellent chances for closer settlement in the State’, declared W. Gordon Graham, Queensland’s Under Secretary for Lands in 1919. He added, ‘with a fair rainfall’, these lands ‘would grow practically anything’, providing farms for ‘hundreds of families’ and he urged the immediate adoption of a land settlement scheme. 1 This rhetoric typified the government’s Callide Valley promotional material that assured potential settlers of a reliable climate and agricultural success. Yet, as the Gangula Nation people had known for centuries, this land has a subtropical climate; variability, and not reliability, its characteristic. Closer settlement schemes in Australia have a long history, beginning in the 1860s. Scholars, focusing largely on South Australia and Victoria, 2 have identified how misunderstandings of climate contributed to their general pattern of failure as agriculture moved to marginal land. By comparison, the Callide Valley scheme was a latecomer, offering the opportunity to learn from past errors. 3 Modifications were made – rail and road preceded settlement; leasehold land was broadly categorised into first- and second-class grazing or agricultural properties; credit or loans were provided by the state to provide capital and experimental farms offered scientific knowledge. What remained was the optimism and environmental naivety characteristic of all closer settle- ments. Victoria’s temperate and South Australia’s arid and semi-arid climates had been found wanting. Queensland’s subtropical land had yet to be tested for its margin of agriculture and per- haps advocates believed (ignorantly or willfully) that it would not be found. But despite the state supplying capital, engineering and science, here too unreliable rainfall plagued the settlement. Settlers had yet to accept what George Goyder, South Australia’s Surveyor General, knew in the 1860s, that seasonal reliability and not averages was the true climatic measure and indicator of agricultural success. 4 © Cambridge University Press 2019 Rural History (2020), 31, 63–77 doi:10.1017/S0956793319000219 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956793319000219 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 207.241.231.83, on 07 Nov 2020 at 16:38:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at