- 366 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
Notions of an arcadian farming life permeate settler-Australian understandings of themselves and their nation. Qualities of hard work, perseverance, resourcefulness, and a steady devotion to family and communityâthe historian John Hirst's Pioneer Legendâare idealised in this nation. But the people from whom the legend is derived have rarely been studied in depth. They are more the stuff of myth and fond imagining than of concerted examination. To what extent is the legend built on lived experience? How have farming people thought of themselves and their contribution to a wider national mythos? 'We are a farming class' examines the lives of people in the farmlands surrounding Dubbo in the New South Wales central west between the 1870s and the 1950s, from free selection and the establishment of agriculture to the dawning of postwar prosperity and change. What emerges is a closely documented, ethnographically rich portrait of a way of life and culture at once distinctive and surprising, recognisable and unknown.
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Information
Table of contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of figures
- Abbreviations
- Conversions and conventions
- Prologue
- Introduction
- 1. âPoor struggling menâ: The slow emergence of a farming class to 1880
- 2. âAnd we are shunned and out in the coldâ: Schools and the making of community and class
- 3. âMaking a poor man poorerâ: Credit and debt
- 4. âA decent sort of a chapâ: Farmers and labour, 1880â1930
- 5. âThe farmers have been most loyalâ: Political allegiance in the farmlands
- 6. âTethered to the worldâ: Transport, communication and imagining the farmlands
- 7. âAll thoughts of depression were banishedâ: Voluntary associations and the making of social spaces and communities
- 8. âThe tales of the pioneers are toldâ: The place of the past in local consciousness
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index