Triumph over a dry, hot and often infertile land. Australia’s farmers have overcome difficult terrain and the tyranny of distance to make the country an important food bowl. This is the story of 200-plus years of ups and downs - savage droughts and daunting challenges but also the triumphs of irrigation and imagination and inventiveness. "The story of the white man's and white woman's heroic attempt to plant European civilisation in the inhospitable bush of Australia ... Robin Bromby is good on the story of the selectors, the closer settlers and the soldier settlers ... Bromby understands and sympathises with the man on the land" (Manning Clark, The National Times.)"This book should dispel the myth ... that farming this country is an easy task" (The Countryman)"Fascinating book, a must" (Western Farmer and Grazier) "Probably the best aspect of this book is its treatment of social history, where it provides an excellent insight into just what farm life was like during the vicissitudes of nearly 200 years" - Peter Austin, The Sydney Morning Herald (reviewing the 1986 edition) This is just one of many colourful anecdotes in my book:Drovers were not usually the kind of people to keep a record of their lives or feats, but one who did was Alexander Buchanan. With seven others, he set out from Sydney to take sheep overland to South Australia as a speculation. Buchanan kept a detailed diary of the trip, and it provides a wonderful record of early overlanding. They set out from Sydney on 11 July 1839. After five days, one of the drovers (an ex-convict) had run away and a man had to be on guard all night to watch for bushrangers. The country was well populated by mounted police, mainly to hunt down those bushrangers. Six miles from Goulburn they passed a chain gang of 200 men making a new road. After riding through Yass they had to make their way along an unformed track, the road going no farther. Each day began early as the horses had to be rounded up; they were hobbled each night to prevent their taking long steps, but even so they could stray for two miles in search of feed. On 26 July the men were up at daybreak but it took until nine o'clock for them to find all the saddle horses. The drays set out an hour earlier. After Yass the journey became even slower as the cart-horses had to be let out to feed in the middle of the day, the stop being made wherever there was grazing, there being no longer any commercial stables to provide feed. At Howe's property on the Murrumbidgee (the same property from which John Hepburn had set out for Port Phillip Bay three years earlier) the young entre­preneurs collected their 4,023 sheep for the journey to South Australia. An unhappy experiment: that was soldier settlement scheme after the Great War where, partly to avoid large numbers of ex-servicemen becoming unemployed after the war, Crown land was divided up into farms that were (mostly) too small to be economic. The endeavour to create a new class of small farmers was probably the most short-sighted, not to say stupid, aspect of the whole soldier settlement episode. Putting inexperienced people on the land had been tried before in Australia, and had failed miserably. Failure was an inbuilt element of the whole scheme and, even if all the men had been hard working, skilled and practical farmers, they could still not have succeeded. Robin Bromby is a journalist, author and publisher. He operated a small publishing company in the 1980s, set up after a book idea was rejected by several publishers (that one went on to go through five editions). But, subsequently, he also had titles issued by mainstream publishers, including Doubleday, Simon & Schuster and Lothian Books. Robin began as a cadet journalist in 1962 with The Dominion, the morning paper in Wellington, New Zealand. He also worked for the NZ Broadcasting Corporation, TV1, the South China Morning Post, The Herald (Melbourne), the Sunday Times (Wellington), The National Times (Sydney) and, since 1988, he has been first a staff reporter and now columnist for The Australian. Books now available via Amazon from Highgate Publishing are "German Raiders of the South Seas", "Australian Railways: Their Life and Times", and "The Farming of Australia".