Uncertainty and the emotional landscape of drought

Abstract

Drought is the most ubiquitous climatic phenomenon in Australia, and the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were decades of particularly frequent and persistent drought in south-eastern Australia. While the financial and environmental cost of drought has been well documented by historians, less attention has been paid to the emotional landscape of drought. These effects share much with other types of environmental adversity; however, droughts are slow catastrophes that generate a particularly profound level of uncertainty. This paper explores emotional responses to drought from the 1890s to the 1940s as well as some of the ways in which people coped with and attempted to ameliorate these emotions. I argue that drought elicits a wide range of emotions, but that the dominant experience of drought and the source of many of these emotions was uncertainty, provoked by the particularly ambivalent, incremental character of drought. Farmers are, arguably, the group whose well-being depends most directly on climate extremes and are therefore the group upon which I will focus this paper. Personal sources such as diaries and correspondence provide a window into the lived experience of drought and a rich picture of the emotional landscape of settler-colonisers in Australia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.