Rebecca Jones: Slow Catastrophes: living with drought in Australia
Tuesday 28 May 2019 8pm
Camberwell Library Meeting Room
340 Camberell Road, Camberwell
All Welcome
Rebecca Jones is an historian of climate, the environment, rural health and wellbeing. She has published widely in environmental history, drought history, organic farming and gardening as well as rural mental and emotional health. She has worked at the Australian National University and Monash University as well as for Museum Victoria, Heritage Hill Museum, Heritage Victoria, Australian Heritage Commission, community groups and local government.
Her book Slow Catastrophes: Living With Drought in Australia deals with one of the biggest issues of our times. Climate change scenarios suggest that in the next fifty years global warming will increase both the frequency and severity of these phenomena. As Rebecca Jones reveals in this sensitive account of families living on the land, the story of drought in this driest continent is as much about resilience, adaptation, strength of community, ingenious planning for and creative responses to persistent absences of rainfall. The histories of eight farming families, from the 1870s to the 1950s, focus on private lives and inner thoughts, revealed by personal diaries. The story is brought up to the present with the author’s discussions with contemporary farmers and pastoralists.