Farmer Bill Monahan talks to Robyn Ballinger about past droughts on the northern plains of Victoria.

Like other Victorian rural areas, the rural population of the Patho Plains is decreasing. When landowners move out of the district, they take a wealth of historical knowledge and experience with them.

The Patho Plains Oral History Project was developed to capture the historical knowledge of farmers and landowners to better understand the changing landscape. These interviews and photographs form part of that project.

Further Information

Patho Plains Oral History interview excerpt 12: Bill Monahan

AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

ROBYN BALLINGER: But in the past, you've...

BILL MONAHAN: Yeah, well, I became an accountant. During the 1940s... We hear abouall this last 10 years or 15 years of drought and whatever, northern Victoria and the Mallee and whatever, in the 1940s, when I was a teenager, a kid just left school, virtually, that was a far worse drought.

ROBYN: Yes.

BILL: A far worse drought as far as the effect on people. There used to be people on 600 acres, that sort of thing. After the 1940s and the war, lack of manpower and that sort of thing, the place was bereft of people, and they've never come back.

ROBYN: Mmm. Mmm. Mmm.

BILL: Never come back. We used to go to school up here. 22 children used to go to the school up here down in Terrick South, a mixture of grades up to eight grades, and now... There's not even a school in Mitiamo, to my knowledge. But that's how the country was devastated because of the droughts and poor years in the 1940s. And they had, to my mind, a far worse effect, but on the other hand, now there's different farming techniques and people do things differently, so that would have reduced the likelihood of it being as bad as it was in the 1940s.

ROBYN: Sure. Sure.

BILL: And Mitiamo, I used to go - just to get a little bit of pocket money - go fruit-picking for four or five weeks up to Swan Hill. I remember going from Mitiamo to Swan Hill and you have dust storms and all that sort of thing, sheets of galvanised iron on the fence lines to keep the dust from blowing over the railway line, all that sort of caper, and that was a real... You know, that was par for the course, and you have a dust storm and you couldn't see. In the drought, one of our neighbours lost 1,500 sheep in one night.

ROBYN: Wow.

BILL: It was the result of a cold snap. Anyhow, but that hasn't been repeated like that.

ROBYN: No, no.

BILL: And that's what makes me... I'm a little bit of a sceptic as far as climate change is concerned.