1914
A tract of country with a frontage of some 420 miles to the river and reaching some 20 miles back, rising generally from the river bank save where in places flats subject to frequent inundations were covered with really splendid forests of redgum. Some few thousand acres of the frontage were lightly timbered or covered with the bluebush, but generally over the whole area the mallee scrub reigned supreme. It had been a hard time in the Mallee country, and the rabbits had marvellously increased; grass there was none; miserable sheep were dying all round; the parched stranger on the weary horse riding through the country heard nothing but the dry rustle of the mallee leaves, saw nothing but the dull glistening foliage, the red sand driving, the starved sheep perishing, the rabbits skipping about (sustaining life in some incomprehensible manner), and the innumerable ants. The dingo howled by night, the villain crow croaked dismally by day, and the only tolerable spot in the broad area of hopelessness and misery was the little irrigated garden at the homestead on the river . . . Yet here were men prepared to provide such pumping plants as had not before been seen in Australia, and to establish, indeed, a township, a city, and a colony in the heart of that howling wilderness. Was it a marvel that a murmur of madness went all through the Mallee country, and that folks who had lived or existed there for thirty years looked on incredulous or aghast? They did not understand that knowledge begotten of experience was at length come into the land. Now there are 11,500 acres under irrigated culture, yielding a return of close upon £400,000 a year, with a population of over 7,000 persons.
The Story of the Mallee, A.S. Kenyon, Melbourne, 1929 (Reprinted from the Victorian
Historical Magazine, Vol. 4, No. 2, Dec. 1914)