I went on a 4 day photo trip into the South Australian Mallee with Gilbert Roe last week.  We travelled on the Karoonda Highway to Loxton, camped  Monday to Thursday in the caravan park by the River Murray and   made individual day trips south  into Mallee country from our base. The season of the lazy hazy autumn days  finally finished whilst  when we were camping at Loxton. It rained quite a lot on the first couple of nights we we’re there.

I explored along the Stott Highway, which runs from Loxton to Swan Reach,   wandering along unsealed  roads that ran east west  in  the  Wunkar, Mantung,   Galga and Wanbi  region.   I’d briefly checked out this area  on a recent day trip,   and I wanted to explore  the  area around Mantung  in greater depth. This is limestone country. It is very dry and quite harsh, as very little rainfall recharges  the underlying limestone aquifer.  The main recharge is rainfall in south western Victoria and the water  slowly moves in a north westerly direction via  Pinnaroo and Murrayville towards Loxton and  the River Murray, which acts as a drain for all the aquifers in the Murray Basin.

As the slow moving underground water moves through the limestone aquifer  it dissolves soluble salts  and becomes increasingly saline. Some of the biggest salt loads to the River Murray come from the Mallee Region–due to land clearing — whilst the future increases in the salt load into the river  can be lessened through changes in agriculture in the dryland areas of the Mallee Region.  Changes means increased revegetation, but conservation farming practices had not been widely adopted across the region, and so there is soil degradation,  surface soil loss, rising water tables  and increased erosion. The CSIRO ’s climate change research forecasts a dramatic rise in extreme weather events such as droughts and heatwaves, and a sharp drop in winter and spring rainfall across southern Australia.

The area I was in is on the western edge of the limestone aquifer and it  was  a region of drylands farming that has been deeply impacted by the drought in the first decade of the 21st century.     I’d spent most of  the  day   on Wednesday and Thursday photographing,  and I hardly saw one car and a tractor in a field on each day.This part of the South Australia Mallee is an empty landscape. It has been de-populated. The farms are increasingly corporate as a result of the  process of amalgamation of small holdings  and people live in Loxton and travel to work on the farm each day. The commute is about 30 minutes. 

An example of the  process of depopulation in this landscape the East Murray  Area School, which  used to have around 270 pupils in the 1960s and  now it has 19 pupils.   The schools future would have to be  in doubt as the farmers in the region are in their 50’s and 60’s and the children leave the area for better jobs and higher  income. People leave rural areas and small towns because technological and economic changes in the rural sector have brought about fewer employment opportunities, which in turn has led to a reduced need for goods and services and even fewer employment opportunities.