The world is a âdust bowl.â Or so it seemed in the 1930s and 1940s, when official and unofficial reports, films, photographs, newspaper stories, illustrated books and magazines, and radio programs around the world described wind erosion and water erosion of the soil as a menace to civilization creating âdust bowlsâ that could bring national downfall, even human extinction without effective conservation programs in place. This was not the first time there had ever been heightened concern over severe soil erosion. However, âdust bowlâ stories were inspired by the ecological catastrophe of the US Dust Bowl, which during the 1930s, produced some of the worst dust storms in recorded history. With it came an increasing concern over the problem of accelerated soil erosion and âdust bowlâ stories. These were generated by New Deal federal agencies focused on innovative social reform under the leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR), President from 1933 to 1945. 1 It was from 1931 that economic, environmental, social, and technological forces combined to create severe soil erosion, leading to frequent severe dust storms across 97 million acres (over 39 million hectares) of the US Great Plains. The time, the place, and the phenomenon have been described as the Dust Bowl. The Soil Conservation Service (SCS) defined the Dust Bowl as the most persistent area of dust storms, which after 1934 was on the southern Great Plains, including areas of south-eastern Colorado, north-eastern New Mexico, the northern two-thirds of the Texas Panhandle, the western third of Kansas, and the Oklahoma Panhandle. Dust storms in this region continued until 1941, peaking between 1934 and 1938 with âBlack Sunday,â occurring on April 14, 1935. 2 These kinds of drought and erosion conditions have colored both America and Australiaâs histories. And while the Dust Bowl describes a time, a place, and a phenomenon, severe drought and wind erosion events of the Depression era on the southern Great Plains, the aim here is not a comparative analysis of these kinds of environmental conditions, nor is the focus on science, technology, or policy-making. 3 As historians such as Linda Gordon have explained, the Dust Bowl is a defining US national mythology. 4 In light of this, the focus of the coming chapters is cultural and transnational, with attention paid to the political forces behind the construction of stories. These chapters describe the âdust bowlâ as an idea, iconic, and born of a time and place in the American experience that generated a major media event: its print, film, and broadcast media storytelling endures, filling the archives, museums, and libraries of the USA. This Dust Bowl imagery was adopted and adapted around the world, including in Australia.
âDust bowlâ storytelling was part of a broader concern about the threat of a âsoil menaceâ voiced during the early twentieth century. The âsoil menaceâ idea described the rapid loss of soil resources being washed away by water or blown away by the wind at an accelerated rate. As early as 1928, US soil conservationist Hugh Bennett sounded a warning. In a pamphlet for the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), he described soil erosion as âa national menace,â while stories of the time also described it as a menace to the planet and all of civilization. 5
Stories describing the US Dust Bowl warned of a threat around the world of similar âdust bowlsâ (or âSaharasâ) due to soil neglect. They formed part of a group of soil menace stories describing conditions in countries including the USA, Australia, Russia, Scotland, Canada, South Africa, East Africa, New Zealand, and China. The soil menace narrative described a condition but it did not grow out of the story of a specific place and time. US Dust Bowl narratives were different. They grew out of events located specifically in one placeâa region of the USAâthey usually described wind and not water erosion, they most often attributed wind erosion to human action, and they described a time in historyâthe Depression decade of the 1930s.
The US Dust Bowl generated particularly powerful imagery portraying wind erosion, and as a result, an enduring American story. While government reports described the Dust Bowl on the southern Great Plains, they illustrated their stories with dramatic images of gigantic dust clouds engulfing homesteads in the region while unofficial reports of the time often located âdust bowlsâ well beyond these borders. âDust Bowlsâ might be described in the Dakotas to the north, farther east in the Midwest, or any area stricken by drought or severe wind erosionâa wide-ranging area where in the first half of the decade all but two US states had suffered from a period of drought. 6 At the same time, a âdust bowlâ might be described as any region within the USA where not only wind but also water had eroded the land leaving behind deep gullies, while âdust bowlsâ soon came to be described in places beyond US borders. Dust Bowl imagery circulated around the world and found currency beyond the Depression decade, including in Australia. âDust bowlsâ became an early twentieth-century environmental narrative in some ways similar in nature, and in scope, to that of climate change storytelling produced by the print, film, Internet, and broadcast radio media of today 7 : there were grave warnings of a time limit with commentators giving the USA only âtwenty years grace.â 8 There was a âbewildering mass of dataâ available on the topic. 9 And the soil menace and âdust bowlsâ had their believers and non-believers. Either you had ârealizedâ its existence or you had notâyet. 10
The Dust Bowl triggered a major national and international media event bolstered by the New Dealâs innovative social reform and conservation agenda from 1935 to 1938. The vast body of print, film, and broadcast media imagery generated endures in the USA because it is an expression of ideas about American identityâthe national myth of American exceptionalism and its narratives of the frontier, the yeoman dream, American optimism, rugged individualism, the American West, westward migration, and a Great American Desert. Dust Bowl stories have endured due to the impacts of American social realism, concepts such as the photo-story, documentary films, broadcast radio forums, and documentary photography, all of which helped to circulate Dust Bowl imagery through the mass media to the nation and around the world, including to Australia. The focus here will be where in Dust Bowl imagery, national myth converged with Western ideas of progress, Western conceptualizations of deserts, gardens, and technology, gendered ideas about civilization and nature, along with New Deal era ideas about social reform, the conservation of natural resources and ecology, and finally, beliefs about photographic truth and the role of the mass media in contributing to democracy and public education. Converging in various combinations, these ideas took form as a popular film, print, broadcast radio, rhetorical, artistic, and photographic product of the American imagination.
The bulk of existing American historiography on the US Dust Bowl decade does not give the impression that Americans (later Australians) constructed and fortified their national story about soil conservation with intergenerational and intra-generational narratives that spanned centuries, the globe, even the Universe. 11 But they did. 12 In the early stages of this project in the first months of 2010, I encountered a huge collection of just this kind of imagery. I started writing about âDeserts, Old World civilizations and New World Dust Bowls,â when I found that in their soil menace narratives American storytellers described ancient civilizations, blending stories of Old-World soil erosion with those of floods and dust storms washing or blowing away topsoil across the New WorldâCanada, South Africa, and, particularly relevant to this study, Australia. 13 This group of stories demonstrated cultural connections linking Australia with a group of US, British, and Canadian narratives on international soil erosion, the fall of ancient civilizations to desert, and the contemporary international concern over âdust bowlsââamong this group of authors, film-makers, and artists were Britons G.V. Jacks and Robert O. Whyte, authors of a 1939 international survey of soil erosion, and E.P. Stebbing. The Australians in this group included popular writer Ion L. Idriess, New South Wales SCS director Sam Clayton, New South Wales politician William McKell, and film-makers John Heyer and Ken Hall, while the Canadians included documentary film-makers J. Booth Scott and Evelyn Spice Cherry. Among the Americans who created often beautifully crafted, intergenerational and intra-generational imagery were US film-makers Pare Lorentz, Hugh Bennett, Walter Clay Lowdermilk, Texan artist Alexandre Hogue, and American writers such as Stuart Chase, Russell Lord, and Paul Sears. Their imagery described human impacts upon the soil. They contrasted the short lifetime of Western civilizations, particularly in the New World, against the long stretch of Earthâs geological time. They did this to portray the soil menace as a contemporary global threat and their stories described the US Dust Bowl. 14
Looking at Dust Bowl Imagery Through a Transnational and a Cultural Lens
To investigate the transfer of âdust bowlâ imagery between the USA and Australia, a combined cultural and transnational approach was much needed. The cultural perspective was needed because the âdust bowlâ stories of both nations were constructed and circulated right across a range of media and by using the power of aestheticâa knowledge of character, color, voice, verse, light, sound, space, music, framing, and costume to do so. New Dealer storytellers understood the power of aesthetic and symbolism particularly well. They used this knowledge to develop a storytelling strategy to promote their national soil conservation program. 15 The stories they created described soil erosion in terms of world history as well as the past, present, and future of civilizations, while to create them they drew together a wide range of ideas often expressed through the use of symbolism.
In turn, this imagery was taken up by Australians during World War Two (1939â1945) and the early post-war years. Australian journalists, photographers, artists, broadcasters, and popular authors also used âdust bowlâ imagery to describe soil erosion in terms of world history. They were equally passionate about the power of aesthetic and symbolism to raise the alarm about soil erosion, while many also recognized the power of âdust bowlâ imagery to draw attention to other issues.
In the course of this research on the Australian side, I recovered a vast collection of images, as well as film, literary, and broadcast media imagery describing a âdust bowl.â To investigate this collection, not only a broad cultural perspective but also a transnational approach was needed. 16 The transnational perspective was essential because camera, sound, and other technologies allowed audiences of âdust bowlâ stories to imagine crossing both physical boundaries and decades. This created âdifferent emotional experiences of time,â particularly relevant in the Australian case where the âdust bowlâ idea evolved after the American experience. 17
A transnational approach was also important because the meanings drawn from, and invested in the âdust bowlâ concept were often very different in Australia and this was not only because of drought and environmental conditions unique to the Australian continent. The production of âdust bowlâ imagery in Australia was influenced by that nationâs own national myths, stories, and ideas, and by war-time and early post-war contexts. It was particularly influenced by state and federal politics. And unlike the US case, there were state programs but there was no national soil conservation program, nor any corresponding media storytelling strategy to support such a vision.
Reflecting this, the focus in the following chapters will be not only on American ideas but also on the Australian Commonwealth Government, the Australian states of New South Wales and Victoria located in south-eastern Australia, and the border between these two states. 18 As a colony, New South Wales was established at Sydney Cove in Port Jackson (Sydney Harbour) in 1788. At its southern border was the Port Phillip District (later the Colony and then state of Victoria), governed by New South Wales until 1851. In 1851 it separated from New South Wales, a Victorian constitution was formed in 1854 and its Parliament in 1855, with the new colony named after Queen Victoria. The move to separate did not come without controversy, while the state border, its corresponding colonial politicsâand after federation in 1901â its state politics, have been the center of much environmental debate since. This was the case during World War Two and the early post-war period, when federation and the Australian constitution were just forty years old and âdust bowlâ stories emerged in the print, film, and broadcast media.
Although a vast body of storytelling of âdust bowlâ imagery was created by Australians during World War Two, a âdust bowlâ has never been remembered as part of any Australian national narrative established in the memory of specific Australian places, times, or events. Unlike the US case, it has never been said to describe the character of the Australian nation. Australia has its own national mythologies. However, the âdust bowlâ imagery created in the Australian popular media of this period is at least one place where US national narratives converged with Australian national myths during the 1940s. On the Australian side, this was very much a nationalistic use of transnational imagery. As the final chapter aims to show, US referents were used to bolster the meaning of Australian national myths and ideas in âdust bowlâ stories set to an Australian nationalistic purpose. War-time politicians were determined to use transnational imagery as a storytelling strategy to drive debate, gain traction on political issues, and bolster their credentials in pursuit of a nation-building post-war conservation scheme for Australia. The historiography needed to locate, record, and explain the vast collection of âdust bowlâ imagery I found buried in the Australian archives did not exist and this is partly to do with the puzzle this whole collection of transnational âdust bowlâ imagery presented when I first encountered it.
The US Dust Bowl occurred in the 1930s. South-eastern Australians suffered severe drought and wind erosion conditions across a similar period. Soil conservationists were well aware of the US Dust Bowl problem, New Deal soil conservation initiatives, and the huge media event generated by both. The case of the US Dust Bowl was well known to Australian experts concerned with severe so...