Understanding Cultural Change from Grains of Wheat

M

aterial culture is laced with symbolism but holds unusual and often quiet agency in the ways stories are told. It benefits us to look not just between the lines, but at the material aspects of our everyday lives that we consider ordinary, unremarkable, or even invisible.

I recently explored the National Museum of Australia collections with the aim of finding objects that might shed light on the shadow parts of the heroic national history of wheat. I focused on the Cultural Dimensions of Salinity Collection by Jim Phillips. The themes encompassed in the collection are science and technology, communication, alternative views, farming practices, domestic life, industry, and art. In it, I found multiple stories of wheat that are personal and based in family connections as much as they are about the roles of power, class, race in nation-building.

As a researcher I recognised the stories of grief and sadness in the documents. But I understand that we cannot effect change from within any given governmental space unless it instils a sense of defiance and responsibility more broadly. We need to tell the stories well, recognizing crisis and continuance and suffering and survivance as factors that hold to account nation building narratives. Telling the story well is not an act of “suppressing bitter stories in favour of hopeful ones, but of telling better, bitter stories” (Chao, 2022: 25).

Wheat and Dispossession

Stories of progress in history are often laden with violence, dispossession, and loss. Engaging with collections in the museum storeroom, quietly and alone, was an experience that made me realise that the undoing of the Aboriginal grain belt was the result of a sustained project by wealthy colonial landowners and governments who sought to command the international export trade of wheat. By the mid 1970s the wheatbelt was claimed as an “Australian” enterprise, encompassing some 13.9 million hectares of land (Head, 2012: 78).

Amidst the long-lasting effects of dispossession of First Nations Peoples and ontologies, the collection shows broader effects – and of course benefits – for different groups in the town. Not everyone experienced the violence equally.

More than Human

The collection’s specific focus on wheat, and my position of looking back at the narrative that had been engineered around it made me wonder what would happen if we reversed the story, to make domesticated wheat the antagonist of the story? This antagonist is a voracious, wilful, and colonizing agent.

Repositioning the human does not shift the blame onto the more-than-human world, but rather, helps to illuminate the mutualism entailed between species who are both communicative, sentient, and worldmaking actors. If we do not listen to wheat’s cries for longer roots, or the soils’ pleas for more nitrogen, we are choosing to “bite the hand that feeds us” and sometimes, she bites back.

Human actions and inactions have visceral effects on landscapes, but also on dreamscapes.

In 1997, the Australian artist Jim Phillips went into classrooms in Wagga Wagga, a small town in the NSW Riverina, to work with kids to facilitate adaptive learning with children who are burdened with the remnants of the landscapes plagued with the injustices of intensive agriculture. He invited the students to use recycled materials to make objects to honour the Murray-Darling River System and to raise awareness of the legacies of intensive agriculture, land clearing, and salinisation that was being experienced in the present.

Together, they created an illustrative model of rising salinity levels within the cracked, dry earth around them. The children expressed their experience to their changed environment in tangible ways. Their work highlights primary salinity, which is when rainfall is insufficient to leach salts from the soil profile and evaporation is high. Its effects are compounded by human-induced secondary salinity, which is the result of clearing native vegetation.

Outside the classroom, dust coats the bodies of kids. It fills their ears, eyes, and mouths.

Research shows that living in salinity-affected areas leads to higher rates of hospitalization for depression, as the residents’ mental health mirrors that of the land around them (Broome, 2020: 335). Drought is in the land, but also in the people. Present consequences can no longer be divorced from contingencies of place and history, lest we firmly sow our children’s fate.

We also know that after the Contact period, only 2-5% of the original native vegetation remained in Wagga.

The Wagga Wagga Experiment Farm established by William Farrer in 1898 bred and selected wheat varieties, which resulted in a lasting rust resistant strain known as Federation. The experiment farm rapidly developed agriculture in Wagga, which was facilitated by pushing Wiradjuri men camped on stations into towns, fringe camps, or onto missions. Federation meant freedom for some, and prison for others. The legacy of lost wages and the poverty that was sown into First Nations generations grows into the present. By 1998, nearly 1,500 land claims were granted to Traditional Owners, but represented less than 0.1% of the total area of NSW. When we consider a dialogue with place, certain voices remain more amplified than others.

The Limits of Technology

Rural colonisation of the kind to occur in Wagga was embedded in the relentless application of new “labour-saving” technologies to the landscape, assuming engineering could solve scarcity. One such technology was the stump-jump-plough, which was a linkage mechanism dragged by horses across the cleared scrubland that allowed for ploughing amidst stumps and roots without damaging the horses or the equipment. This tool marks the stark break from British agriculture because Australia had to develop technologies to contend with growing foreign grains in dry environments. The stump-jump-plough continues to valorised as a national icon, with an illusioned capacity to transcend nature to facilitate export oriented agricultural production.

But industrial agriculture is a monster that thrives on weakening and destabilizing living systems, and the stories of the heroism of the stomp-jump-plough contribute to environmental denialism within Australia. The plough’s immediate impact on the land leads to a persistent process of degradation where after the initial clearing, the uprooted plant community can no longer absorb rainfall, drying out the soil further. Objects such as the plough had a strong stake in maintaining white occupancy of land through vicious means and they gained protection by the progressive story that scaffolded their impact. However, recontextualizing an object of progress into an agent of violence lets us address some of the environmental denialism that continues to plague modern agriculture.

Wheat as Colonizer

Wheat supplies 19% of calorific supply in the human world (Head, 2012: 2). It is a component of hairspray, paper, and milk. The wheat strain triticum aestivum occupies more area than any other plant species on Earth and it represents 90% of the global crop (Head, 2012: 90).

The strain triticum aestivum is “unnatural,” meaning the species has no wild progenitors. Humans have artificially manufactured it as a consumer good. Most people remain unaware that the development of this strain, and our reliance as a species on wheat, has a spatially and geographically organized history.

Human-induced genetic variation manifested new species of plants, which became dependent on humans for the continuance of their life cycle (Pascoe, 2014: 35). Technological progress furthered this notion of mastery, whereby growing wheat mutually reinforced ideas about the physical and mental superiority of the white bread-eaters. Without human intervention, nature would naturally have selected different strains of wild grain, increasing the success of progeny under non-cultivated environments (Head, 2012: 43). Playing on the historian Tony Birch’s words, “we are in a storm of our own baking.”

The homogenization and globalization of human’s consumption practices have disrupted the natural existence of resources. Although wheat and humans have become interdependent, reciprocally domesticating each other into mutual relations, wheat continues to elide its whereabouts by moving in nonlinear ways. The mutualization between humans and wheat species is evolutionary, definitional, spatial, political, and technological.

References

Broome R, Fahey C, Gaynor A, and Holmes K (2020) Mallee Country: Land, People, History. Victoria: Monash University Publishing.

Chao S. (2022) In the Shadow of the Palms: More-than-human Becomings in West Papua. Durham: Duke University Press.

Head L, Atchison J, and Gates A (2012) Ingrained: A Human Bio-Geography of Wheat. Surrey: Ashgate.

Pascoe B (2014) Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? Broome: Magabala Books.

‍

Evelyn Lambeth is a PhD Candidate at the University of Tasmania looking at how cultural attitudes toward pork consumption affect food sustainability, environmentalism, and food safety. Her expertise in food history is transdisciplinary, encompassing history, sociology, political economies, and environmentalism. She is passionate about exploring ways that cultural institutions such as museums, universities, public spaces, and government bodies can work together to make impactful change in society.