Rural Community

<html><body>
GUEST OBSERVATION
The Financial Services Royal Commission has exposed the fraught relationship between farmers and financiers. We have heard about loan terms being changed without notice or consultation, loans revalued to suit the agendas of financiers, and heartless and harsh treatment of farmers once the loans are revoked.
A number of factors have contributed to this, including instability in the market value of farms, policy changes that make farms more reliant on financial instruments, and shifts in the global positioning of farm land relative to other forms of property.
The commission has heard that local lending brokers were not qualified to value farm properties, and that farm valuations have become fluid and unpredictable.
Sometimes farms and farmland were deliberately overvalued. Higher values enable farmers to borrow more money for farm improvements, and the local lending branch manager to earn higher commissions.
Not only do the central administrators in banks lack the information and expertise to question these assessments, their business models have encouraged overvaluation and overborrowing as a means to grow their businesses.
Across the Murray Darling Basin banks have taken the separation of water from land – a precursor to the marketisation of water – as a cue to devalue land.
This has provided a reason to void existing loan agreements and to offer refinancing under more arduous conditions. Farmers have no option to refuse, and so borrow with the expectation that a couple of good years will put them back on track.
And if the good years don’t materialise, farms fall into financial stress.
This confronts a third issue, which is that in the bad years farms are harder to sell so their market value plummets. This compounds the problem.
Farmers are more reliant on banks
Policy changes have made farms more reliant on banks.
Since Australia adopted open-market policies in the 1980s and agricultural markets have become global, farmers have been exposed to global price changes.
The removal of single-desk marketing boards like the Australian Wheat Board, which protected farms from price fluctuations, increases the impact of price changes. Farmers are now expected to purchase financial products to reduce the risk of this volatility.
Drought assistance has also been reoriented to rely on market-based instruments, such as loans from banks rather than grants from governments. In the wake of the deregulation of the financial system, and the post-financial crisis consolidation of the farm lending sector, many farm-specific loan products have disappeared. So banks tend to treat farms as businesses like any other.
The open-market policies also create an imperative to expand landholdings (“get big or get out”) and to invest in the latest equipment and technologies. Since this requires borrowing, it thrusts farmers onto a credit treadmill.
Of course, low interest rates have also stimulated borrowing for farm expansion.
Increasing corporate control of farm inputs (seeds, fertiliser etc.) and outputs is squeezing farmers’ capacity to earn enough to service their loans.
To make matters worse, the declining terms of trade impel farmers to increase productivity just to stand still.
The farmers before the royal commission have mostly managed to stay on the treadmill, but only until the banks’ rule changes cranked up the speed to throw them off.
It’s clear that despite their crucial role, many banks still don’t really “get” the vagaries of farming. They don’t understand how different farm lending is – or should be – to commercial and housing lending. Neither do they seem to appreciate the broader social and economic dimensions of the role they have in managing farm risks.
Dramatic revisions to land valuations, as discussed in numerous cases described in the commission, can undermine an entire farming region’s equity.
The accelerated thinning out of the farming population impacts on local economies and sporting teams, among others. In the lead-up to and during the whole process of deregulation, farmers were continually reassured – in reports by the Productivity Commission, for example – that the credit market would evolve to meet their needs.
The evidence that the commission has heard in many respects represents a case of market – and regulatory – failure.
Since the global financial crisis, farm land has become an attractive investment for wealthy families and institutional investors, and for governments worried about food security.
As this pushes up land values, banks can be more aggressive towards failing farms. Foreclosures free up land for deep-pocketed investors.
It would be a mistake, then, to conclude that the stories coming out of the commission are an isolated issue relating to the one bank’s heavy-handed mopping up after the failure of a specialised rural lender – as was the case with ANZ and Landmark.
On the contrary, there are many stories of different banks imposing financial risk frameworks on farmers that are ill-equipped to accommodate the vagaries of farming production and pricing.
When farmers jest about being owned by the banks, they aren’t joking.
We should ask why the government took so long to acknowledge the problems of rural finance and the effects on farming communities.
After the commission concludes, it is likely that banks and regulators will tighten the risk parameters on farm lending and make it harder for smaller family farmers to access finance.
Vulnerable farms will not be able to borrow as much money as in the past. This might be prudent from a financial risk perspective.
However, if city bankers don’t understand farming and don’t make allowances for the volatile and uncertain economies of farming, there’s still no guarantee that tighter rules will translate into better decisions and more positive outcomes.
<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/99086/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1">Rather, tighter rules are likely to have uneven consequences, further disadvantaging smaller family farms relative to deep-pocketed agribusinesses. So, in effect, restricting credit is likely to accelerate the transfer of farmland from family farms to more corporate entities including transnational corporations.
Sally Weller, Reader, Australian Catholic University
Neil Argent, Professor of Rural Geography, University of New England
This article was originally published on <a href="http://theconversation.com" target="_blank">The Conversation</a>. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/royal-commission-shows-bank-lenders-dont-get-farming-and-rural-economies-pay-the-price-99086" target="_blank">original article</a>.
</body></html>

j.ballantyne1990-6AQqhLzZaK

Royal commission shows bank lenders don't 'get' farming, and rural economies pay the price

<html><body>
GUEST OBSERVATION
What if Australia were to stop farming? At approximately 3% of gross domestic product, the removal of agriculture from the economy would be a significant hit. It would affect our balance of payments — 60% of agricultural produce is exported and it contributes 13% of Australia’s export revenue.
Towns that are slowly dying would collapse, jobs would go. But really the scandal of this thought goes beyond economics and into the very soul of the nation. The crucial insight to emerge from such a thought-experiment is that agriculture in Australia is a religion — it is as much a religion as it is an industry.
The powerful ideological connection between Australia and agriculture is being increasingly and diversely scrutinised and comes to the fore in Charles Massy’s iconoclastic epic, Call of the Reed Warbler: A New Agriculture, A New Earth (2017), which throws into question 200 years of assumptions about what it means to graze animals in Australia.
Massy’s joins a spate of recent books that seek to recast the basic assumptions on which Australian agriculture was built. They include Don Watson’s The Bush (2016), Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? (2014) (which has recently been turned into dance by Bangarra) and Bill Gammage’s The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia (2012). If agriculture is a religion in Australia, these writers are its heresiarchs.
It is a truism that Australia, overwhelmingly urban for most of its modern history, draws its identity disproportionately from “the land”. Those Qantas television advertisements with choirs of angelic children strewn elegantly in front of Uluru or the Twelve Apostles trade on the basic fact that Australians identify and want to be identified with the continent itself.
In this sense, Australia (the continent, the land, the soil, the bush) is imagined as a metaphysical substance which gives unity, meaning and destiny to what might otherwise seem like a collection of recently federated settler colonies, formed to extract resources for the benefit of a once powerful European nation state. The practice of agriculture is central to the belief that Australians as a people are expressive of Australia, the metaphysical ideal. Without this connection between agriculture and Australianness, we couldn’t make sense of such fashion icons as Akubra, Blundstone, Driza-Bone and R.M. Williams.
Serious questions
Serious questions about the way that Australia sustains people through the plants and animals that are husbanded on its ancient soils are not, of course, confined to the past several years. The revision might be traced to Tim Flannery’s The Future Eaters (1994), or even earlier to such seminal works of environmental history as Eric Rolls’ A Million Wild Acres (1981), W.K. Hancock’s Discovering Monaro (1972), and Barbara York Main’s Between Wodjil and Tor (1967) and Twice Trodden Ground (1971).
What each of these writers did was to make the Australian environment, or some part of it, an actor rather than a stage. The environment for these writers was not some broadly passive, albeit resistant, thing out there that needed to be overcome, battled, tamed, brought into submission — it was a dynamic system of interrelated parts, where every action had cascading consequences and complex repercussions.
At the centre of, or just beneath, all of these books is the attempt to try and locate some kind of basic environmental baseline. There seems to be no dispute about the fact that the agricultural colonisation of Australia by Europeans has had far reaching consequences for the organisation of the continent’s biota.
In almost every possible way the land has undergone serious and widespread interventions. The introduction of new predators, notably cats and foxes, caused (and continues to cause) mass extinctions of species. The introduction of hooved animals, in addition to their utterly different patterns of grazing, also hardened the soil and changed the extent to which rain is absorbed or runs off the surface of the land, often carrying soil into rivers which now run faster but also then silt up and slow down.
The removal of perennial, deep rooted vegetation for annual crops causes groundwater to rise and dissolves salt crystalised in the soil, resulting in soil salinity. Fire regimes have changed radically. Rabbits and other rodents out-compete native herbivores, while European carp have transformed the major river systems of the south east. The list goes on, and it is surprisingly familiar to all of us.
But as these things continue to run rampant, and as major questions begin to be asked about the sustainability of agriculture, we seem to be thrown backwards into the origins of these problems. And as we trace them back we come against the tantalising question of what it was all like before this. Before what? Before the arrival of Europeans. What did Australia look like in 1788, in fact? This is the question that each of these writers seems to be either answering, or at the least reacting against.
What it was like before
In this respect, Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, which builds in important ways on Gammage’s earlier book, provides the most concerted attempt to answer the question about the quality of the country — in particular, the interface between human and nature — in the pre-colonial epoch. Because of the oral quality of Aboriginal societies, many of these questions have traditionally been considered to fall beyond the province of history proper, and into the study of pre-history (archaeology) and anthropology.
Indeed, there is something of a demarcation dispute around this crucial hinge between Aboriginal and European colonial lifeways. One of the strengths of Pascoe’s book is its ability to bridge archaeology, anthropology, archival history, Indigenous oral tradition and other more esoteric but highly revealing disciplines such as ethnobotany and paleoecology.
The key contention in Pascoe’s book is that the whole distinction between the farming colonist and the hunter-gatherer indigene is based on a radical, and frankly self-serving, misunderstanding of the way that the Indigenous peoples of Australia lived in their countries. Pascoe assembles a persuasive case that Indigenous Australians farmed their land, lived in villages, built houses, harvested cereals, built complex aquaculture systems — possibly the earliest stone structures in human history — and led the kind of sedentary agricultural lives that were meant only to have arrived with Europeans in 1788.
Pascoe is an Indigenous historian and is clearly motivated by a desire to redress the serial denigration of Indigenous people. His cards are on the table, but this does not mean that he is not a rigorous and exacting judge of the historical record.
Massy, for his part, was born and bred on a sheep and cattle farm on the Monaro plain — a farm he has now run for over 40 years. By his own confession, he spent the majority of his farming life assiduously contributing to the problems he is now just as assiduously diagnosing in The Call of the Reed Warbler. The book is in many respect a conversion narrative, documenting the moment when the scales fell from his eyes and he saw truly the world as it was — not a land made efficient and productive by the application of agricultural science, but a land emptied of its relationships and webs of life by a kind of collective psychosis. Farming wasn’t sustaining the land, it was ruining it. It was an extractive industry that had gobbled up thousands of years of sustenance in a few generations of sustained plunder.
Don Watson’s book The Bush is the most literary of these recent contributions, and it moves effortlessly and elegiacally between science, history, reminiscence and anecdote. He has a writing style that is epigrammatic and sonorous, reminiscent of the way that, in an American context, Wallace Stegner treated the tumultuous history of the American Great Plains.
Against the bluff empiricism that underpins Gammage and Pascoe, and the ardour of the convert that galvanises Massy, Watson offers something more elliptical and rhapsodic. He moves from his native Gippsland to Australia at large through a sort of sly mimicry of the discourse of the Australian bush. The bush is both the object of Watson’s study and his linguistic mode, since he draws his wry sensibility directly from Joseph Furphy or Henry Lawson. The distinctive admixture of acerbic humour, dark melancholy and a poignant apprehension of the absurdity of life that was the hallmark of the Bulletin school of writers.
Something is broken
What all of these books are saying, and why they are in fact getting traction now, is that something is broken. These books are not announcing that the environment is broken — they merely mention this in passing, regarding this as beyond any reasonable doubt. Instead, what these books are announcing is that agriculture is broken.
This, in the context of our self-image, is something that is much more terrifying and it will be savagely resisted. But each book is also hopeful in its way. None more than Charles Massy, whose book’s subtitle “A New Agriculture, A New Earth” is openly salvationist and The Call of the Reed Warbler is a detailed plan for the regeneration of degraded pastoral country that allows for both agricultural production and environmental recovery.
A few weeks ago, I was visiting the rock formation we whitefellas have called Wave Rock, in Western Australia’s southern wheatbelt. It is a stunningly beautiful granite outcrop and central to the lifeways of the Noongar people of this region.
What stands out now is the contrast between the cleared fields stretching to the horizon in every direction and this tiny oasis of bushland surrounding the rock. The paleo-river channels that shaped the landscape are now heavily waterlogged by a rising water-table and everywhere you see the signs of salinized soil—dead and dying shrubs and trees.
But as tourists we carefully avert our eyes and pose for photographs at the rock. This is in many ways a microcosm of the determined blindness that these recent books are trying to rectify.
Tony Hughes-D'Aeth, Associate Professor, English and Cultural Studies, University of Western Australia
This article was originally published on <a href="http://theconversation.com" target="_blank">The Conversation</a>. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-dark-emu-and-the-blindness-of-australian-agriculture-97444" target="_blank">original article</a>.
</body></html>

Dark Emu and the blindness of Australian agriculture

<html><body>
GUEST OBSERVATION
Amid the politics, it’s sometimes easy to forget that the Murray-Darling Basin Plan was originally designed primarily to restore the rivers’ environment. While questions have been raised over the plan’s governance, economics, and political commitment by the states, it is important to note that, more than five years after the plan’s adoption, the environmental benefits are slowly but surely being seen.
The Long-Term Intervention Monitoring Project began in 2014 to monitor and evaluate environmental outcomes from Commonwealth environmental water – the water being delivered into the Murray-Darling Basin by the plan.
We are leading independent teams of researchers and consultants in monitoring seven selected areas across the Murray-Darling Basin, and then scaling up those results to deduce the health of the basin as a whole.
<img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216603/original/file-20180427-175047-1mbewa4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=237&amp;fit=clip" alt="">
The seven monitoring sites. Author provided
Three and a half years into an initial five-year program, we are generally seeing environmental changes of the types and magnitudes expected at this stage of the plan.
Plans, predictions and possibilities
It’s not widely known what environmental water can and cannot do, and how different environmental indicators will respond at different rates. The Basin Plan’s objectives focus on fish, bird and vegetation communities – and in all of these areas, the changes will take time.
Under the plan, we expect that it will take more than a decade from the start of flow delivery before large-scale changes become evident. Detecting these changes will require both time and high-quality data.
What’s more, Commonwealth environmental water is a relatively small proportion of what once flowed through these systems. The government currently holds entitlements to 1,836 billion litres, which is less than 6% of average system inflows (the rainfall that makes it into the river system).
This is not enough water to restore natural flow patterns. Along with other constraints, such as the pressure to keep water off floodplains, this means that managers need to be extremely selective about where, when and how water is delivered for environmental benefits.
What are we monitoring?
While we are monitoring fish, birds and vegetation to allow us to measure progress towards the Basin Plan’s objectives, we are also monitoring shorter-term responses. These responses provide data on environmental processes that will allow us to predict whether we can expect the Basin Plan ultimately to deliver on the promised long-term improvements.
A good example of this is golden perch, a threatened and iconic native fish species in the Murray-Darling Basin. Long-term changes in the adult population will only be seen if shorter-term processes, such as migration and spawning, occur. Environmental water should help these processes, and we are monitoring those outcomes.
Adult fish respond to high flows in spring, moving downstream to spawn. Eggs and larvae are washed further downstream, so to bring new fish into the local population, high flow events in autumn can be used to attract juvenile fish back into a river. Golden perch move over very large distances, and as adults they may end up living in a different river from where they were spawned.
If environmental water is used to achieve all these processes, then over years to decades, we will see an increase in adult golden perch numbers.
<img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216605/original/file-20180427-135538-17ka5au.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip" alt="">
Adult golden perch fitted with a tag to track its movements. Wayne Koster/Arthur Rylah Institute, Author provided
Quicker results
Not everything takes decades, however. We have already been able to detect some shorter-term benefits from the plan. Here are some examples from around the Basin:
<ul>
<li>
Lower Murray: environmental water has reduced salinity in the Coorong and increased salt export through the Murray mouth
</li>
<li>
Edward-Wakool: environmental water has provided refuges for aquatic fauna during low-oxygen “black water” events caused by floods in 2010 and 2016, reducing impacts on fish populations
</li>
<li>
Murrumbidgee: environmental water has been crucial in helping endangered populations of the vulnerable southern bell frog to recover
</li>
<li>
Gwydir: environmental water allowed the production of 1,000 tonnes of zooplankton over 90 days, in turn providing food for fish and higher predators
</li>
<li>
Warrego-Darling: environmental water has maintained flows in a system that would have otherwise dried to a series of isolated pools, maintaining food webs and stimulating fish breeding.
</li>
</ul>
Alternative outcomes
Besides reporting progress, our monitoring program also allows us to make predictions of what the system might have looked like with different environmental flows, or with no environmental flows at all.
In the Lachlan River in New South Wales, environmental water has been used to support a major bird breeding event by extending the period of flooding. Without this water, nests would have been abandoned, leaving thousands of fledglings to die.
<img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216607/original/file-20180427-175077-1rwhx2l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip" alt="">
Straw necked Ibis chicks from the Lachlan River. Mal Carnegie/Lake Cowal Association, Author provided
We also share our results with environmental water managers to help improve the effectiveness and efficiency of environmental water delivery – a process called adaptive management. In the Goulburn River in Victoria, we have learned that the release of environmental water to help riverbank vegetation is more effective if delivered earlier in spring. Riverbank vegetation has now improved so much that metal pins being used to monitor erosion and sediment deposition can’t be found without a metal detector.
In it for the long haul
One criticism of the Basin Plan is that there is no evidence yet of basin-wide improvements. For some indicators this is to be expected because of the long time frames of response of the Basin Plan objectives. However, we have already reported on basin scale changes of other indicators, such as vegetation.
Also, the assessment of Commonwealth environmental water delivery shows that across the basin, we are creating the types of flow events expected to lead to beneficial environmental outcomes at broad scales.
<img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216606/original/file-20180427-137525-1mj0jlf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip" alt="">
Environmental water release to improve water quality in the Edward-Wakool system. Photo: Commonwealth Environmental Water Office, Author provided
The politics of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan will probably always be fraught. But as the group charged with assessing environmental progress, we want the debate on its effectiveness to be underpinned by sound evidence from independent experts.
The Long-Term Intervention Monitoring Project, along with other research and monitoring, is providing that evidence.
So, while the Basin Plan’s objectives will take a long time to be realised, there are positive signs that it is slowly achieving its major goal of improving environments in the Murray-Darling Basin, underpinning more sustainable social, environmental and economic outcomes into the future.
Angus Webb, Senior Lecturer and quantitative ecologist, University of Melbourne
Darren Ryder, Professor of Aquatic Ecology and Restoration, University of New England
Fiona Dyer, Associate professor, University of Canberra; Michael Stewardson, Professor, University of Melbourne
Mike Grace, Associate Professor, Monash University
Nick Bond, Professor, La Trobe University
Paul Frazier, Adjunct Senior Lecturer, University of New England
Qifeng Ye, Principal Scientist, Inland Waters and Catchment Ecology Program
Rick Stoffels, Senior Scientist, CSIRO; Robyn J Watts, Professor of Ecology, Charles Sturt University
Samantha Capon, Research Fellow in Ecology, Griffith University
Skye Wassens, Associate Professor in Ecology, Charles Sturt University
<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/93568/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1">This article was coauthored by Mark Southwell, Geomorphologist, Eco Logical Australia; and Shane Brooks, Director, LitePC Technologies.
This article was originally published on <a href="http://theconversation.com" target="_blank">The Conversation</a>. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/it-will-take-decades-but-the-murray-darling-basin-plan-is-delivering-environmental-improvements-93568" target="_blank">original article</a>.
</body></html>

The Murray Darling Basin Plan is starting to deliver environmental improvements

<html><body>
GUEST OBSERVATION
Australia is a continent defined by extremes, and recent decades have seen some extraordinary climate events. But droughts, floods, heatwaves, and fires have battered Australia for millennia. Are recent extreme events really worse than those in the past?
In a <a href="https://www.clim-past.net/13/1751/2017/cp-13-1751-2017" target="_blank">recent paper</a>, we reconstructed 800 years of seasonal rainfall patterns across the Australian continent. Our new records show that parts of Northern Australia are wetter than ever before, and that major droughts of the late 20th and early 21st centuries in southern Australia are likely without precedent over the past 400 years.
This new knowledge gives us a clearer understanding of how droughts and flooding rains may be changing in the context of a rapidly warming world.
A history of drought
Australia has been shaped by floods, droughts, and blistering heat. How big and how intense these events were is poorly understood due to the limited historical and observational records.
Historical records provide rough estimates of the extent and intensity of droughts in parts of Australia since the late 1700s. For example, captains’ logbooks from ships anchored off of Sydney describe the Settlement Drought (1790-1793), which threatened the tenuous foothold of early European settlers in Australia. And farmers’ records describe the Goyder Line Drought (1861–1866) that occurred in areas north of the known arable lands of South Australia.
Observational weather records provide more detailed descriptions of climatic variability. However, systematic recording of weather in Australia only began in the late 19th century. Since then many parts of the continent have experienced prolonged wet periods and droughts. The most well known of these are the Federation drought (1895-1903), the World War II drought (1939-45), and the recent Millennium drought (1997-2009).
All three droughts were devastating to agriculture and the broader economy, but each was distinct in its spatial footprint, duration, and intensity. Importantly, these droughts also differed in seasonality.
<img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/215802/original/file-20180422-75119-l7k2fy.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip" alt="">
Recent and historical droughts in Australia for the different natural resource management (NRM) regions. Provided by M.Freund
For example, the Millennium drought, which was most severe in southwestern and southeastern Australia, was caused by poor rainfall during the cool season. In contrast, the Federation drought, which affected almost the entire continent, was predominantly due to rainfall declines during the warm season.
Although the historical and observational records provide a wealth of information about the frequency of wet and dry extremes, they provide only part of the picture.
Looking back
To understand possible trends in rainfall and assess the likelihood of prolonged droughts, we need to understand the long-term climatic context. For this, we need records that are much longer than existing observational and historical records.
Our new study used an extensive network of tree rings, ice cores, corals, and sediment records from across Australia and the adjacent Indian and Pacific Oceans to extend rainfall records across all of the major regions of Australia by between 400 and 800 years. Importantly, we did this for two seasons, the cool (April–September) season and warm (October–March) season, over eight large natural resource management regions spanning the Australian continent. This allows us to place recent observations of rainfall variability into a much longer context across the entire continent for the first time.
We found that recent shifts in rainfall variability are either unprecedented or very rare over the reconstructed period. The two most striking patterns were in tropical northern Australia, which as been unusually wet over the past century, and southern Australia, which has been unusually dry.
Our reconstructions also highlight differences between recent extreme drought events and those in earlier centuries. For example, the Millennium Drought was larger in area and longer than any other drought in southern Australia over the last 400 years.
Our reconstruction also shows that the most intense droughts described in the historical records – the Settlement Drought (1790-93), Sturt’s Drought (1809–30), and the Goyder Line Drought (1861–66) – were limited to specific regions. The Settlement Drought appears to have affected only Australia’s eastern regions, whereas the Goyder Line Drought, which occurred north of the northernmost limit of arable lands in Southern Australia, primarily impacted central Australia and the far north.
These historical droughts varied widely in the area they covered, highlighting at a continental scale the spatial diversity of drought. This spatial variability has also recently been demonstrated for eastern Australia.
<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/94292/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1">Our multi-century rainfall reconstruction complements the recent Climate Change in Australia report on future climate. By providing a clearer window into climates of the past online, we can better see how extremes of rainfall may affect Australia in the future.
Mandy Freund, PhD student, University of Melbourne
Ben Henley, Research Fellow in Climate and Water Resources, University of Melbourne
Kathryn Allen, Academic, Ecosystem and Forest Sciences, University of Melbourne
Patrick Baker, ARC Future Fellow and Professor of Silviculture and Forest Ecology, University of Melbourne
This article was originally published on <a href="http://theconversation.com" target="_blank">The Conversation</a>. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/recent-australian-droughts-may-be-the-worst-in-800-years-94292" target="_blank">original article</a>.
Main photo: Lancelot that became a ghost town following the Federation Drought. <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/82134796@N03/9520085195/" target="_blank">denisben/flickr</a>, <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/" target="_blank">CC BY-ND</a>
</body></html>

Recent Australian droughts may be the worst in 800 years

<html><body>
GUEST OBSERVER
Most people with mental health issues in rural areas don’t seek treatment and access to mental health services is limited outside the major cities.
So rural professionals like hairdressers, bank managers, agriculture suppliers and vets have a crucial yet often overlooked role in looking after the mental health of their community.
These professionals have trusted work relationships where country people often pour out their emotions and open up to them about their problems. Training in some simple skills would allow them to approach these conversations with confidence, and contribute to improving the mental health of their communities.
Rural mental health
Rates of mental illness in rural communities are actually similar to those in metropolitan areas. However, rural people have higher rates of suicide and harmful alcohol use and about 70% of those with mental health problems do not seek treatment.
This is for a few reasons. First, there is a lack of mental health services in rural areas. In NSW for example, a quarter of people live outside major cities but 91% of psychiatrists have their main practice in a city. Second, people have difficulties accessing what specialist rural services there are due to cost (like lower rates of bulk-billing in rural areas) and distance.
And third, the stigma attached means many people may not seek help. This is especially the case in smaller communities where individuals are more visible and confidentiality may be less certain, and there is a culture of stoicism and self-reliance. All of this leads to people in rural areas being less likely to seek help – people from cities are almost twice as likely to have seen a psychologist in the last year (15%) compared with those from rural areas (8%).
Talking with ‘safe’ professionals
Rural people do often talk about their problems with “safe” professionals – professionals they already have trusted relationships with for other routine reasons. And these professionals – hairdressers, accountants, vets, teachers, agriculture suppliers – often listen to their problems.
Accountants and bank managers are good examples. A rural accounting firm once asked me to come in and train staff on how to deal with farmers who were attending meetings about finance or succession planning, and then letting it all out in a flood of tears about how stressed they were, and sometimes even their thoughts about suicide.
It can be easy to see how hairdressers too can be proxy counsellors, given the very close and trusting relationships they often have with their (especially female) clients. But their role in rural areas can be even more valuable. Some rural families may have only one car for the household, so they may only make it into town once a week. With such limited social contact, the time spent with hairdressers, grocers and early childhood nurses is very valuable in providing social support.
Supporting rural professionals
As mental health professionals we should be actively supporting these existing relationships between people who may be struggling and the “safe” professionals they already talk with. The Turnbull government’s reforms for mental health services announced in 2015 emphasised “our current ‘one-size-fits-all approach’ is not helping Australians […] as best it can”.
The reforms included moving towards a “stepped care model” where people receive varying levels of intervention and support depending on their level of need. For people struggling with emotional issues (but not a mental illness) or an actual (but unrecognised) mental illness, non-stigmatising community support where they are listened to and referred on as appropriate is exactly what they may need.
How can we support these professionals so they know what to do when someone opens up to them? There are a number of existing training programs, including the excellent Mental Health First Aid and Rural Adversity Mental Health Program.
And there is a precedent for providing such support – in the US state of Illinois hairdressers are being given training in domestic violence prevention because of the trusted relationship they have with their clients.
Some tips for supporting someone when they open up to you:
<ul>
<li>listen more than you talk</li>
<li>be non-judgemental</li>
<li>be aware of appropriate services to refer the person to</li>
<li>use open-ended questions (cannot be answered “yes” or “no”, such as “so tell me about …”)</li>
<li>encourage exercise, healthy eating, sleeping and socialising</li>
<li>be honest - be yourself</li>
<li>spend time with them</li>
<li>look after yourself.</li>
</ul>
Do not:
<ul>
<li>give advice (such as “when I am stressed, I have a glass of wine or two” or “go and have a nice flutter at the TAB, that always cheers me up”)</li>
<li>pressure them to “snap out of it”, “cheer up” or “get their act together”</li>
<li>avoid the topic</li>
<li>assume the problem will go away.</li>
</ul>
It’s important to encourage people and provide a sense of hope that “help is available”. Sometimes all they need is someone to listen.
Gene Hodgins is senior lecturer and Clinical Psychologist, Charles Sturt University and author for The Conversation. He can be contacted <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/gene-hodgins-322218" target="_blank">here</a>.
</body></html>

Rural Community

Editor's Picks

Have something to contribute?

Developments

New apartments

New townhouses

News

Rural Community

Editor's Picks

Receive the latest news stories to your inbox

Have something to contribute?

Developments

New apartments

New townhouses

News