Joseph Furlonger Round Up Ready Field, near Dalby 2012 Acrylic bound pigment 91 x 122 cm Courtesy of The Hughes Gallery, Sydney
agricultural scenes (Hughes, 2012). His works Round Up Ready Field, near Dalby, 2012 and Applying Herbicide, 2012 show conservation farming techniques that involve retaining stubble from harvested crops to help prevent erosion and assist in the retention of precious moisture in the soil. Herbicides are then applied with spray rigs, crawling like swift insects across the paddocks, to wipe out the weeds that compete with the soonto-be-planted-crops. The next crop is planted directly into the stubble of the previous crop. Drought and plague are unwelcome yet inevitable cycles of life on the land. Drought is woven throughout the story of Australia. It has been a regular visitor to The Downs and climate change scientists predict that in the future, the Darling Downs will experience longer dry periods interrupted by more intense rainfall 8 | Habitat: Environmental Art of the Darling Downs
events. Chinchilla artist Sylvia Secomb (Mann) observes: ‘In the farming industry every regeneration is preceded and followed by an opposing degeneration. This is the cycle of life.’ (Secomb (Mann), 2014) Her hand-coloured lino etching Drought Diary, 2010 poignantly references this frequent climatic event that inflicts sustained devastation on man and nature alike. In the good years comes an abundance of grain, a celebration for the farmer and a feast for smaller creatures. It is purported that the earliest recorded mouse plague in Australia occurred on the Darling Downs in 1917 (Land Protection Office, Department of Natural Resources and Mines, 1998). Dalby artist Sally Charlton recalls her early childhood spent on a property in the Wandoan area where the family lived through numerous mouse plagues.