Tools & tillage: a journal on the history of the implements of cultivation and other agricultural processes (1.1968/1971)

FARMING BY THE EARLY SETTLERS
and the making of ridges and furrows in South Australia

*7
C. R. Twiddle

We are most of us creatures of habit, and the
early farmer sellers of South Australia were no
exceptions. Though they found themselves in an
environment in many ways different from their
homelands1, initially they used the same imple-
ments and applied the same techniques as they
and their forebears had used for generations.
The early settlers were the prisoners of their
traditions. And although technological changes
gradually emerged, partly in response to the new
conditions and problems encountered in South
Australia, partly as a result of worldwide advan-
ces, neither the new implements nor the associated
developments in technique and procedure were in
every case used widely and immediately. The tra-
ditional one-share plough was used for many
years after the more efficient multi-share ploughs
came on the market, and was indeed used to
plough fields in the Mount Lofty Ranges as recent-
ly as 19492. Similarly, older ploughing procedures
were widely used in South Australia before the
First World War, and occasionally thereafter.
The land2 was the field unit used in ploughing the
paddocks, and the patterns of ridge and furrow
established in the Mount Lofty Ranges for the
most part before 1870, and in the Flinders Ranges
before about 1915, remain firmly imprinted on the
landscape.
Early wheat Growing
During the years following the founding of South
Australia in 1836 the early settlers grew wheat on
the plains immediately to the south, west and
north of the newly established town of Adelaide

and even within the limits of the present City
block or Central Business District (Lendon 38,
39). But the growth of the local population, de-
mands for wheat from other parts of Australia,
and the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, which
opened the British market to Australian wheat,
combined to encourage wheat production. More
and more land was put under the plough. Before
1870 the Adelaide plains and the Mount Lofty
Ranges (fig. 1) together produced wheat in amount
adequate not only for South Australia’s own re-
quirements but sufficient also to supply Victoria
and other parts of Australia (Dunsdorfs 114-186
and 531) (fig. 2).
The Adelaide plains continued to be and re-
main an important cereal producer but the Ran-
ges fell out of favour for wheat growing and were
replaced from the mid 1860s onwards by the
Mid North and the Mallee lands4. Several fac-
tors contributed to this change in the distribu-
tion of cereal growing. First, after 20 years of
high yields the fertility of the soils around Ade-
laide diminished under continuous cropping but
the development and widespread use of nitro-
genous fertilizers in the 1880s and 1890s allowed
the Adelaide plains to continue in cereals. Se-
cond, with the decline in the Victorian goldfields,
men looked to the land for a livelihood, and the
important wheat growing areas of the Wimmera
and northern Victoria were developed. This first
reduced and then eliminated South Australia’s
closest and most important interstate market;
although overseas buyers remained, transport
charges put the emphasis on costs and efficiency