Life on Goyder's Line
By: James McCormack
| September-21-2009
As climate change bites, a historic rainfall marker in South Australia’s marginal lands has increasing importance.
There's a modest brass plaque just north of the village of Melrose on the edge of South Australia’s Willochra Plain, amid gnarled river red gums and in the shadow of Mt Remarkable. Another, identical to the first, sits near Pekina, below hills where the wind seems to blow constantly and wild grasses bend low with each gust. There are several other such plaques, at various points along the great plains of SA’s mid-north. They commemorate one of Australia’s most visionary, enduring, misunderstood and under-recognised land-management accomplishments: Goyder’s Line of 1865.
As a geographical concept, Goyder’s Line is claimed to rival Wallace’s Line in Asia (see page 97). Yet outside of SA the line is barely known, and even within the State it is frequently oversimplified. It’s usually neatly packaged as following the 10-inch (250 mm) rainfall isohyet – the line linking places of equal rainfall – but it’s much more complex than that. It isn’t as simple as stating: “land inside the line is more reliable for cropping and land outside is less reliable”; “the region is on the brink of catastrophe”, and “the current string of poor seasons is due to climate change”. Yet in each of those statements there is some truth.
The drought of 1864–65, one of the worst in SA’s history, led to the line being drawn. For nearly two years, properties in the north received insufficient rain to saturate the soil. Stock losses were immense and, with the vegetation gone, great dust storms swept away the topsoil. Pastoralists demanded rent relief, and George Goyder – SA Surveyor-General from 1861 to 1894 – was sent north “to lay down on a map, the line of demarcation between that portion of the country where the rainfall has extended, and that where the drought prevails”.
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