Foothill Farmers: The Literature of Gippsland
Australian History Agricultural History Rural Studies Local History Literary Criticism Cultural History Regional Literature
Foothill Farmers: The Literature of Gippsland is the only book that tracks how generations of Gippsland farmers, orchardists and graziers have turned their landscape into stories, poems and art. Historian Patrick Morgan has mined 150 years of diaries, local newspapers, agricultural show prize essays, Women’s Institute recipe books and even cattle-dog trials to show how writing quietly shaped one of Australia’s richest food bowls. The result is a 141-page, generously illustrated paperback that doubles as a textbook for senior secondary and tertiary Australian-studies courses and as a browsable cultural history for anyone who loves the land.
Buyers repeatedly hunt for this 2010 title because every copy is already “out in the paddock” – libraries hold it in reference only and it has never been reprinted. The soft-cover edition you are looking at is the original release, complete with the crisp regional photographs, vintage advertisements and hand-drawn maps that do not appear in later digital excerpts. Inside, Morgan follows the seasonal calendar: autumn fodder-crop poems, winter “cocky’s curse” rhymes, spring-time horticultural show reports and the summer bushfire chronicles that became survival literature. Along the way readers meet Aboriginal land custodians, Italian tobacco growers, Slovak potato farmers and the women who wrote scientific soil notes between lines of sponge-cake recipes – a true cross-section of rural Australia.
Collectors value the book for its scarcity; researchers value it for its 17-page annotated bibliography that points to now-vanished local journals. General readers love the way Morgan lets the farmers speak in their own idiom, then steps back to show how those voices created a distinct Gippsland literary accent – slower, ironic, weather-obsessed and quietly proud. This copy carries a neat gift inscription on the fly-leaf (no author signature) but is otherwise clean and tight, making it an ideal reading copy or an affordable addition to an Australiana collection.
Refer to our eBay listing for a full condition report and many more high-quality pictures of this item.
Buy Now