A transnational environmental idea: reception, interpretation and employment of US Dust Bowl imagery in World War Two and post-war Australia

Abstract

This thesis explores the ‘dust bowl’ as a transnational idea. Beginning with an analysis of the emergence of dust bowl narratives and imagery in the US, it tracks these ideas and shows how and why they evolved and accumulated new meanings as they were woven through Australian narratives of the World War Two and early post-war period. The study recovers and analyzes the sound, textual and visual aspects of print, broadcast and film media imagery of the period to ask what cultural myths and political forces combined to empower the proliferation and reception of the dust bowl idea? It reveals that transnational ‘dust bowl’ narratives were produced by a group of Australian politicians, writers, reporters and their editors, documentary film-makers, photographers and artists across the decade as south-eastern Australia endured a period of severe drought. To achieve traction on political issues, they wrestled the US-born idea of a ‘dust bowl,’ and its complex and often contradictory narrative possibilities, into stories that combined US and Australian imagery, sometimes seamlessly. The aim of these storytellers was to ‘ignite’ the imagination, and rouse Australians to action. And, by capitalizing on the nation’s existing environmental insecurities and war-time fears, they did. This thesis is a case study in the history of environmental ideas. It argues that ideas like the ‘dust bowl’‒those meanings ascribed to certain combinations of images, sounds and words‒ are not ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ neither are they fixed and impotent. They are complex‒powerful cultural creations born of the understandings and experiences of their time.