lands of South Australia notes that both the northern expansion of wheat-
growing in South Australia and the eastward expansion in America from the
Willamette River pushed settlers into areas that were widely believed to be too
dry for agriculture. The landscapes were similar; rolling hills with a summer-
dry climate, ranging from sub-humid to semi-arid. Rapid colonization
occurred at the same time—the 1870s and 80s—under similar economic
conditions. In both, cultivation was‘an experimental folk process’(Meinig
1959). In both areas, wheat varieties evolved to suit local conditions. The
Federation cultivar was developed in Australia, capable of resisting the onset
of rust in warm, moist conditions. In Canada and the USA, hard varieties of
red spring and winter wheat were developed, together with milling technol-
ogy capable of breaking it. Indeed, all other things being equal, Australian soft
wheat was a superior product to the‘hard’winter wheat of North America.
Neither was there any significant gap in technology. Pioneers on both sides
of the Pacific were ingenious in developing machinery to master local condi-
tions. The counterpart of the chilled steel mould-board plough used to turn
the tough prairie sods of America was the stump-jump plough that tilled the
Mallee lands of South Australia. As Meinig notes,‘the reaper and the stripper
and the remarkably different harvesters were prominent examples of near
simultaneous, yet independent inventions’(1959, p. 208).
While Australia’s arid interior imposed natural limits on the advance of the
plough, an equal if not greater challenge was the efficient delivery of grain to
market. It was here that America gained its vital competitive advantage.
Australian producers had demonstrated they could satisfy distant markets
with a high value-to-weight product like wool. Transporting a high-volume,
low-value commodity like wheat, however, required capital investment,
astute decisions, and a healthy appetite for risk. It would require not just
grit, but raw animal spirit. Nowhere in the second half of the nineteenth
century was the spirit of enterprise more alive than in the American Midwest,
where innovations in trade and mechanics would transform the supply
of grain.
13.2 Inventing a Grain Market
The introduction of bulk handling in the American Midwest in the second
half of the nineteenth century transformed the supply chain into a river, with
tributaries feeding main arteries and eventuallyflowing to the sea. From the
start of the export trade, the North American grain industry was geared to bulk
handling. Australia was slow to adopt the innovation. Bulk handling was not
introduced in New South Wales (NSW) until after the First World War, and
another forty years again passed before the process was adopted in every state.
Nick Cater