"Packing for Perth," Plains Folk #694 (Copyright Hoy & Isern)

I've been to Perth, and I'm going back. A lot of other people are going there, too.

Perth, population a million or so, is the capital city of the state of Western Australia, another region that attracted me as likely for comparison with the plains of North America. Western Australia is subhumid on the coast, where Perth is; semiarid through its wheat belt, extending some 200 miles inland; and from there on east, deadly dry.

Perth is accessible, like a prairie city; it's like driving into Albuquerque. And Perth is cosmopolitan, as diverse as, say, Winnipeg. Its downtown is vital and bustling. You can buy aboriginal art or Paris fashions. Its skyline is clean and impressive on the level horizon.

People are pouring into Perth from all points of the compass. There are plenty of eastern Australians; lots of Hong Kong Chinese; and among professional groups, inordinate numbers of white South Africans. I am told that "P.F.P" in South Africa means "Packing for Perth."

The black cockatoos were screaming and diving as I walked on campus at Perth's Curtin University of Technology to give a seminar for the social science faculty. We got to talking about life on the plains of the various continents and found that we had different words for some of the same things. We talk about the virtues of "value-added industry" in agricultural products; they talk about "upstream processing" and "downstream processing." We talk about people going back to the land. They talk about "commodification of the rural ideal."

Most of all, these people who studied the plains of Western Australia were interested in the globalization of agriculture. They were practically cosmopolitan in a way no similar group in any American plains state would be. As they say in real estate, location is everything.

They told me, as I drove inland, to be on the lookout for Whitington ditches. That sounds like some sort of prank played on tourists, doesn't it? Watch out for jackalopes, too.

No, the Whitington ditch is an interesting bit of plains lore. People on the North American plains are familiar with the problems of soil salinity. On the southern plains it often happens because of irrigation with water that is a little salty. On the northern plains it comes through capillary action, brine coming to the surface, especially on summer fallow ground.

That's similar to what has happened in Western Australia. There, the native eucalypt trees, which thrive in that hard country, acted as wicks drawing off deep moisture and preventing it rising and carrying salts to the surface. Until, that is, the trees were cleared to make wheat fields and sheep paddocks.

Now great tracts, thousands of acres each, are being rendered barren by the rising salt. Research on dealing with this takes a pretty long view--analyze the hydrology of the watershed, strategically replant key areas to trees, reclaim salt lands with salt-resistant shrubs, and so on.

In the meantime, this chap named Whitington brought in some dozers and started cutting ditches, deep furrows along the contour of the field, designed to intercept and drain off the saline waters. These seem to work, at least locally.

The farthest inland we got was the town of Southern Cross, on the east edge of the wheat belt. Above the bar in the Southern Cross pub is an autographed photo of Slim Dusty, Australia's foremost country singer, sitting on his guitar case in front of the pub. Local barflies say this was the very pub that inspired Dusty's best-loved song, "The Pub with No Beer." I have to believe them, or else they might not believe my stories, either.

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