The northern plains of Victoria¹ are a place of both scarcity and abundance. They experience a median annual rainfall of 420 mm. But to speak in terms of medians does not describe the rain that falls to double this figure, or the rain that falls to halve it. The northern plains are not a place of norms or averages, and like other semi-arid regions they have drawn varied responses.² Some white settlers described a place transformed by rain into a sea of waving grasses as far as the eye could see; others spoke of the plains without water as parched and unwelcoming. Shaped by individual motivations, societal attitudes, and the seasonal shifts of the country itself, some have reacted to it as a place of promise, others as a place of disappointment.

Informative studies of how cultural attitudes and appraisals of the physical environment have influenced patterns of settlement in Australia have been undertaken, notably, by historical geographers DW Meinig, RL Heathcote and JM Powell.³ This article extends the themes of these studies by contending that dominant appraisals of the northern plains of Victoria were constructed around ideas of abundance and scarcity influenced by the country's semi-arid climate. Using documentary records such as those held by Public Record Office Victoria, this article explores cultural interactions with the northern plains through an analysis of settlement visions applied to one particular section of land over the eras of squatting, selection, and closer settlement. By undertaking an historical micro-study of a section of land that lies within the present-day Victorian township of Ballendella, approximately 80 kilometres northwest of Bendigo (see Figure 1), it is possible to trace how the larger dynamic processes of culture and nature continually describe one another to form local landscapes.

Figure 1 - Study area showing township of Ballendella. Courtesy of North Central Catchment Management Authority

The plains country is of itself an abundant place, a finely balanced ecosystem that functions as its own living entity. Its natural features have provided a home for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in turn. Today's Ballendella comprises part of the homeland of the Barababaraba people.⁴ Like other Indigenous peoples of the River Murray, the Barababaraba hunted and collected seasonally, farmed land through fire-stick burning, engineered waterways, and altered their social and territorial interaction at times of climatic fluctuation.⁵ Over thousands of years, they learnt to work within the limitations of the plains, for it was this country that sustained them both spiritually and physically. Despite this, the explorer Surveyor General Thomas Mitchell viewed the northern plains as an 'empty' space. Mitchell's heavily promoted vision of his journey through the area in the wet year of 1836,⁶ published in newspapers in Sydney and Britain and in his book Three expeditions into the interior of eastern Australia, described the landscape in terms of its potential for Europeans, for what it could become. In imagining it ready for white settlement, Mitchell negated Aboriginal experience of the plains as homeland. Yet, in the name of the Ballendella township and parish there is a link to New South Wales Aboriginal woman Turandurey and her daughter, Ballendella, who accompanied the expedition.