Agricultural Catastrophes: Revising settler belonging and the farming novel in Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living

This article details how Carrie Tiffany’s 2005 novel, Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living poses a series of significant challenges to both non-Indigenous Australian belonging and the teleology of the settler-colonial farm novel. I argue that Tiffany provides a conceptual space for thinking the history of Australia differently, while responding to the farm novel that emerged with different traditions in Australasia, North America and southern Africa in the first half of the 20th century (Hughes-d’Aeth 207). Specifically, I examine how Tiffany deploys agricultural catastrophes to destabilise the ideology of progress as a technology for claiming land under the dictum of proper use, consequently bringing the justifications for colonial domination into contest