ABSTRACT:

Drought has always had a historical presence in ‘rural’ Australia and is predicted to intensify in frequency and duration due to climate change. We argue here that the creeping havoc drought visits upon humans, animals and ecosystems in an Australian context is a form of ‘slow violence’ . Such harm and hardship are often obscured because they are more challenging to conceptualise and symbolise than sudden, spectacle-creating disasters. Furthermore, in Australia, it is often obscured because of discursive prioritising of ‘urban’ centres. We resist the ‘invisibility’ of this form of slow violence, applying the concept of slow violence in combination with intersectionality and a relational mode of interviewing to analyse data from 27 interviews undertaken across 3 years with a range of women in drought-declared regions of South-West Queensland, Australia. We centre the voices of Aboriginal women as leaders in this space, as well as settler women who are often overlooked in the settler narrative of working the land. In doing so, we interrogate external constructions of ‘the rural’ and bring recognition to stories and knowledges of women who live with its daily and yearly impacts.

(This was judged independently from the two AWGSA committee members and all conflicts of interest declared)