General News
22 January, 2026
Netting a book about rural decline
“I NEVER imagined myself as being an author.” Starting as purely a family project, Ron Dodds said his wife, Mary, had a strong interest in genealogy, which led him to write about his heritage – and much more.
Some time ago, while appreciating the interesting level of detail the family trees she recorded gave, he saw a gap in the stories they told – “it just tells you of them, it doesn't tell you about them” – to which his wife suggested he “write down a page” to add to the entries.
“I don’t think she expected 200 pages!” Ron said, laughing, but admitted the project did change along the way.
“I suppose when I was writing this bit down, I was still thinking family.”
But after an extended hospital stay, he wondered, “What am I going to do?”
The writing continued to expand, and he asked himself, “Who do I think I’m writing for?”
With a more focused goal and a broader audience, Ron thought it was worth documenting the changes in rural life he saw growing up in Perenna, north of Nhill.
The book’s title came from a feature on the far rise on the horizon.
“The netting fence ... delineated the boundary between the Wimmera and the Mallee and the good country from the big desert country,” he said.
Ron said over the 54 years he lived in the area, almost exactly the second half of the 20th Century, the population declined dramatically.
The district boundaries from his home of about eight kilometres each to the north and south, and five to the east and west, formed the catchment for the school and church, but “when Mary and I left there in the year 2000, the population of that whole district – (about) 150 square kilometres – fell to one”.
“And six months later, he moved too,” Ron said.
“So the population, that area that once sustained a real population and the community, went to zero.”
With the dual purpose of writing about his family history and Perenna’s farming changes, Ron became increasingly passionate about completing the project.
“You go out there now and think that's sad, there's no one who's out there anymore, this is rural decline, this is a bad news story,” he said.
“But what's changed, of course, is technology – this (is a) worldwide change in farming, people don't live out in those kinds of landscapes, certainly not in the Australian wheat/sheep belt. Everyone's just disappeared out of the wheat/sheep belt.”
Ron said there was a certain paradox in the story, as “agricultural production is probably greater there than it ever was”.
“It's just technology, it's just massive machinery,” he said.
“My first chapter is about (remembering) I'm sitting out on the little tractor out on the Perenna Hill, and I can see about a dozen other farmers all on their little old tractors, with their felt hats on, driving their little old tractors around.
“About 15 or 20 blokes would plough up about as much as one bloke on a great big machine would do now in a few hours.
“That’s the story.”
With dozens of different years of working the land to draw experience from, Ron said there were a couple of drought years, especially 1972 and 1987, that substantially affected how farmers viewed their work.
“We had a really good run of seasons all through the 50s in my time in farming as a school kid, watching what was going on around the farm,” he said.
“Then, when we had the business on the farm ourselves after we married ... we had a great run with one little blip, which is the drought year of 1967, but we overcame that, and it rained again.
“All through that period of time, Lake Hindmarsh was just southeast, and it was pretty much a beautiful body of water. Everything went really, really well, until we hit the 1972 drought.
“The '72 drought was the real cruncher, when we realised that, ‘hold on, things are different.’
“Then later on, the '87 drought did the same thing … we're all getting bigger tractors, so we're ploughing the country more, we're cultivating it to bits, and so we had soil erosion, we had crop failure, and that made us all think, ‘hold on, perhaps we need to change.’”
The book details this catalyst for adopting modern methods, such as direct drilling, no-till, zero-till, and full retention of stubble, and Ron said it also helped farmers now achieve good harvests even with only average weather conditions.
“I saw the benefit of the new system … but by that time it was time to move on,” he said.
Ron said the book ended up being less about his own family’s history.
Still, more about the Perenna district and the community that once called it home – he loved the area.
He was mindful that its story be preserved, as going out there now would give the impression that it had always been devoid of a local population.
“We often go back,” he said.
“Still do. The point on the horizon out there is where Mary and I love to go and have a glass of some champagne and watch the sun go down across the vast expanse of the Big Desert.
“If I, or anyone else like me, who lived and was raised there and witnessed it, didn't write about it, no one will ever know what actually happened out there,” he said.
“They'll always go out there and think it's just a great big, wide open expanse, with nothing other than great big tractors once every six months.
“But it was a vibrant community. So really, the intent of the story was to write about what life was like there when it was totally different.”