Importation, adaptation and innovation in cropping

Some problems were peculiar to Australia and it was these in particular that the local machinery makers and farmers set out to solve. Cropping difficulties arose as wheat growing was expanded into the dry Mallee country of South Australia and Victoria. The vegetation of this country consisted of a dense cover of Mallee eucalyptus (a small tree which characteristically has several stems growing from large stumps at or just below ground level) which had to be grubbed out before the land could be cultivated. This was a slow and costly process until a scrub roller was devised which could be pulled through the scrub by horses or bullocks, flattening the small trees and undergrowth as it went. The flattened vegetation was then left to dry before it was burnt. This invention has been attributed by various writers to a settler called Mullens, but Charles Branson also claimed to be the inventor.

1 Farmers, mechanics and engineers have invented many ingenious machines and pieces of equipment to cope with the special problems of the Australian environment

The scrub (or mallee) roller still left stumps in the ground which made ploughing difficult, until the stump-jump plough was brought into use. In 1876 a local agricultural implement maker, Richard Bowyer Smith, exhibited his 'Vixen' three-furrow stump-jump plough. When one of the mouldboards on this plough hit a stump or root, its levers allowed it to rise out of the ground and pass over the obstruction, thus enabling partially cleared land to be cultivated successfully. The stump-jump mechanism was not a totally new idea, but Smith developed it into a practical implement which was widely accepted and copied after some initial opposition. In cases such as the mallee roller, the earlier development of the stripper and similar inventions, it is perhaps invidious to name only one person as the inventor, when several people were working on similar ideas at the same time in the same locality, all encouraged by the prospect of government and agricultural society awards if they were successful. The developments of the mallee roller and the stump-jump plough together so transformed the economics of clearing, cultivating and cropping Mallee country that between 1878 and 1881 more than half a million acres of new land was taken up by wheat farmers.[27]

Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering