SOMETIMES history has to be saved before it is lost forever, particularly when the primary sources are largely oral or based on memory.
For that reason, this book on the northern Mallee farming hamlet of Carwarp is, in its own way, heroic.
- Carwarp, Community, Politicians and the Wanderers: A Social History of a Special Mallee Town, by Colin Cleary. Self-published, rrp $20
Home-grown author Colin Cleary, who left the district in the 1950s to pursue a career in teaching, knew that time was running out for a history of his childhood home.
Now 72, and living at Epsom, near Bendigo, Cleary spoke with many of the surviving locals he grew up with and who either stayed in the district or moved to nearby Red Cliffs.
What began as a history of the Carwarp district's Wanderers Cricket Club broadened out into a bigger canvas as Cleary researched his subject and saw the need to tell the story about this "special Mallee town".
It was special for many reasons, one being that it was created relatively late in Victoria's history, in 1913.
Cleary's father, Bert, was among the first to take up a lease in the district, so this book covers a large slice of the author's own family history.
Carwarp was special too, because it became part of the Sunraysia soldier settlement experiment.
Its story between the wars was coloured by the hardship the returned soldiers faced, along with other leaseholders.
But Cleary wanted to say more than that. He wanted to tell the story of how a disparate group of individuals came together to form a harmonious community, and how they overcame isolation and poverty.
He also wanted to highlight Carwarp's political significance: its role in the formation of the Victorian Farmers Union, the part it played in the newly created Country Party, chiefly through a largely forgotten but once influential politician, Percy Stewart.
