Description: There are many points on which the western Canadian and northern Australian cattle frontiers evoke comparisons. This book provides a comparative study of frontier cattle ranching in two societies on opposite ends of the globe. It is also an environmental history that at the same time centres on both the natural and frontier environments.
Brief description: Warren Elofson is a professor, and former head, of the history department at the University of Calgary, where he has taught since 1986. He has written several books on British and western Canadian history, including Somebody Else's Money: The Walrond Ranch Story, 1883-1907 and Frontier Cattle Ranching in the Land and Times of Charlie Russell Much of Dr. Elofson's expertise in Western Canadian agriculture comes from many years of personal experience ranching and farming in Alberta.
Review Quotes:
In addition to being an environmental history, So Far and yet So Close: is also an engrossing social history . . . makes an important statement about how the rough-and-tumble crew culture of the frontier was tempered by a growing institutional framework for family-based farms, even though the frontier ranch culture persists in distinctive regional customs and social traditions.
--Ian MacLachlan, Historie social/Social History