THE DUST BOWL DOWN UNDER
WHEN THE WIND BLOWS, KRYSTAL BULLEN’S HOME can vanish in an instant. It sits on 4,000 acres of dust outside Pilliga, a New South Wales town nearly 300 miles northwest of Sydney, and a good gust will engulf her homestead in a brown haze. “I’ve kind of given up on cleaning,” says Bullen, 36, laughing at the dust that coated her windows when TIME visited in December. Among the more pressing matters: a debt of nearly half a million dollars, an injured husband and a farm to manage alone during one of Australia’s worst-ever droughts. “We’ve had droughts before,” she says, “but nothing of this caliber.”
Jack Slack-Smith, a 65-year-old farmer, listens to a weather report in his living room at Epping Farm. The drought has reduced its sheep stock from 7,000 to approximately 3,600,
