Simon Farley, Mateship with Brumbies: Horses, Defiance and Indigeneity in the Australian Alps, Journal of Australian Studies, published online 10 November 2022, https://doi.org/10.1080/14443058.2022.2142835.

“The feral horses of the Australian Alps—’brumbies’, as they are usually called—have occupied considerable space in settler- Australian culture since the 1890 publication of “The Man from Snowy River”. From the 1980s onwards, brumbies have been culled periodically to preserve “native” alpine ecosystems, which have not evolved to support hoofed animals. Such culls, however, are often highly controversial. This article uses Sara Ahmed’s concept of affective economies to explain why the culling of brumbies generates such heated debate and intense public outpourings of emotion. I relate the hyperaffective public performances of brumby supporters to a crisis in settler identity in Australia: as Indigenous activism has undermined the legitimacy of settler claims to belonging, some settlers have begun to use brumbies to assert their own kind of indigeneity.”

Russell McGregor, Before Slater: A history of field guides to Australian birds to 1970. Australian Field Ornithology, 39 (2022), pp. 125⎼138.

“This article traces the evolution of field guides to Australian birds from the first in 1911 up to the publication of Peter Slater’s ground-breaking guide to non-passerines in 1970. The classic guides, John Leach’s An Australian Bird Book (1911) and Neville Cayley’s What Bird Is That? (1931), receive due attention, but I also scrutinise the many more guides to specific parts of Australia and particular avian families and orders that were published over those six decades. I set the development of Australian field guides in international context, with particular attention to the works of the American, Roger Tory Peterson, whose influence is apparent in many of the guides of more restricted scope, but not in the reissues of the classics by Leach and Cayley. Innovation in Australian field guides is also contextualised within the broader transformations of birding practice over the period under consideration. Field guides were among the drivers of those transformations, while at the same time being shaped by them.”

Emily O’Gorman, Wintering in the South: Birds, Place, and Flows, in Edward Dallam Melillo, Ryan Tucker Jones, and James Beattie, Migrant Ecologies: Environmental Histories of the Pacific World, Mānoa: University of Hawaii Press, 2022.

Biography

Clare Gleeson, Quaker Mason and the weeping pagoda tree plate: Commemorating a great New Zealand gardener, Australian Garden History, 34 (1/2022), pp. 18⎼21.

“A gardener’s spade and a potters’ wheel seem unlikely historical bedfellows. Yet, as a plate resting on dresser shelves around New Zealand shows, historical is full of interesting twists and turns. The plate was fired by world-famous English pottery Masons Ironware to celebrate one of the most important figures in New Zealand’s horticultural history, Thomas ‘Quaker’ Mason. Because the potter and the horticulturist shared a common ancestor, the Mason business agreed to manufacture 160 of these special plates to commemorate the Mason family reunion in 1994.”

Michael Roche, Poole, Alick Lindsay ⎼ Biography, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, Te Ara ⎼ the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, published online in 2022, https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/6p6/poole-alick-lindsay.

“Lindsay Poole was a forester and senior public servant who guided the New Zealand Forest Service, first as assistant director then as director, during the middle decades of the twentieth century. His career followed an upward trajectory from skilled forestry worker during the depression, to botanist in the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, to senior Forest Service administrator. He lived to see his generation’s efforts dismantled by the fourth Labour government.“

Michael Roche, Dr Hill of Kew in the Manawatū, Manawatū Journal of History, 18 (2022), pp. 44⎼50.

“Describes the botanical tour of the Palmerston North region by Dr Arthur Hill, director of London’s Royal Botanical Garden who was on a mission to study botany around the Empire, gather seeds and plants and dispense solicited horticultural advice. Details his visit to the nascent Massey Agricultural College and the surrounding flax industry which included the Miranui flax mill. Reproduces Hills’ reflections on the Manawatū and his travelling companions.”

Climate, Weather, and Climate Change

Deb Anderson, Grim humour and hope: Australian oral histories of drought; in S. M. Sloan and M. Cave (eds.), Oral history and the environment: Global perspectives on climate, connection, and catastrophe, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2023, pp. 13⎼33.

“The Mallee Climate Oral History Collection is the product of a four-year research partnership with Museum Victoria. From 2004 to 2007, a series of annual recordings were conducted on the experience of drought with people in wheat-belt communities dotted across the semiarid Mallee. The timing of the project during the millennium drought coincided with a momentous shift in Australian public awareness of climate change, prompting reflexive discussion of the meaning of drought. Interviewees wore several “hats” in life—farming to health work, public service to parenting, local business to education, government science to community advocacy for rural social and environmental sustainability. These stories bear the mark of rural endurance: as the drought wore on, just one interviewee left the Mallee; the rest were determined to continue making a living here, at the inland edge of the Australian cropping zone.”

Deb Anderson, Endurance in the Australian Wheat Belt: ‘Drought Makes Who We Are’; in Noel Salazar and Jeroen Scheerder (eds.), Contemporary Meanings of Endurance: An interdisciplinary Approach, London: Routledge, 2023, pp. 60⎼79, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003321842-5.

“This chapter leverages the insights of oral history on extreme weather and climate change to engage with the notion of endurance. It draws from extensive oral history project undertaken in the Mallee wheatbelt of Australia during the millennium drought, which coincided with a marked shift in public awareness of climate change. It homes in on the drought stories of two farming families who have assumed normative patterns of farm inheritance and devolution, where the future is constructed in a way that allows farm people to conceive of themselves upon a multigenerational continuum. In each case, the lived experience of enduring boom-and-bust cycles of drought is positioned as a prerequisite to understanding both the region’s historical volatility and the wider neoliberal denial of rural community in the late twentieth century. In this context, despite shifts in climate change perception, experience and expertise are viewed as inherently partial forms of knowledge. Acknowledging that both livelihoods and identities are at stake, the chapter explores the self-preservative power of a narrative of endurance for a rural culture under threat.”

Claire Lowrie, Chinese elites, hill stations and contested racial discrimination in interwar colonial Malaya and the Philippines, Journal of Historical Geography, published online 20 December 2022, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2022.10.002.

“This article analyses the experiences of Chinese elites who sought access to the hill stations of Malaya and the Philippines. Using a comparative and trans-imperial method, it highlights the particular ways in which colonial categories of race and class influenced the development of hill stations. The comparative approach also allows for consideration of how social exclusion on colonial hill stations changed over time and in contrasting ways in the Philippines and Malaya. Baguio was promoted by the Americans as a Filipino place where all nationalities were welcome, provided they had the means to make the trip. Manila’s Chinese merchant class and wealthy Chinese visitors from overseas regularly made the trek up the Central Cordillera Mountains. In contrast, the Malayan hill stations of Fraser’s Hill and the Cameron Highlands were developed for use by British colonists. This was controversial, with Chinese elites condemning the amount of the public money spent on developing these hill stations and insisting upon their right to climate respite. By the mid-1930s, the idea of racially exclusive hill station was beginning to be broken down in Malaya. In contrast in Baguio, overt forms of racial discrimination targeting the Chinese community were emerging in the context of heighted Filipino nationalism and claims of Chinese economic competition.”

Fiona Williamson‚ Heat and colonial weather science in the Straits Settlements c. 1820⎼1900, Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 95 (323/2022), pp. 39⎼55, https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cis_research/74.

“Historical explorations of tropical heat in a colonial context have largely focussed on two interconnected spheres: colonial perceptions of place and body or, the implications of heat on different bodies in medical thought and practice. This paper seeks to move the discussion towards a history of colonial scientific thought about heat as component of weather and of escalating nature-induced hazards, studied in the observatory or meteorological department. A central theme is to think about heat in its relationship to nascent meso-scale atmospheric knowledge, meteorological theory and, as a by-product of urbanisation and land-use change. In so doing, it conceptualises the scientific understanding of heat as essentially responsive, embodied within science as result of how heat was prioritised within a local context and in the contemporary understanding of human-induced climatic change. The paper works thus across the disciplinary boundaries of history of science and environmental history to highlight an underexplored aspect of the Straits Settlements’ past: the scientific history of urban heat.”

Terry van Gevelt, Brian G. McAdoo, Jie Yang, Linlin Li, Fiona Williamson, Alex Scollay, Aileen Lam, Kwan Nok Chan, and Adam D. Switzer, Using virtual simulations of future extreme weather events to communicate climate change risk, Plos Climate, February 1, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0000112.

“Virtual simulations of future extreme weather events may prove an effective vehicle for climate change risk communication. To test this, we created a 3D virtual simulation of a future tropical cyclone amplified by climate change. Using an experimental framework, we isolated the effect of our simulation on risk perceptions and individual mitigation behaviour for a representative sample (n = 1507) of the general public in Hong Kong. We find that exposure to our simulation is systematically associated with a relatively small decrease in risk perceptions and individual mitigation behaviour. We suggest that this is likely due to climate change scepticism, motivation crowding, geographical and temporal distance, high-risk thresholds, feelings of hopelessness, and concerns surrounding the immersiveness of the virtual simulation.”

Decolonisation, Colonialism, and Ecological Imperialism

Danielle Carney Flakelar and Emily O’Gorman, Wayilwan Women Caring for Country: Dynamic Knowledges, Decolonising Historical Methodologies, and Colonial Explorer Journals, Journal of Australian Studies, 47 (1/2022), 160⎼180, https://doi.org/10.1080/14443058.2022.2153378.

“This article presents research from an ongoing collaborative project between two women—an Aboriginal woman and senior Wayilwan cultural knowledge holder, and an academic of European descent—that aims to closely and critically re-read Australian colonial and later historical sources for Wayilwan women’s knowledge of Country and community. In this article, we specifically focus on the journals of colonial explorers John Oxley, Charles Sturt and Thomas Mitchell, who travelled through Wayilwan Country in the early to mid-19th century. We begin by outlining our collaborative methodology, contextualising Wayilwan Country and introducing these journals. We then examine the journals in terms of four interlinked Wayilwan women’s knowledges: river knowledge, fire knowledge, grain and yam knowledge, and care of children and the elderly. In undertaking this research, we aim to contribute to decolonising methods and methodologies, address harmful disengagements with Aboriginal women’s practices, and respectfully carry forward Wayilwan women’s knowledge.”

Amanda Wells, “Place of Spirits:” Persistence and Deep-Time Entanglements in Colonised Place, Network in Canadian History & Environment, published online 31 October 2022, https://niche-canada.org/2022/10/31/place-of-spirits-persistence-and-deep-time-entanglements-in-colonised-place/.

“This essay grapples with the dispossession of Erawirung people from their Country along the River Murray. The tangible and intangible persistence of sovereignty is mirrored in deep time continuities, and in Western notions of haunting. While the soils and sands of Erawirung Country retain evidence of Erawirung sovereignty, so too does the environment retain evidence of settler-coloniality. Poisons and the orderly lines of settler-colonial agriculture persist well beyond the time-scales of agricultural seasons, or individual lives. The prompt for this series of essays was ‘Folkloric Non-Humanity on the Environmental Stage’, and while my research does not engage with folklore per se, I knew that the ambiguous and uncomfortable idea of ‘haunting’ sits within conceptual reach of deep-time, and Indigenous connection with Country. Chowilla, the ‘place of spirits’, offers a way in to exploring how these ideas intersect, conflict, and illuminate one another.”

Earthquakes, Fires, and Floods

Daniel May, Rethinking The Biggest Estate on Earth: A critique of grand unified theories, History Australia, 20 (1/2022), pp. 154⎼172, https://doi.org/10.1080/14490854.2022.2090396.

“The 2019–20 bushfires which ravaged Australia have intensified interest in Indigenous burning practices and their contribution to contemporary Australian land management. This recent interest builds upon a base established by Indigenous activism and well-circulated academic works which propose ‘Grand Unified Theories’ to explain the pre-European impact of Indigenous peoples upon environments. In this paper, I critique these theories as reliant upon binaries which either underemphasise or overemphasise impact. Just over a decade since its publication, it is timely to re-examine Bill Gammage’s The Biggest Estate on Earth and its influence upon policy and environments. Gammage’s model shares significant features with earlier popular works depicting Indigenous environmental impacts. Numerous theories incorporating ideas of overhunting have been proposed to explain the rough correlation of human arrival and the extinction of Pleistocene megafauna in Australia and North America. These Grand Unified Theories were shaped by similar tropes; they were all proposed with an eye to the present, and they have all influenced contemporary politics. I present an alternative model for conceptualising Indigenous environmental relationships that will work to advance understandings while minimising harmful repercussions and avoiding undermining Indigenous aspirations.”

Kate Booth, Chloe Lucas, Christine Eriksen, Eliza de Vet, Bruce Tranter, Shaun French, Travis Young, and Scott McKinnon, House and contents underinsurance: Insights from bushfire-prone Australia, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 80 (2022), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2022.103209.

“As the climate changes and extreme weather events become more common, the role of house and contents insurance in managing risks is garnering more attention. There is concern, as insurance is a key safety net in contemporary life, that significant levels of house and contents underinsurance are placing individuals and communities at undue risk. Yet, the phenomenon of underinsurance is under-researched. Informed by a document analysis of findings from a multi-modal project investigating the experiences and perspectives of insured and uninsured households in bushfire-prone Australia, we identify underinsurance as a complex phenomenon that is variably co-constituted at different scales – households, landscapes, and markets. To better understand what principles can be meaningfully applied for addressing underinsurance, we present four pertinent and novel themes – place (contextualising rates of underinsurance), integration (integrating insurance with other disaster management mechanisms), hegemony (dismantling hegemonic risk discourses including reference to ‘shared responsibility’), and solidarity (in insurance, and through disaster and climate responses). We conclude that addressing inequality and inequity remains paramount given the multifarious reasons why households may be underinsured. Strategies for addressing disasters and global environmental change should be socially just and inclusive irrespective of whether or not households have insurance.”

Scott McKinnon and Christine Eriksen, Engaging with the home-in-ruins: memory, temporality and the unmaking of home after fire, Social & Cultural Geography, 24 (2/2023), pp. 311⎼326, https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2021.1939127.

“In the aftermath of a firestorm, many survivors will spend time with the ruins of their homes, fossicking through the rubble or simply being present with the transformed space. Through a series of oral history interviews with survivors of the 2003 Canberra firestorm in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), this paper investigates ruined homes as spaces imbued with memory – of the fire itself, of life before the fires, and of a once imagined future. By examining the first hours and days after the firestorm, we explore the complex temporalities and spatial meanings at play in spaces that are simultaneously understood as both home and ruins. We argue that the unmaking of home by fire is a gradual process. In resistance to the rapid destruction of fire, and before the clearing of ruins by demolition crews, many firestorm survivors enact a slow and embodied process of unmaking. This enactment allows both a coming to terms with the fire’s material impacts and a careful engagement with the space’s mnemonic resonances. It provides important lessons for a 21^st century where more frequent and intense disasters will continue to result in engagement with home-in-ruins.”

Paul Cloke, David Conradson, Eric Pawson, and Harvey C. Perkins, The Post-Earthquake City: Disaster and Recovery in Christchurch, New Zealand, London: Routledge, 2023, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429275562.

“This book critically assesses Christchurch, New Zealand as an evolving post-earthquake city. It examines the impact of the 2010-13 Canterbury earthquake sequence, employing a chronological structure to consider ‘damage and displacement’, ‘recovery and renewal’ and ‘the city in transition’. It offers a framework for understanding the multiple experiences and realities of post-earthquake recovery. It details how the rebuilding of the city has occurred and examines what has arisen in the context of an unprecedented opportunity to refashion land uses and social experience from the ground up. A recurring tension is observed between the desire and tendency of some to reproduce previous urban orthodoxies and the experimental efforts of others to fashion new cultures of progressive place-making and attention to the more-than-human city. The book offers several lessons for understanding disaster recovery in cities. It illuminates the opportunities disasters create for both the reassertion of the familiar and the emergence of the new; highlights the divergence of lived experience during recovery; and considers the extent to which a post-disaster city is prepared for likely climate futures. The book will be valuable reading for critical disaster researchers as well as geographers, sociologists, urban planners and policy makers interested in disaster recovery.”

Environmental Activism

James Colman, Jack Mundey…a gardener?, Australian Garden History, 34 (3/2023), pp. 12⎼15.

“It is highly unlikely that a future history of Australian gardening will include a chapter on the late Dr (Hon) Jack Mundey, AO. Indeed, if Jack was still with us, he would almost certainly be surprised at the notion that he had made a serious contribution to garden heritage. Yes: he coined the phrase ’green ban’; and yes: some green bans were declared on places that included gardens. But to suggest that these bans would somehow qualify Jack for membership of the ’Gardening Hall of Fame’ would, for him, be stretching the bounds of credibility. Jack was a builder’s labourer, a Communist, a leader of a radical trade union. If he dirtied his hands on the job it was not because he had green fingers. Rather it was because he wanted to cleanse the workplace and improve the pay and working conditions of the unskilled labourers on big construction jobs during the 1960s and 70s’ building boom in Sydney when such workers were at the bottom of the food chain. Growing petunias or geraniums was not in his mind set.”

Benjamin Cooke, Aidan Davison, Jamie Kirkpatrick, and Lilian Pearce, Protecting 30% of Australia’s Land and Sea by 2030 Sounds Great – but It’s Not What It Seems, The Conversation, published online 28 July 2022.

“You would have heard Australia’s environment isn’t doing well. A grim story of “crisis and decline” was how Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek described the situation when she launched the State of the Environment Report last week. Climate change, habitat destruction, ocean acidification, extinction, and soil, river and coastal health have all worsened.

In response, Plibersek promised to protect 30% of Australia’s land and waters by 2030. Australia committed to this under the previous government last year, joining 100 other countries that have signed onto this “30 by 30” target. While this may be a worthy commitment, it’s not a big leap. Indeed, we’ve already gone well past the ocean goal, with 45% protected. And, at present, around 22% of Australia’s land mass is protected in our national reserve system. To get protected lands up to 30% through the current approach will mean relying on reserves created by non-government organisations and Indigenous people, rather than more public reserves like national parks. This approach will not be sufficient by itself. The problem is, biodiversity loss and environmental decline in Australia have continued – and accelerated – even as our protected areas have grown significantly in recent decades. After years of underfunding, our protected areas urgently need proper resourcing. Without that, protected area targets don’t mean much on the ground.“

Nandini Oza, The Struggle for Narmada: An Oral History of the Narmada Bachao Andolan, Adivasi Leaders Keshavbhau and Kevalsingh Vasave, Telangana: Orient Black Swan, 2022.

“This book is an English version of a seminal work in the Marathi language titled Ladha Narmadecha (The Fight for Narmada) which was first published in 2017. The author Nandini Oza is a frontline activist associated with the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) since the 1990s. She was instrumental in creating a nexus between the local people and the civil societies against the Sardar Sarovar Project (SSP). The book provides a glimpse into the oral history and interviews associated with this movement that began in 1961. Adivasi and non-Adivasi people residing near the banks of River Narmada were particularly devastated by the project. The then government assured the localites that the mega project spreading over Gujarat, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh would turn the region into Nandanvan (paradise). Later, the state of Rajasthan became a part of the project despite being a non-riparian state of River Narmada. The river was Jeevan-dori (lifeline) to the riparian forests and the individuals dwelling near it and the project caused the loss of this lifeline from nearly 250,000 localites, which led to an unrelentless agitation spanning over six decades. The land was grabbed by the then government for the project comprising of thick vegetation and cultivable lands.”

Environmental Ideas, Theory, and Philosophy

Billy Tusker Haworth, Scott McKinnon, and Christine Eriksen, Advancing disaster geographies: From marginalisation to inclusion of gender and sexual minorities, Geography Compass, 16 (11/2022), e12664, https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12664.

“Despite growing awareness and research into experiences of gender and sexual minorities – also known as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, asexual and other identities (LGBTQIA+) – their needs and capacities are often overlooked in crisis response and disaster risk reduction. LGBTQIA+ peoples’ vulnerability is shaped by social marginalisation, discrimination, and stigma, and exacerbated by dominant value systems and Western heteronormative framings of disaster experiences. We present a review of scholarship into gender and sexual minorities and disasters. We summarise extant knowledge and identify areas for growth in the field of disaster geographies. We argue that progress requires increased conceptual and methodological focus on diversity and the intersectional factors that exacerbate marginality, more inclusive knowledge production pathways focussed on risk reduction, and establishing methods for LGBTQIA+ people to be involved in research about them. More critical and inclusive research will not only aid progress in disaster geographies; it will also provide vital evidence with which to lobby policymakers and disaster management to pay closer attention to diversity and inclusion. By moving beyond normativity, cisgender-heterosexual assumptions, and homogenising identity labels, we can begin to address social, cultural, and political factors that determine spatial inequalities, marginalisation, and disaster vulnerability for gender and sexual minorities.”

Ruth Morgan, A Pacific Anthropocene, in James Beattie, Ryan Tucker Jones, and Edward Dallam Melillo, Migrant Ecologies: Environmental Histories of the Pacific World, Mānoa: University of Hawaii Press, 2022, https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/migrant-ecologies-environmental-histories-of-the-pacific-world/.

Libby Robin, Soil in the Air, Historical Records of Australian Science,33D4D4D43D (2/2022), pp. 110⎼121, https://doi.org/10.1071/HR21014.

“The post-war era of the 1940s is known for the birth of global governance, a time when Western nations united in efforts to reconstruct the war-torn world and reflected on the role of science in society. History and philosophy of science (HPS) was one of the early projects that emerged out of the war years. Diana (Ding) Dyason who headed the first HPS department in the southern hemisphere is honoured by this annual lecture, the text of which constitutes this article. Thomas Kuhn’s influential lecture in Oxford in 1961 inspired her work on the history of scientific entanglement with social concerns, and the directions of HPS at the University of Melbourne. Post-war reconstruction was both a local and a national project for every nation, very much in the air in the 1940s, and influential until the 1970s. The Australasian Association of Scientific Workers (AASW) brought together scientists too old to serve, or, in reserved occupations, to undertake their own ‘war effort’ on the question of: ‘What comes next?’ AASW held a planning conference in Sydney in 1944 to ‘formulate a policy on the organisation of science necessary to meet the demands of post-war Australia’. They set out to consider the role of the ‘the scientific method’ in the welfare of society. In particular, they recognised their existing international scientific networks and connections could become valuable for post-war collaborations between different sciences and different nations of benefit to Australia and the world. The idea of ‘the environment’ was one of many that emerged internationally in these ‘world-minded’ times, an idea that focused on the management of nature for the benefit of people using the scientific method. National Parks were a crucial discussion point, bringing together amateur naturalists and professional environmental managers of all sorts in discussions about landscape planning along with international comparative work on reserving places for wild animals and plants. This Dyason Lecture explores the emergence of ‘integrated science’, of science in the service of society, that later included natural resource management, big science, environmental science, earth systems science and climate science. It begins with the tragedy of the ‘dirty thirties’, when soil was in the air, and the scientific response to concerns about feeding the world.“

Farming, Agriculture, and Soils

Peter Ardill, Albert Morris and the Broken Hill regeneration area: ecologically informed restoration responses to degraded arid landscapes 1936–58. Australian Association of Bush Regenerators, Sydney 2023 (Link).

An anthology of historical and contemporary documents and illustrations concerning the Broken Hill regeneration area and a celebration of it held in August 2017.

Danielle Brady, Keith Bradby, Gracie Butler, and Andrea Gaynor, Community-led land management: historical perspectives, future prospects; Australian Journal of Environmental Management, 29 (2/2022), pp. 218-233, https://doi.org/10.1080/14486563.2022.2077848.

“This study introduces community-led land management (CLLM) as a unifying concept, drawn from an environmental history perspective, that both researchers and community members might use in analysis and reflection on land management activities carried out by communities in connection with place. By exploring the histories of three otherwise disparate case studies in south-western Australia – a catchment group, an Indigenous ranger group and an urban bushland friends group – we draw attention to common attributes of community leadership and co-operative, hands-on work in and for a defined geographical area. These case studies also suggest a trend toward increasingly structured controls within the movement, with neoliberal regulation and accountability tending to obscure community origins. While inclusive of many landcare activities, CLLM can be understood as a broader social movement covering diverse groupings, where communities continue both to lead and apply their place-specific knowledge and labour. This social movement is of crucial importance for effectively tackling the escalating environmental problems in Australia and elsewhere.”

Daniel Rothenburg, Irrigation, Salinity, and Rural Communities in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin, 1945–2020, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.

“This book explores the issue of salinization in the context of contemporary conflicts about irrigation, water, and the environment in Australia, considering the Murray-Darling Basin in particular. It provides an environmental and social history charting the transformation of rural communities in the basin through the salinization of soils and water. Focusing on the Goulburn-Murray Irrigation district in the southwest of the Murray-Darling basin – the largest irrigation district in Australia – it explores the history of state-directed, large-scale engineering in the district, where the environment has been altered dramatically to facilitate white agricultural settlement inland. Changes to the landscape led to extensive salinization, however – a significant environmental threat in Australia. This book traces the impact of these changes on rural communities, taking a ‘bottom-up’ approach, highlighting the connections between environmental, social, and political change. It provides an important reflection on the importance of environmental history for facing the challenges posed by anthropogenic climate change.”

Fisheries and Fisheries Management

David Harris,The two fishery inspectors: managing the Victorian fishery, 1885–1894, Provenance: The Journal of Public Record Office Victoria, 20 (2022), https://prov.vic.gov.au/explore-collection/provenance-journal/provenance-2022/two-fishery-inspectors.

“The ‘Outward Letter Book, Inspector of Fisheries and Game’ used between 1885 and 1894 is an unusual archival item at Public Record Office Victoria. Apart from being a rare example of a letter book from the Victorian Government’s colonial-era Department of Fisheries, it was used by only two inspectors over almost 10 years. Rather than the expected matter-of-fact administrative tone, the letters, memos and reports preserved in the Letter Book carry a clear sense of the authors as they express their opinions over a range of matters to do with the fishery. Both inspectors came from maritime backgrounds, so there is strong sense of identification with the commercial fishers with whom they regularly worked. At the same time, there is a palpable resonance with current concerns about the marine environment, species extinction and destructive fishing practices—matters that concerned both commercial fishers and the inspectors. Finally, the Letter Book captures a period of significant change in commercial fishing in the colony, as the older, pre-industrial remnants of artisanal fishing, brought to the colony by commercial fishers during the gold rush, gave way to an imagined industrial fishery with dreams of a Bass Strait trawling industry.”

Simon Kaminskas‚ Alien fish ascendancy and native fish extinction: Ecological history and observations on the Lower Goodradigbee River, Australia, Pacific Conservation Biology, 29 (1/2022), pp. 38⎼73, https://doi.org/10.1071/PC21048.

“The Murray–Darling Basin – Australia’s largest river system – is heavily dominated by alien fish. Native fish species have suffered numerous localised extinctions and ~47% are listed on federal and/or state threatened species lists. Aims. This paper explores the hypothesis that alien fish and alien fish stockings can be the primary cause of decline and localised extinction of large-bodied native fish species, as opposed to habitat degradation and river regulation. The Lower Goodradigbee River, which is unregulated, in excellent instream health over the great majority of its course, and replete with high quality habitat, is utilised as a case study. Methods. I investigated the hypothesis by synthesising historical records with contemporary scientific research and recent field observations. The role of alien fish species, particularly alien trout species (Oncorhynchus mykiss and Salmo trutta) and constant stockings of them, were closely examined. Results. Data support the hypothesis that domination by alien trout species and their continual stocking have led to historical declines and localised extinctions of large-bodied native fish species. Continued alien trout stockings, along with more recent invasions of alien carp (Cyprinus carpio) and alien redfin perch (Perca fluviatilis), are inhibiting native fish recovery. A suspected field sighting of the alien fish pathogen atypical Aeromonas salmonicida is reported, and the status of the declining native crayfish Murray cray (Euastacus armatus), and potential alien fish impacts upon them, are examined. Conclusions. The impacts of alien fish and alien fish stocking in Australia require major re-evaluation and dedicated research. Implications. It is strongly recommended that stocking of alien trout into the Lower Goodradigbee River for angling cease in order to conserve surviving native fish and Murray cray populations. Conservation stockings to affect a Murray cod (Maccullochella peelii) recovery in the Lower Goodradigbee River are warranted.”

Forests, Forestry, and Forest Industry

Jared Davidson, The shady origins of New Zealand’s pine plantations, The Spinoff, published online 11 June 2022.

“Significant parts of New Zealand’s exotic forests were born and raised by prisoners. From 1901 onwards, the unfree were siphoned out of city jails and onto vast prison plantations, where their handiwork created valuable forests out of scraggy tussock. These open-air prisons spurred the growth of private afforestation companies, whose dubious dealings led to several commissions of inquiry. Resonating with today’s carbon market schemes, the pine plantation, then and now, is rooted within a world of power, profit and cheap nature.”

Michael Roche, Eucalypts in New Zealand, Australian Forest History Newsletter, 85 (2022), 5⎼8, https://www.foresthistory.org.au/afhs-newsletter-no-85-april-2022.

“[W]hen were Eucalypts first grown in New Zealand? Along with Monterey Cypress (Cupressus Macrocarpa) known just as ‘Macrocarpa’, numerous ‘Blue Gums’ were a feature of the Canterbury landscapes of my childhood. Farmers planted both species for shelter and firewood. But answering some elementary questions about what species, and when and where Eucalypts were first introduced to New Zealand has proven surprisingly fraught. What follows is provisional and indicative rather than definitive. Perhaps it will trigger some more comprehensive research?”

Michael Roche, The Diggers Sawmill Company and White Pine: Exports to Australia, 1920 to 1928, Part 1, Australian Forest History Society Newsletter, 86 (2022), pp. 3⎼6, https://www.foresthistory.org.au/afhs-newsletter-no-86-september-2022.

“The ‘Debt of Honour’ that New Zealand’s Prime Minister Bill Massey felt was due to those who served in WWI has largely been studied in terms of the discharged soldier settlement act. Not all returned service personnel went farming under the scheme, considerable numbers borrowed money to build or purchase a home or to set up a business. There were failures and successes within all these groups. What follows is an examination of a returned soldiers’ sawmill company, established in Westland in 1920, to mill some 630 acres of kahikatea (Dacrycarpus dacrydiodes), also known as ‘White Pine’.”

Geology, Geography, and Landscapes

Patrick Nunn and Margaret Cook, Island tales: Culturally-filtered narratives about island creation through land submergence incorporate millennia-old memories of postglacial sea-level rise, World Archaeology,published online 16 June 2022, https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.2022.2077821.

“In many long-enduring coastal cultures, there are stories – sometimes mythologized – about times when pieces of land became separated from mainlands by submergence, a process that created islands where none existed before. Using examples from northwest Europe and Australia, this paper argues that many such stories recall times, often millennia ago, when sea level in the aftermath of the Last Glaciation (last ice age) was rising and transforming coastal landscapes and their human uses in exactly the ways these stories describe. The possibility that these may have arisen from eyewitness accounts of these transformative processes, hitherto thought to be understandable only by scientific (palaeoenvironmental) reconstructions, should encourage more systematic investigations of such stories by scientists. It also suggests that science has traditionally underestimated the capacity of oral (pre-literate) cultures to acquire, encode and sustain their observations of memorable events with a high degree of replication fidelity.”

Patrick D. Nunn, Ingrid Ward, Pierre Stéphan, Adrian McCallum, W. Roland Gehrels, Genevieve Carey, Amy Clarke, Margaret Cook, Paul Geraghty, David Guilfoyle, Bianca McNeair, Glen Miller, Elia Nakoro, Doc Reynolds, and Lisa Stewart, Human observations of late Quaternary coastal change: Examples from Australia, Europe and the Pacific Islands, Quaternary International, 638 (2022), pp. 212⎼224. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2022.06.016.

“In the aftermath of the last ice age, when sea level rose along most of the world’s coastline, the activities of coastal peoples were impacted by coastal submergence, land loss and sometimes isolation as offshore islands formed. In some parts of the world, there is clear evidence that people encoded their observations of postglacial sea-level rise into oral traditions that were communicated across hundreds of generations to reach us today in an intelligible form. In other contexts, people’s observations of rising sea level are likely to have formed the foundations of ‘legends’ about undersea places and the peoples inhabiting them.”

Jeremy Long and David Nash (eds.), Diary. Walker Bros Prospecting Expedition 1913, Western Australian Explorers’ Diaries series, Carlisle, WA: Hesperian Press, 2023, http://www.hesperianpress.com/index.php/western-australian-explorers-diaries-project.

“The annals of Australian land exploration include many expeditions remembered for misfortune, inexperience, or poor bushcraft. None of this applies to the eight months in 1913 when this part of four men prospected by camel from Ryan’s Well (north of Alice Springs) west and southwest to Wiluna (WA), between the routes of previous desert explorers. The party proceeded carefully and had no serious misadventures The report to the Commonwealth Government was eclipsed by the Great War (WWI), and has been largely overlooked. Chris Walker’s competent journal includes numerous geological and natural history observations, and several notes relating to Aborigines. One of the seven appendices is a summary of the flora mentioned. Another shows how Walker’s records are the earliest of what was 17 years later called Lake Mackay.”

Mike Roche, The “Rediscovery” of Reginald Ford and his New Zealand Antarctic Lectures, 1906-1926, Polar Record, 58 (e39), https://doi.org/10.1017/S0032247422000341.

“Reginald Ford, steward on Scott’s Discovery expedition, settled in New Zealand in 1905 and over the next two decades gave public lectures about his Antarctic experiences. Hitherto unrelated biographical details of Ford’s early life are assembled, and something of the character of his lantern slide lectures are reconstructed from various sources. The means by which Ford established his authority as a public speaker included his actual participation in the events he lectured about, his credentialling as a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and the use of his own lantern slides. The ‘performative triangle’ established around the audience, the lantern slide images, and Ford as lecturer, is examined via contemporary newspaper accounts and Ford’s other writings.“

Human Biology, Public Health, and Pandemics

Warwick Anderson, Immunities of the Herd in Peace, War, and COVID-19, American Journal of Public Health, 112 (10/2022) pp. 1465-1470, https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2022.306931.

“Intermittently, the concept of herd immunity has been a potent, if sometimes ambiguous and controversial, means of framing the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic and envisaging its end. Realizing the full meaning of human herd immunity requires further attention to its connections after World War I with British social theory. Distracted by “obvious” yet unsubstantiated correspondences with veterinary research, historians of the concept have not engaged with the more proximate influence of discussions of social psychology and group dynamics on postwar epidemiology. Understanding the openness of early 20th century epidemiology to social thought deepens our appreciation of the significance of herd or population immunity, as well as suggests new avenues for exchange between public health and contemporary social sciences.”

Marine and Freshwater Environments

Alessandro Antonello, Antarctic Krill and the Temporalities of Oceanic Abundance, 1930s–1960s, Isis, 113 (2/2022), pp. 245-265, https://doi.org/10.1086/719745.

“In the decades after World War II, oceans were envisioned as sites of resource abundance that would underpin global development. This essay investigates Antarctic krill and its potential “surplus” as one articulation of this abundance, attending to the cultural and epistemic strategies at play in constituting this ocean abundance. Concentrating on the work of Neil Mackintosh, a world-leading British whale biologist working within governmental scientific bodies, this essay identifies temporal imaginings and sensibilities as being central to his claims around krill abundance and its seeming surplus in the context of whale stocks significantly diminished through overexploitation. Mackintosh’s temporalities of abundance were generated in three overlapping and mutually reinforcing sites: the archive of the colonial scientific survey he worked for, the decades of his career, and the recovery of polar seal populations. The story of the krill surplus and the temporalities underpinning it allows for a more complex reckoning with ideas of scarcity and abundance as well as further demonstrating the need to see the temporalities at work in constituting environments and the scientific labour in them.”

Andrea Gaynor, Margaret Cook, Lionel Frost, J. Gregory, Ruth A. Morgan, M. Shanahan and Peter Spearritt, Urban water policy in a drying continent, in Carolyn Holbrook, Lyndon Megarrity, and David Lowe, Lessons from History: Leading Historians Tackle Australia’s Greatest Challenges, Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2022, https://unsw.press/books/lessons-from-history.

“In Lessons from History leading historians tackle the biggest challenges that face Australia and the world and show how the past provides context and knowledge that can guide us in the present. Does history repeat itself in meaningful ways, or is each problem unique? Does a knowledge of Australian history enhance our understanding of the present and prepare us for the future?” (Description of collected volume)

Margaret Cook and Ella Harrison, Ten Years On: Brisbane’s Compounding Flood Risk, in Anna Lukasiewicz and Tayanah O’Donnell, Complex Disasters: Compounding, Cascading and Protracted, Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022, pp. 101⎼121, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-19-2428-6_6.s

“It is over 10 years since Brisbane experienced the devastating 2011 flood. Reaching 4.46 m AHD in the Central Business District (CBD) at its peak, the flood was estimated as equivalent to a 1 in 100 (1%) Annual Exceedance Probability (AEP) event. Despite the catchment’s hydrological history recording four larger floods since British settlement in 1824, the 2011 event caught many residents off-guard, with the community expressing shock at the consequences of a major flood event in this sub-tropical catchment. Media reports, community folklore and the Queensland Floods Commission of Inquiry revealed the deep-seated myth that Wivenhoe Dam had ‘flood-proofed’ Brisbane. The findings of the subsequent class action further reinforced the misconception that flood events can be largely prevented by dams. In doing so, development of the region’s flood prevention, preparedness and resilience strategies was impeded, and urban areas continued to expand. The hazard compounded. This chapter uses the 10-year anniversary of those floods to benchmark the present and future flood risk in the Brisbane River floodplain. Already identified as the most flood-impacted catchment in Australia, without management, future development and continued population growth will increase the flood risk. This challenge is intensified further by the anticipated changes in rainfall and sea level from climate change. Current modelling indicates that by 2050 a 1 in 100 AEP event will be between 1.2 m and 2.5 m higher in Brisbane’s CBD. The 2011 floods proved a catalyst for change prompting research and new policy and legislative initiatives in Queensland over the last decade. This chapter asks, can this increased knowledge overcome the compounding risks in this complex catchment and better prepare the region for the next major flood?“

James Beattie, Ryan Tucker Jones, and Edward Dallam Melillo, Migrant Ecologies: Environmental Histories of the Pacific World, Mānoa: University of Hawaii Press, 2022.

“Migrant Ecologies: Environmental Histories of the Pacific World is the first volume explicitly dedicated to the environmental history of Earth’s largest ocean. Covering nearly one-third of the planet, the Pacific Ocean is remarkable for its diverse human and non-human inhabitants, their astounding long-distance migrations over time, and their profound influences on other parts of the world. This book creates an understanding of the past, present, and futures of the lands, seas, peoples, practices, microbes, animals, plants, and other natural forces that shape the Pacific. It effectively argues for the existence of an interconnected Pacific World environmental history, as well as for the Pacific Ocean as a necessary framework for understanding that history.”

Suzanne Grenfell, Michael Grenfell, Stephen Tooth, Adriana Mehl, Emily O’Gorman, Tim Ralph, and William Ellery, Wetlands in drylands: Diverse perspectives for dynamic landscapes, Wetlands Ecology and Management, 30 (4/2022), pp. 607–622, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11273-022-09887-z.

“The United Nations Environment Programme classifies global drylands according to an Aridity Index, defined as the ratio between mean annual precipitation and potential evapotranspiration. Drylands are areas where AI is < 0.65, collectively incorporating subhumid, semiarid, arid and hyperarid settings. Wetlands in drylands have distinctive hydrogeomorphological, biogeochemical, ecological, and social-ecological features, and as a result, they require carefully tailored research and management strategies.”

Museums and Public Environmental History

Dolly Jørgensen, Libby Robin, and Marie-Theres Fojuth, Slowing Time in the Museum in a Period of Rapid Extinction, Museum & Society, 20 (1/2022), pp. 1⎼12, https://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/article/view/3804/3491.

“The long, dimly-lit Threatened and Extinct Species Gallery extends before the visitor at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, Paris. The majestic gallery stretches above the darkness with clerestory windows topped by an elegant arched ceiling. The natural history museum as ‘Cathedral of Science’ takes a sombre tone in this room. The cases in the walls are clothed in black, punctuated by ghostly, illuminated animal and plant forms. These are remains of species which have already become extinct or are in imminent danger of becoming so. The darkness invites mourning, an appropriate response to the vulnerable and lost animals on display.“

Nuclear Testing

David Harris, The Secrecy of British Nuclear Testing in Australia, in Agora Modern History, 57 (2/2022), https://www.htav.asn.au/curriculum/2022/agora-2022-2-modern-history.

This article was inspired from an observation by Sir Mark Oliphant, who had been part of the Manhattan Project that developed the nuclear weapons used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was not involved in the Australian nuclear tests but his experiences during the Manhattan project left him aware of the consequences arising from the meeting of science and secrecy. In a letter to a colleague, he referred to nuclear secrecy as a thick, dark sticky contaminant that like pitch, was difficult to remove and it stuck to everything that came in contact with it. This article briefly explores how secrecy was one factor contributing to the history of the British nuclear tests in Australia, a story that involves a tragic intersection of race, politics, science, health and the environment. While it was argued that secrecy was essential to the progress of the testing program it did not silence dissent and the certainties of the testing program were contested. The Australian media was generally compliant with government requests for secrecy during the tests so the hope for resistance lay in the influence of international debates, organised labour and the peace movement that embraced a diversity of political and religious beliefs. The potential for despair hovers on the boundaries of this history, yet the long view of it is more sanguine as a continuing struggle of resistance, hope and truth-telling unfolds. The article is intended as support for teachers of year 12 Australian History in Victorian secondary schools and is an extension of a topic covered in the year 12 textbook, R Broome et al From custodianship to the Anthropocene : 60,000 BCE-2010, (Cambridge University Press, Melbourne).

Political Ecology

Jamie B. Kirkpatrick, Julie Fielder, Aidan Davison, Lilian M. Pearce, and Benjamin Cooke, The Role of Government in a Partial Transition from Public to Private in the Expanding Australian Protected Area System, Conservation and Society, 20 (3/2022), pp. 201⎼10, https://www.conservationandsociety.org.in//text.asp?2022/20/3/201/341178.

“Since the 1980s in democratic societies, neoliberal reforms and neofeudal governance have transferred the delivery of many public goods and services from governments to non-government actors. Privatisation is a core neoliberal agenda, but little is known of the nature and extent of its application to nature conservation through reservation. We investigate the degree of privatisation of the expanding protected area system in our case study areas of Australia and Tasmania, hypothesising that governments have: disrupted public agencies managing the protected area estate by repeated reorganisation; diverted public funds from public to private protected areas; and increasingly alienated public reserves for subsidised private profit from tourism. We found frequent restructuring of agencies managing protected areas. Although Federal Government expenditure on private reserves increased markedly in the twenty-first century, so did expenditure on public conservation reserves. All States except Queensland increased public protected area funding. Direct subsidisation of private reserves by government has not had a steady upward trajectory. In contrast, subsidisation of private alienation of public conservation reserves for tourism may have accelerated in the twenty-first century. We conclude that, while Australian governments see value in protected areas as a source of economic development and electoral advantage, they are agnostic on ownership.”

Reflections, Literature, and Visual Cultures

Margaret Cook, Looking to Greener Futures: The Need for Environmental History, in Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton, The Australian History Industry, North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2022.

“Australian history has undergone major transformations over the twentieth and twenty first centuries. Started by small groups of antiquarians and novelists, it is today practised in a myriad of ways by millions of Australians. Local, community and family historians spend huge amounts of time and resources investigating the past. The Stolen and Forgotten Generations seek connection and healing through history. The digital revolution has democratised history making and its production and consumption. In the academy, land settlement, politics and great men have been supplanted by Indigenous histories, immigration stories, gender and memory perspectives, cultural, environmental and public history. Through 22 readable chapters by leading practitioners, this book explores the complex, multi-roomed house of Australian history.” (Description of collected volume)

Tourism and the Environment

Josh Woodward, Pioneers, progress and the sublime: Blue Mountains tourist promotion, 1885–1894, History Australia, 20 (1/2023), pp. 64⎼80, https://doi.org/10.1080/14490854.2022.2094814.

“This paper explores the representation of the Blue Mountains portrayed in a handful of tourist guidebooks (published 1885–1894) for the region. It argues that tourist promoters continued to depict the area in terms of the romantic sublime, not only because they believed tourists sought a transcendental experience, but also to accentuate the heroic achievements of the colonial explorers who had first attempted to cross the mountains. Finally, it suggests that tourist literature was an important medium for the dissemination of myths relating to a collective search for a settler identity, and therefore presented a one-dimensional vision of the past that did not properly account for the problematic history of settler-Indigenous relations.”

Urban Environments, Gardens, and Parks

Rachel Goldlust‚ Building with hand and heart: The rebirth of do-it-yourself earth houses as environmental sentiment in post-war Australia, International Review of Environmental History (2/2022), http://doi.org/10.22459/IREH.08.02.2022.

Adapting techniques applied across the globe for thousands of years, earth building as a form of vernacular architecture has been a prominent part of English rural houses for centuries and was ubiquitous across regional Australia and New Zealand as an essential feature of colonial settlement. This article considers the rebirth of earth (later environmental) building in the immediate post–Second World War years in Victoria, Australia. Faced with a housing shortage, emergent government science saw the practical benefits of rationalising house building and design, while a new generation of artisans looked to connect with the landscape and natural features as part of a modern, simple, yet politically and culturally ‘tuned-in’ form of citizenship. This altermodern refashioning of an essentially relegated style of housing was largely instigated by local draughtsman and builder Alistair Knox who experimented, developed and popularised earth houses, founding a new movement of ‘muddies’ that has since become a legitimate building modality and profession across the country. A formative but long-overlooked aspect of an emergent ecological consciousness, promoting housing as a vehicle for creative and conscious living was enacted on the outskirts of post-war Melbourne, a generation before counter-cultural architecture emerged as a powerful sign of the self and became a vital nexus and vehicle for environmental expression, thinking and action.

Rachel Goldlust, Housing for a Changing Climate: The Commonwealth Environmental Building Station in 1950s Australia, Arcadia (1/2023), https://www.environmentandsociety.org/arcadia/housing-changing-climate-commonwealth-environmental-building-station-1950s-australia.

“Modern houses are increasingly designed to buffer us from the extremes of heat and cold. A belief held by both professionals and the public that a home can and should reflect the climate and location has waxed and waned over the twentieth century. However, research in housing adaptability has surprising origins. In a continent notorious for its extremes, the Australian government fostered an innovative centre known as the Commonwealth Environmental Building Station (CEBS) in the immediate postwar period. Concerns about the environment led to an international drive to place a climatically defined framework over the layout and construction of homes. In Australia, government science linked technology, the environment, and domestic spaces by reviving the use of raw earth as a viable and adaptable building method.”

Blogs

Bundanoon History Project, Bushfire Archive https://bundanoonhistory.org.au/bushfires-2020.

This digital collection records the Bundanoon community’s experience of Black Summer 2019/2020, as captured and recorded by the Bundanoon History Group’s (BHG) Bushfire Archive Project.

Broadcasts and Podcasts

Jonathan West, A Biography of Lake Tūtira, Public History Talk, National Library of New Zealand on 6 July 2022, https://nzhistory.govt.nz/files/pdfs/transcript-jonathan-west-2022.pdf.

“In this talk about Lake Tūtira in central Hawke’s Bay, Jonathan West will reflect on the records of Herbert Guthrie Smith who in 1882 took over the lease of a sheep station near the lake. Guthrie Smith’s first book opened with the lines: ‘The lake on Tutira may be considered the heart of the run. It is the centre of all the station’s life and energy.’ A keen naturalist, Guthrie Smith preserved the lake as a sanctuary for his beloved birds.

But since the 1950s Lake Tūtira has faced problems – now posed much more widely – of invasive weeds, nutrient pollution, poisonous algal blooms and mass fish kills. Jonathan will conclude the talk by considering the lessons the lake’s history provides for our future.“

Websites

Rebecca Jones,http://rebeccacjones.com

Contains links to articles and other publications as well as an illustrated essay exploring the concerns of the Australian Inland Mission through their maps: ‘Mapping the Inland: maps of the Australian Inland Mission and Flying Doctor Service of Service in the 1910s-1930s’.

Alison Pouliot, https://alisonpouliot.com/

Contains links to articles, books and interviews to do with fungi and Alison Pouliot.

Reviews

Julie McIntyre, Heather Goodall reveals Anglo-Celtic environmental activism in Sydney’s suburbs, History Australia, 20 (1/2023), pp. 178⎼179, https://doi.org/10.1080/14490854.2022.2153229.

Libby Robin, “Depaysement” Review of Mandy Martin – A Persistent Vision (Geelong Gallery), ABR Arts,published online 20 December 2022, https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/arts-update/101-arts-update/9977-mandy-martin-a-persistent-vision-a-major-retrospective-at-geelong-gallery-by-libby-robin.

Amanda Wells,Jarrod Hore Visions of Nature, H-Net: https://networks.h-net.org/node/19397/reviews/12224562/wells-hore-visions-nature-how-landscape-photography-shaped-settler.

Ben Wilkie, Writing the Empire: The McIlwraiths, 1853–1948, Journal of Australian Studies, 46 (3/2022), pp. 390⎼392, https://doi.org/10.1080/14443058.2022.2068760.

Australian & Aotearoa New Zealand Environmental History Network

AANZEHN Publication Round-up June 2022 to February 2023

Themes

Animals