Themes
Activism, and Scholarly Practice
Antarctica
Anthropocene
Blogs
Colonialism, Capitalism, and Commodities
Water and Fire
Environmental Governance
Gender
History of Science
More-than-Human Histories
Reviews
Urban and Rural Place and Practice

Activism, and Scholarly Practice

Heather Goodall. “Solidarity and Dilemmas: Tranby, Indenture and the Nuclear-Free and Independent Pacific Campaigns, 1980s,” Labour History 126, no. 1 (2024), pp. 73⎼95.
The 1983 call by the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) campaign to end imperialism built strong alliances between disempowered Indigenous peoples and descendants of the unfree, indentured labourers who had been moved between colonies. The colonies and new nations of the Pacific, including Australia, had been left with populations that included both Indigenous and non-Indigenous (formerly indentured) people, all damaged in different ways by colonialism. There were unresolved tensions between these two groups, particularly in Fiji where the NFIP campaign was established. This paper traces responses in Tranby, an organisation that demonstrated the dilemmas of these tensions for Australian Indigenous people. Tranby, the Aboriginal-led Adult Education Co-operative, took a strong anti-colonial position in the 1980s, advocating land rights as well as endorsing the NFIP campaign. Yet Tranby’s support wavered over the tensions between Indigenous people and those displaced by colonialism through indenture. Tranby’s history demonstrates how its links had continued with colonised peoples damaged in both ways across the Indian and Pacific Oceans, suggesting why it reshaped its support for the NFIP campaign after the 1987 Fiji coups.

Emily O’Gorman, Mark Carey, William San Martin, and Sandra Swart, “Introduction: Framing Environmental history today and for the future,” in Emily O’Gorman, William San Martín, Mark Carey, Sandra Swart (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Environmental History, Routledge, 2023, pp. 1⎼14.
This introductory chapter frames and explains the suite of essays in the Handbook of Environmental History. The Handbook seeks to provide novel and important contributions to environmental history while stimulating and inspiring new types of scholarship in the history of human-environment dynamics. It is purposefully organised thematically – rather than geographically or regionally – in order to bring the histories of different regions into conversation with each other and, more importantly, to underscore new approaches and trends in the field rather than specific places and time periods. That said, the work in this Handbook is strongly grounded in time and space, with many of the chapters highlighting specific issues or places. The goal is thus to broaden the directions and make them accessible to scholars working in all subfields, places, and time periods while providing concrete examples. To be more wide-ranging and globally accessible in terms of topics and approaches, this Handbook is also global in nature. It features 28 chapters by approximately 72 authors from 27 countries.

Luke Keogh, Liisi Jääts, Nina Möllers, Libby Robin. “Environmental History in Museums: Past Practices and Future Opportunities,” in Emily O’Gorman, William San Martín, Mark Carey, Sandra Swart (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Environmental History, London: Routledge, 2023.
The concerns and projects of environmental history fit so well into the Anthropocene epoch that many museums and galleries around the world have turned to environmental history in creating and delivering their exhibitions and programmes. This chapter showcases environmental history as it is practised in museums and galleries and details the important collaborative opportunities that can occur in the museum and gallery setting. The chapter highlights a number of recent projects completed at the National Wool Museum in Australia, the Estonian National Museum, and BIOTOPIA in Germany. Throughout, focus is given to the ways that environmental history can engage in core areas of gallery and museum functions such as exhibitions, collections, and public programmes, and what sorts of futures museums might offer to new audiences who have grown up with a world already in environmental crisis. Engaging audiences’ museums not only showcases environmental pasts but becomes places of collaboration and discussion around environmental challenges and potential futures.

Benjamin J. Richardson. “Cinematic Activism and Tasmania’s Lake Pedder: How Film Shaped Environmental History,” Australian Historical Studies 55 (2024), pp. 1⎼23.
Film has played a seminal role in Australian environmental history, as an instrument of advocacy to shape political disputes and government actions. Such cinematic activism originated in the 1960s with the dispute over the damming of Tasmania’s iconic Lake Pedder. Here, documentary filmmaking was used by the protagonists to influence public opinion and convey rival views of the remote wilderness lake. For conservationists, film helped build an emotional connection and sense of place, whilst for pro-dam proponents, film helped curate an ideology of economic progress. The protagonists’ mutually reinforcing tactics, especially the intermediary role of the Tasmanian Department of Film Production, combined with the outstanding beauty of Lake Pedder, drove the turn to cinematic activism. Understanding how these films were produced and screened is also important to appreciating their significance for cinematic activism.

Jessica Urwin. ‘‘Better active today than radioactive tomorrow’: Environmentalism and the Australian anti-uranium movement, 1975–82,” International Review of Environmental History 9, no 2 (2023), pp. 123–44.
Uranium mining in Australia has been a contentious issue for over 50 years, not least due to the industry’s (ongoing) impact upon Aboriginal communities and the environment. In particular, the Ranger uranium mine has, since the 1970s, been a site of conflict between economic development, Aboriginal land rights and environmental protection. Despite this, historical scholarship on the motivations and messages of the environmentally focused anti-uranium mining movement of the 1970s in Australia is scarce. Through an examination of ephemera created by Australia’s key environmental groups—namely the Australian Conservation Foundation and Friends of the Earth—this article explicates the arguments that were mobilised against the pursuit of an Australian uranium industry among environmentalists during the 1970s. It demonstrates that environmental arguments against uranium mining in Australia were influenced by concurrent transnational movements against the production of nuclear energy (for both peaceful and military purposes) occurring in the United States and across Europe, while reflecting fluid and rapidly changing local environmental debates, the most consequential of which engendered a clash between ecologically driven wilderness rhetoric and land rights.

Cintia Velázquez-Marroni, Jessica Urwin, Nicolo Paolo Ludovice, Bryan Umaru Kauma, Sangay Tamang, Jayson Maurice Porter, “Future Directions in Environmental History,” in Emily O’Gorman, William San Martín, Mark Carey, Sandra Swart (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Environmental History, Routledge, 2023, pp. 413⎼428.
Bringing together various voices with diverse backgrounds and interests in environmental history, this afterword delves into the field’s past, present, and future. The urgency of the climate crisis within the context of the Covid-19 pandemic makes the work of environmental historians increasingly vital. By revisiting old historiographical debates in new conversations, this chapter proposes a re-examination of methods and approaches by environmental historians in three ways. First, the epistemologies that the field was founded upon are challenged by considering the temporalities, legacies, and prospects of the discipline. Second, greater reflexivity in theory and action is suggested to shape future directions for environmental history. Finally, the chapter offers a rethinking of the practice of trans/interdisciplinary research as crucial for shaping perspectives on environmental justice, archives and sources, and human-environment relations. Drawing on global stories and experiences, the chapter demonstrates how environmental history has become a more-than-human story, encompassing new academic scholarship, multispecies agency, and Indigenous perspectives. In so doing, this afterword puts forth a shared vision that challenges the boundaries of environmental thinking beyond the restrictions of sources, to glean the future direction of environmental history as a civic duty and an academic discipline.

Sarah Jane Jones, Alexandra Crosy, and Ilaria Vanni. “From photo documentation to photo diagrams: a technique to make civic ecologies present and legible,” Visual Communication (2024).
The visualization of nature in cities fundamentally impacts how we imagine the urban environment and our role in caring for it. Across Australia, the project of urban renewal imagines and designs specific typologies of urban nature. These typologies can obscure grass root forms of environmental stewardship and their connection through civic ecologies. Yet, at this time of environmental change, residents’ engagement with urban ecologies is vital. What role might visual communication play in helping to make these civic ecologies initiatives more legible? This article discusses an experiment creating photo diagrams, which expands visual methodologies used in place-based research, such as photo documentation and visual ethnography. Iterative photography augmented by ethnographies enables us to ‘read’ the landscape. Diagrams support us in expanding the photographs in three crucial moves. First, desaturation reveals examples of civic ecologies. Second, tracing exposes the networks and relations that constitute them. And, third, text and lines of flight draw out how civic ecologies extend beyond specific sites and connect to other places. In this way, this article makes three contributions. The first is to experiment with ways to make grass root civic ecologies legible in their complexities to recuperate practices marginalized by top-down socio-ecological processes of urban renewal. The second proposes photo diagrams as a medium moving between photography as descriptive documentation and documentation of non-representational dimensions. Finally, the third brings a visual communication perspective into debates on conveying the non-representational in visual form.

Antarctica

Edward Doddridge, Annie Foppert, and Stuart Corney. “The limits of ice: what a 19th century expedition trapped in sea ice for a year tells us about Antarctica’s future,” The Conversation (10 April 2024).
In 1897, the former whaling ship RV Belgica left Antwerp in Belgium and set sail due south. It was the first voyage of what would become known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration. It did not go to plan. Antarctica was once a place where humans found their limits. A little over a century later, we are finding the ice, too, has limits.

Rohan Howitt. “Australasian Histories of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean World”, History Compass 22, no. 9 (Sep. 2024).
Australia and New Zealand have deep historical connections—geological, environmental, cultural, political, and economic—with Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. Yet while Australasia and the Southern Ocean are historically entangled, their historiographies are largely estranged. This article provides a survey of Australian and New Zealand histories of Antarctica, the subantarctic, and the Southern Ocean. I argue that historians in and of Australasia have contributed significantly to understandings of the region’s southern hinterland, including the histories and legacies of Antarctic whaling, sealing, science, exploration, politics, and culture. These same connections and entanglements have rarely been used to shed light on Australian and New Zealand histories, but can offer new perspectives on Australasian histories of intercultural contact and exchange, mobilities, the frontier, imperialism, and internationalism. I argue that conceptualising Australia, New Zealand, and Antarctica as littorals of a ‘terraqueous’ Southern Ocean World provides a way to both generate new insights into this region’s history and draw new connections with global, world, and oceanic histories.

Anthropocene

Angi Buettner. “From facts to spectacle: the climate change documentary,” TRAVERSES #2 / L’éco-documentaire à l’épreuve de l’anthropocène.
“Now that you know, what are you going to do about it?” Those are the final words of the 2015 Cannes Film Festival closing film, Ice and Sky (2015). Cannes gave this prominent spot in its schedule to Luc Jacquet’s environmental documentary, after the issue of climate change also featured largely throughout the festival. Jacquet positions his film about climatologist Claude Lorios (one of the scientists who proved the contribution of greenhouse gases to climate change) as a call to arms to the environmental movement, and as a “head on challenge to climate change deniers”. In this paper, I want to discuss this responsibility of the filmmaker taken on by Jacquet here, the potential role of documentary as political cinema, and the potential role of environmental documentary in climate change activism.

Tom Griffiths. “The world after John Curtin,” Inside Story 24 November 2023.
What guidance for the challenges facing the planet can we find in the words of one of Australia’s greatest prime ministers? This essay is drawn from the text of the 2023 John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library Anniversary Lecture, delivered in Perth on 24 October.

Lesley Head. “Anthropocene: Shrug, engage, or do new sorts of work?” Progress in Environmental Geography 2, 4 (2023), pp. 309⎼319.
In this article, I make some comparisons between approaches to the Anthropocene in archaeology and geography and use them to consider where to go from here. The Anthropocene has lacked purchase in archaeology due to three main disciplinary trends; the importance of process and contingency, the increasing importance of de-periodisation and the increasing critique of the universal human in human origins discussions. Each of these trends has an expression in geography but geographers have tended to critically engage while archaeologists have shrugged. The sense that we have all moved beyond the Anthropocene is a luxury challenged by three important convergences between recent scientific and social scientific thought: a much enhanced set of data about the variable specifics of human–environment relations, particularly across time; increasing recognition of the role of colonialism and capitalism in constituting not only the earth system changes but also the subjectivities and conceptualisation of the Anthropocene; the profound challenges of a transforming and transformable Earth. These convergences demand new and different sorts of work.

Ruth Morgan and Cristián Simonetti. “Planetary boundaries, climate change, and the Anthropocene,” in Emily O’Gorman, William San Martin, Mark Carey, and Sandra Swart (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Environmental History, Routledge, 2024, pp. 187⎼203.
This chapter examines the ways that researchers in the environmental humanities and social sciences have understood, contested, and challenged the implications of the Earth System Science concepts of the Anthropocene and planetary boundaries. The chapter offers a reflection on the history and implications of planetary narratives, followed by an experiment with provincialising these narratives by drawing on case studies that focus on perspectives from First Nations and Global South scholarship. By foregrounding the visual iconography of a synoptic planetary consciousness, while acknowledging the corporeally grounded encounter of feeling and embodiment, the chapter contends that our planetary predicament behoves us to attempt to reconcile these views not only into a singular narrative of transformations to the Earth system, but instead to embrace the plural voices of the planet’s many places and peoples.

Eric Pawson. “Managed retreat and experimentation: realising opportunity in the Ōtautahi Christchurch residential red zone, Aotearoa New Zealand,” Kōtuitui: New Zealand Journal of Social Sciences Online (2024).
Managed retreat is becoming a prominent issue both nationally and internationally. This is due both to the threat of rising sea levels and the growing incidence of extreme weather events, but also reflects the increasing propensity for placing human assets in harm’s way. We analyse how this observation plays out in Aotearoa, and offer a simple model, informed by our intergenerational perspective and mātauranga Māori. This model has three features: retreat, relocation, and re-imagining. It enables us to explore the capacity for positive outcomes to further lower long-term environmental and social risks. We apply the model to the Ōtākaro Avon river corridor in Ōtautahi Christchurch, formerly known as the residential red zone, created during the Canterbury earthquake sequence of 2010-13. We discuss what can be learned from the decade-long history of adaptation in the corridor as an exemplar for emerging areas of managed retreat elsewhere. By means of a thought experiment, we explore the potential of the area for provision of affordable, climate-resilient housing.

Jane Carruthers and Libby Robin. “The Anthropocene Acacia: A History”, in David M. Richardson, Johannes J. Le Roux, Elizabete Marchante (eds), Wattles: Australian Acacia Species Around the World, Egham: CABI UK, pp. 118⎼130.
The countless introductions and rapid proliferation of some Australian Acacia species (‘wattles’) across different parts of the world has greatly accelerated in the Anthropocene. One of the four major impacts of the Anthropocene is that of burgeoning neobiota. This chapter traces the transfers of wattles, particularly from Australia to South Africa, and demonstrates how this genus has contributed to Anthropocene effects, altering or transforming natural ecosystems beyond their native habitats. Changing awareness of the impacts of invasive alien species has shifted ecological thinking, linking it more strongly with historical and globalizing processes of communication and intergovernmental collaborative structures. Using South Africa and Australia as case studies of broader phenomena, the chapter expands upon earlier work to offer a fresh historical perspective on the transfers of wattles from Australia to other parts of the world. The sciences of the Anthropocene illuminate paradigms and concepts that have affected the local and global changes in planetary ecosystems. Wattle transfers are a prime driver for counting invasion biology among the emerging sciences of the Anthropocene. Our approach draws on the history of ideas and the history of science, which complement the methods of other chapters in this book that investigate in detail many different and specific aspects of wattles. This chapter provides an overarching historical context for the book.

Jan Zalasiewicz, Julia Adeney Thomas, Colin J. Waters, Simon Turner, Martin Head and supplementary authors (including Libby Robin), “What should the Anthropocene mean?” Nature, Vol 632, 29 August 2024, pp. 980—984.
Even though geologists have rejected the designation of an Anthropocene epoch, the idea of a major planetary transition in the mid-twentieth century remains useful across physical and social sciences, the humanities and policy.

Penny van Oosterzee and Barry Hunter. “‘Ecology on steroids’: how Australia’s First Nations managed Australia’s ecosystems,” The Conversation (29 December 2023).
On October 9 1873, George Augustus Frederick Dalrymple reclined in a boat on the glorious North Johnstone River in the coastal Wet Tropics. Dalrymple was in raptures. A riot of palms, bananas, ferns and lilies descended to the waters edge, and large-leafed taro grew in strips along the riverbank over tens of hectares. He came across a large village with rows of neatly made bark and palm leaf huts. Dappled paths led to managed patches of open forest, groves of fruit trees, bananas and yams. Nearby, a small fleet of moored catamarans sat bobbing. In the colonial literature, there are many such descriptions of beautiful and bountiful pre-European tropical landscapes. It was clear that people had helped create such a rich paradise through their land management. By 1886, many rainforest people of tropical north Queensland had been “dispersed” – killed – and swathes of this biodiversity hotspot began being cleared for sugarcane. First Nations groups such as Australia’s rainforest people had skilfully managed entire ecosystems over the long term, in what has been termed “ecology on steroids”. These future-making methods protected landscapes from climate change and buffered them against extinction. Australia’s First Nations did this through the cold and dryness of the last ice age, and as the seas rose through the droughts and floods of the El Niño Southern Oscillation climate cycle. As we face an uncertain climate future, it’s valuable to look at how people weathered such change.

Blogs

Jamie Ashworth. “Crimes Against Nature: Stories of Takatāpui and the Wilderness in Wairarapa,” NiCHE.
In 2008, Ngahuia Te Awekōtuku presented an important revision of the tale of her ancestress Hinemoa. In the original missionary retelling of the story, the noblewoman Hinemoa crossed the darkened waters of the great volcanic lake Rotorua to unite with her beloved against the wishes of her father. Te Awekōtuku expanded upon this narrative, drawing on folklorist Wiremu Maihi Te Rangikāheke’s writings in te reo Māori to emphasise Hinemoa’s genderfluidity, the story’s long-standing connections with the concept of hoa takatāpui (close same-gender companions), and Rotorua’s queer connections to darkness, obscurity, and otherness. The result is a crafted narrative reflecting a time before colonial attacks on Māori cultural conceptions of sexuality. Hinemoa, here, is granted connections with her successors, the takatāpui of today. Te Awekōtuku’s various writings have inspired further investigation into histories of takatāpui throughout Aotearoa. For instance, queer activist and scholar Dr Elizabeth Kerekere, inspired in part by Te Awekōtuku, uncovered a wealth of historical material regarding Māori conceptions of gender and sexuality, such as mōteatea (chants, songs, and poems), whakairo (carvings), and tales of tipua (otherworldly entities) who could shapeshift and change sex at will. In this piece, I hope to draw attention to other historical accounts of takatāpui, this time, queering the remote districts of Wairarapa as a backdrop against colonial interactions with gender and sexuality. In what follows, I examine two stories that take place decades apart that both demonstrate environmental colonisation, and draw connections between Wairarapa’s environments and the queer identities of those who call it home.

Harrison Croft. “The Incidental Animal: Bumping into Non-Humans in the Archive,” NiCHE, 21 November 2023.
Librarians’, archivists’, and museum curators’ principal modes of collating, archiving, and siloing routinely render the more-than-human invisible at worst, and hard-to-find at best. As a result, researchers’ locating of historical evidence of the more-than-human is often incidental. That is, historians usually happen upon them spontaneously. We do not get to greet them in the same pre-planned manner in which we are introduced to the archived humans; we bump into them suddenly, unexpectedly.

Mike Lloyd. “Whanganui’s Pākaitore Palms,” Garden History Research Foundation, 26 July 2024.
In his work on war memorials in New Zealand, Jock Philips calls Whanganui ‘the war memorial capital of the world’. Clearly, the expression is used for rhetorical effect, not really being open to empirical evaluation. Nonetheless, in the example of Whanganui’s small riverside reserve originally known by Māori as Pākaitore, then in 1900 to become Moutoa Gardens, but then in 2001 to return to being called Pākaitore, substance is found for Philips’ expression. The less than one hectare site contains three significant war memorials. As Philips details, ‘The Maori name was Pakaitore, the place (pa) where food (kai) was given out (tore)’, pointing to the strong significance to Māori of this gathering place. The renaming as ‘Moutoa Gardens’ overrode this initial sense, emphasising the 1864 Battle of Moutoa with its complex array of antagonists. Eventually, related to the 1995 occupation of Moutoa Gardens, the land was vested in the Crown, with the return to the name Pākaitore. The presence of the three war memorials on the site is testament to this complex history, which can still invoke strong emotions. An unintended consequence of the well documented nature of these events is help in telling an untold history: the story of the planting and removal of palms in Pākaitore.

Colonialism, Capitalism, and Commodities

David Avilés. “Spatial political economy: The ideology of Nature, State–space and the oil commodity frontier,” Philosophy, Theory, Models, Methods and Practice, published online 11 January 2024, 1⎼25.
In this article, a spatial political economy approach is used to examine the development of global capitalism through an analysis of the expansionary movement of commodity frontiers. It surveys the early history of oil exploitation in Chile and offers a close analysis of Patagonia’s constitution of its oil commodity frontier as Cheap Energy. It is argued that focusing on the internal relation of space and Nature can enhance our understanding of capitalism as an emergent and dynamic totality grounded in particular places where value is extracted. The article sheds new light on the spatialities of Import Substitution Industrialisation in Latin America using the case of Chile and its development agency, Corfo, and reveals how the capitalist ideology of Nature was wrought as a state project. The political economy of scale in this context is examined by analysing the central role of state and class relations in the environment-making process of capital accumulation. The article advances a new understanding of State–space within uneven and combined capitalist development. The spatial political economy lens allows for a fresh understanding of past history, which may help us understand the current ‘green’ energy transition by means of the production of space and Nature.

Nancy Cushing. “Carbon Old and New: The Australian Agricultural Company, Coal, Wood and the New Complexities of Energy Transition in New South Wales, 1825⎼1847,” in L. Conor (ed) Colonial Extraction and Industrial Steam Power, 1790⎼1880: Decarbonising Imperial History, Palgrave Macmillan, 2024, pp. 113⎼137.
The present urgency of bringing about an energy transition away from fossil fuels has sent many historians to the past, seeking other periods of change that can provide context for the present and future. What scholars have found is that although we may hope to see clear, smooth and generalisable transitions, the evidence shows that, in Vaclav Smil’s interpretation, they are partial, halting and particular. This chapter examines the first decades of coal mining in the British colony of New South Wales and demonstrates that there was no rush to adopt coal as a fuel in part because of the greater familiarity and ready availability of wood as an alternative. Despite its monopolistic control of the coal industry, the Australian Agricultural Company required patience and persistence to establish a local market for coal.

Rohan Howitt. “The company-microstate: the Auckland Islands and corporate colonialism in global history, 1849-52,” Journal of Global History 19, no. 1 (2024), pp. 37⎼56.
The Auckland Islands, a subantarctic archipelago 465 kilometres south of New Zealand, were the setting for one of the stranger episodes in the global history of colonial expansion. From 1849–52, these remote, inhospitable islands were governed and settled by a chartered company. The project was driven by lofty ambitions to simultaneously create a flourishing settler colony and unlock vast new whaling grounds in the Southern Ocean; the reality was a commercial disaster plagued by bitter internal disputes and a speedy abandonment. Drawing on the methods of global microhistory, I argue that the colonization of the Auckland Islands was a pivotal moment in the integration of the Southern Ocean world into global processes of governance, mobility, and trade. This anomalous case contributes to recent scholarship on ‘company-states’ and the central role of such hybrid polities in processes of cross-regional interaction and globalization.

Rohan Howitt. “Oil from Penguins: Mentalities of extraction in the Southern Ocean World, 1889-1919,” International Review of Environmental History 9, no. 2 (2023), pp. 51⎼75.
From 1889 to 1919, Macquarie Island was the centre of one of the world’s most unusual extractive industries. On this small island, roughly midway between Australia and Antarctica, penguins were killed and boiled down to produce oil. Yet despite a single company having a virtual monopoly and investing heavily in machinery that allowed them to process up to 3500 penguins a day during the summer oiling season, penguin oil never became the lucrative commodity its boosters predicted. This article explores two overlapping processes of extraction in the Southern Ocean World. It firstly reconstructs the extraction of oil from penguins on Macquarie Island, a deeply controversial industry that triggered an organised transnational conservation movement aimed at ending penguin oiling and establishing a wildlife sanctuary on the island. This physical process of extraction is then used to explore the wider mentality of extraction that both animated the penguin oilers’ schemes and shaped visions for the island’s future articulated by the oilers’ critics. The article argues that the history of penguin oil provides an entry point for understanding how extraction has profoundly shaped human interactions with the Southern Ocean World.

Martin Kalb. “Centring Simon Kooper: Frontier Politics, Desert Environments and African Resistance,” Journal of Southern African Studies 49, no. 4 (2023), pp. 569-588.
This article centres on |Gomxab Simon Kooper’s resistance to German colonialism in Southwest Africa (1884–1915, modern-day Namibia). First, it underscores the agency of Kooper and the Fransman Nama within southern African history. Kooper’s actions and motives fuelled widespread anxieties, shaped international correspondences and incurred mounting costs for the mainly German administration. Secondly, this analysis sheds further light on a complex international frontier space; Kooper found himself on the edges of three distinct political entities – German Southwest Africa, the Cape Colony and the British Bechuanaland Protectorate. Finally, the article argues that taking the environment of this borderland into account is essential for an understanding of these conflicts. Within the Kalahari Desert, access to water was critical not only to Kooper’s livelihood, but also to the success of German expeditions, and those of the Cape Colony and the Bechuanaland Protectorate. Their reliance on a melon-like fruit growing in parts of this arid landscape, as well as the animals adapted to desert spaces, highlights the importance of natural factors for discussions of historical events. African resistance ultimately emerged within a specific political and environmental context, shaping colonial dynamics beyond current historiographical understandings.

Julie McIntyre. “Awabakal and Nikkin: Reconnecting Histories of First Peoples, Coal and Colonists,” in L. Conor (ed) Colonial Extraction and Industrial Steam Power, 1790⎼1880: Decarbonising Imperial History, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024, pp. 95⎼112.
The location of early coalmining in the British Australian colony of New South Wales has an Indigenous history of nikkin, the Awabakal word for coal. In Awabakal history, nikkin is life-giving and tradeable in ways that serve as a counterpoint to the settler-colonial positioning of coal for mining, trading and burning at larger scales.

Matthew D. J. Ryan. “‘A great many of them die’: Sugar, race and cheapness in colonial Queensland.” Journal of Agrarian Change, 24(2), e12574.
The frontier of colonial Queensland was pushed northward through the second half of the 19th century by proliferating sugar plantations. The cultivation of sugar cane for these plantations rested predominantly on the shoulders of unfree, racialized Pacific Islander workers. This history reveals dialectics of cheap lives and land, as nature was produced for exchange at the commodity frontier, unfolding in crises of disease, death and exhaustion. In exploring the story of this frontier, an opportunity emerges to begin a conversation between a recent return to materialism within Australian historiography and the traditions of eco-Marxism and Black radicalism. The contention here is that this engagement represents both ‘urgent history’ and ‘truth-telling’, as plantation socioecologies of cheapness continue to (re)produce the crises of the racial Capitalocene.

Matthew D. J. Ryan. “‘Our land abounds in nature’s gifts’: Commodity frontiers, Australian capitalism, and socioecological crisis,” Asia-Pacific Economic History Review, 64, pp. 267⎼272.
The concept of the Anthropocene remains heavily contested, but can be summarised as the idea that humanity has, through the emission of greenhouse gases associated with industry and agriculture, begun shaping the very geology of our planet. My thesis begins from this context, from the pressing contemporary conjuncture of fires, floods, ecosystem collapse and – paradoxically – rapid expansion of fossil capital in the form of natural gas, and other follies. It has been argued that this moment calls for ‘urgent histories’ (Rees & Huf, 2020), that the ‘shock of the Anthropocene’ ought to ramify through how we approach our work as historians. It is for this reason, that my work considers how the radical implications of our current crises might cause us to reconsider histories of capitalism in Australia.

Matthew D. J Ryan. “Cheap Energy, Cheap Nature: Newcastle/Awabakal Coals in Colonial Capitalism, 1850-1880,” in L. Conor (ed) Colonial Extraction and Industrial Steam Power, 1790⎼1880: Decarbonising Imperial History, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024, pp. 139⎼160.
We live in a time of socioecological crisis—one that demands new, ‘urgent’ histories. In light of this context, and calls to return to histories of capitalism and nature, it is surprising that there has been traditionally so little attention to the relationship between coal, colonialism and capitalism—especially in Australia. The relative neglect of the colonial coal mines in Australian (political) economic historiography demonstrates a conceptual failure to appreciate the socioecological nature of production. Much has been made of the rapid expansion of the colony’s pastoral economy, gold rushes and urbanisation as being integral to Australia’s historical developmental trajectory. Each of these narratives, however, suffers from an energy ‘blind-spot’: these stories lack an explanation for the emergence of the energy regime that underpinned these other processes of economic growth. This chapter considers the emergence of a coal economy in the colonies of eastern Australia, in the second half of the nineteenth century. The emergence of a fossil fuel economy is situated within the broader socioecology of colonial capitalism—one overwhelmingly defined by the contradictory relations of ‘Cheap Nature’.

Jessica Urwin. “Following the yellowcake road: exploring the colonial roots and routes of Australian radioactive minerals, 1900s-1950s,” Settler Colonial Studies (2024).
Over the past 40 years, environmental justice activists and scholars have drawn greater attention to the disproportionate environmental burdens borne by marginalised communities. This includes the consequences of ‘nuclear colonialism’, a phenomenon defined as constituting ‘a system of domination through which governments and corporations target indigenous peoples and their lands to maintain the nuclear production process’. In this article, I seek to complicate this definition of nuclear colonialism by exploring the role of uranium mining in consolidating both British and Australian settler colonial power during the first half of the twentieth century. I will do so through an examination of Australian uranium’s roots and routes as both a manifestation and facilitator of settler colonialism in Australia between 1900 and 1955. Combining sources from both British and Australian archives, this article seeks to contribute to emergent scholarship on the colonial dimensions of mineral extraction in two ways. Firstly, by explicating the role uranium played in fuelling the extractive mentalities of settler colonial Australia. And secondly, by exploring uranium extraction’s contribution to the consolidation of the British Empire’s waning power in the mid-twentieth century.

Jessica Urwin & Rohan Howitt (eds), Special Issue of International Review of Environmental History on “Histories and Legacies of Extraction and Toxicity”.
The histories and legacies of extraction and toxicity are innumerable. Globally, these forces have both facilitated and been a by-product of industrial growth, technological advancement and nation-building for centuries, but so too have they enabled and exacerbated environmental degradation, structural inequality, and the continued colonisation of lands and peoples. In addressing the histories and legacies of extraction and toxicity, this special issue of the International Review of Environmental History draws attention to several of the most pressing themes taken up by historians dealing with these processes. The papers within explore how extraction and toxicity have been woven into the colonial fabric of various countries, the ways that the exploitation and contamination of specific landscapes have come to define the history of such places and spaces, the response of various groups to these processes, and the extent to which long-term environmental consequences wrought by extractive practices and their toxic by-products are—in many cases—yet to be revealed. The articles in this special issue span Australia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Southern Ocean, consider the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, and draw on a range of disciplinary methods and perspectives. What binds them together is a deep engagement with the significant legacies of extraction and toxicity that endure into the present and inform contemporary environmental debates.

Josh Woodward. “Making a modern marketing machine: the New South Wales Government Tourist Bureau, 1905⎼1914,” Journal of Tourism History 16, no. 1 (2024), pp. 55-72.
This article explores the promotion of the Blue Mountains by the NSW Tourist Bureau from the organisation’s formation in 1905 to the beginning of the First World War in 1914. It draws on archival material and promotional ephemera to detail how the Blue Mountains became an important destination in the promotion of New South Wales overseas and within Australia. Emerging beliefs about science contributed to the Bureau’s construction of the Blue Mountains as a sublime landscape, as did emerging technologies in printing and photographic manipulation. As the Bureau constructed ideas about Australian nature and identity, they perpetuated the myth that Indigenous people were a ‘dwindling’ race. Exploring the extent to which Hunter’s Bureau crafted an Anglo-Saxon vision of the Blue Mountains that advanced a settler claim to the land, whilst simultaneously expunging the claims of Indigenous people, is a central theme of this article.

Fire and Water

Susan Broomhall. “Early Modern Histories of Fire on the Australian Continent,” The English Historical Review (2024).
This essay explores early modern European records of fire behaviours on the Australian continent. In particular, it analyses the perspectives provided in hitherto relatively unexplored records of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and situates these in relation to contemporary English and later French and British accounts of fire practices. It argues that knowledge, use and textual record of fire practices constituted a key form of power for Europeans, a site of invasion and a tool of violence. Fire produced knowledge of people, of their resources and of their technologies, particularly their weaponry. Fire could be harnessed for European possession. Fire communicated distinctiveness in these records, marking a boundary between Aboriginal peoples and Europeans, and, on some occasions, interactions around fire with Indigenous people aimed to transition local peoples to new technologies and to presumed civilisation. In their own practices, in their perceptions of Aboriginal fire behaviours and in the written accounts that they produced from their experiences, Europeans form part of the story of early modern histories of Antipodean fire. Understanding what such sources reveal and what they obscure can assist in situating them appropriately in modern discussions about historic fire behaviours on the Australian continent.

Jacqui Ewart and Margaret Cook. “Mind the gap, exploring the expectation gap in political leadership in disasters: An Australian case study,” Risk, Hazards & Crisis in Public Policy (2024).
This article uses expectation gap theory to explore news coverage of the leadership performance of a national political leader in a major bushfire disaster in Australia. It does so to identify the types of behaviors and leadership that leader enacted and embodied during these events and what fire-affected communities expected that politician to do in that disaster. Using a case study approach to the Black Summer bushfires that occurred in Australia in late 2019 and early 2020, it highlights the way Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison engaged with affected individuals and communities during and after that disaster. We draw on news media coverage as the disaster unfolded and in the months that followed to analyze his leadership and what others expected of him in those events. We find that in this disaster there was a significant gap between the Australian Prime Minister’s leadership and community expectations of that leadership. Our article highlights how the expectation gap played out in news coverage of the fires and why the expectation gap matters.

Margaret Cook. “The Flood Blame Game: A Brisbane Case Study,” Australian Garden History 35, 3 (2024), pp. 4-7.
Floods may be natural, caused by heavy or intense rain over an extended period – but without humans are not disasters. They are part of a climatic cycle that provides rain to replenish rivers, restore ecological systems and rejuvenate riverbanks with alluvial soil. It is the decision by humans to live and build on the floodplain that can have calamitous consequences. As cities develop, socio-cultural factors of economic and population growth, real estate pressure and town planning rules and government decisions steadily create the flood hazard.

Margaret Cook. “Natural hazards: The future of learning is already here,” The Australian Journal of Emergency Management 39, no. 1 (2024), pp. 6⎼7.
When floods occur, humans have a habit of looking for someone to blame. Rather than examine the underlying human-induced causes behind the disaster, it is easier and palatable to blame others and this avoids awkward issues of culpability. But in doing so, it can remove the opportunity to reduce the effects of future hazard events.

Justin Buckley, David Chasworth, Taylor Coyne, Alexis Farr, Laura Harper, Xavier Ho, Ana Lara Heyns, Sonia Leber, Maria de Lourdes Melo Zurita, and Oscar Raby. “Listen-Look up! Listen-Look down! Experiencing the counter-city through a sonic and augmented reality experience in urban undergrounds in southeast Melbourne,” Cities 142 (2023), 104513.
This paper is set in Nairm/Port Phillip Bay (Melbourne, Australia) – specifically in Boon Wurrung Country – across and below the watery landscapes that once characterised the south-eastern shore of Port Phillip Bay. Here, water springs and wetlands were gradually dredged, drained, filled, piped underground, or built over through processes of settler colonial urbanisation. Nevertheless, waters must always flow, and ecologies find remarkable ways to survive, especially underground. This paper discusses how an interactive sound and augmented reality (AR) experience can help us to reconnect histories of water, soils, and non-humans that inhabit the underground pipes and other water infrastructures in the urban. The paper uses as a case study The Rippon Lea Estate, a colonial house and pleasure gardens currently managed by the National Trust Australia, to explore the hidden and underground water narratives and materialities that underpin it. Through our collaborative project between the Trust, Universities and the Boon Wurrung Foundation, we have grappled with the question of how to invite visitors to Rippon Lea to engage ethically and care-fully with undergrounds, groundwaters and the histories they represent. This paper shares this counter-experience, inviting readers to immerse themselves in the layers of storytelling, materiality and the beings that traverse these realms.

Lorinda Cramer. “‘All the Men at the Pump’: Water, Wool, and Squatter Anne Drysdale’s Diaries, 1840⎼1851,” Australian Historical Studies (2024).
Australian wool-growing has long been cast by most writers as a masculine endeavour, from the male squatters who took great swathes of land to run their sheep, displacing First Peoples and transforming ecosystems in the process, to the shearers who became the embodiment of hardy bush masculinity. The pastoral insights recorded by Anne Drysdale in her diaries spanning the 1840s, however, provide rich insights into a female engagement with the industry. In focusing on Drysdale and her partner Caroline Newcomb as part of the renewed interest in ‘invisible farmers’, this article considers their interactions with water. It examines how Drysdale recorded the rain and the river, allowing us to trace her multifaceted uses of them. As her account indicates, water was an economic safeguard and a productive resource essential to the squatting enterprise, as well as a means for neighbourly connection, a source of pleasure, and a site of danger.

Sue Jackson, Erin O’Donnell, Lee Godden, Marcia Langton, “Ontological Collisions in the Northern Territory’s Aboriginal Water Rights Policy,” Oceania 93, no. 3 (2024), pp. 259⎼281.
Amid a renewed push to extract water for agriculture and mining, Indigenous advocacy in northern Australia has resulted in the introduction of a new water allocation mechanism: a reserve of water to be retained for the use and benefit of Indigenous communities. Our socio-legal analysis of the Oolloo Water Allocation Plan shows that the Strategic Aboriginal Water Reserves carry essential hallmarks of neoliberal property relations and are founded in the modernist mode of regulating extracted water as a commodity divisible from land, amenable to partitioning and disarticulated from socio-cultural relations. Informed by ethnographic material from the Daly River region gathered over almost a century, we describe the hydro-social relations that are created through customary traditions and practices, water planning and licencing, and the interaction between different scales of water movement and decision-making by both the state and Traditional Owners. The paper contributes in several ways to research that has identified ontological conflicts as central to disagreements over water and pointed to the difficulty of articulating theoretical framings of ontological difference with the practical work of water negotiations. It shows how the new Indigenous water rights discourse that coincided with the commodification of water in wider Australia shaped the way in which Aboriginal people of this region have more recently articulated their relationships to the Daly River and the limits to state recognition of those relationships. We find that the Reserve model is unable to recognize the capacity of water to connect and unify people and other beings, as well as to define boundaries between them. Within a regime that facilitates resource extraction, a limited opening has been created for Aboriginal people to benefit from this model of economic development, yet we argue that there is reason to fear that the divisions the Aboriginal Water Reserve enacts between waters and land presents significant socio-cultural risks.

Susan Lawrence and Peter Davies. “In need of improvement: archaeological evidence of river management in South-Eastern Australia,” Water History (2024).
Patterns of river modification since settler invasion of southern Australia are the product of a specific set of deep-seated and implicit cultural values concerning the purpose and function of waterways. Rivers have been dammed, diverted, dredged and straightened to meet a range of human needs and objectives. Such changes are routinely described as ‘improvements’ but there is a lack of critical engagement with what ‘improvement’ might mean. Interventions carried out initially on an ad hoc basis, and later more systematically with state support, collectively shed light on the persistent underlying drive to ‘Improve’ nature and society that has permeated Western thought since the Enlightenment. Here we use the example of one river system, the Loddon, to analyse ways in which Improvement intersected with settler engagement with Australian rivers. We argue that settler interventions have been informed by a consistent set of understandings about the purpose of rivers. The characteristics of water management infrastructure along the Loddon reveal how the river fell short of the settler-colonial ideal and why they thought it needed to be Improved at all.

Julie McIntyre. “Bulk Wine from Big Water in a Dry Land,” Environmental History 29, no. 3 (2024), pp. 552⎼567.
To retain a “taste of place” or terroir, some French fine wine production prohibits engineered irrigation of wine grapes, relying instead upon precipitation. As grapevines as sensitive to overwatering, this measure aims to protect the delicate sensory qualities of luxury wine brands as a sort of comestible art form. The Bourgogne, a region that epitomizes French terroir-style wines – as well as other less venerated wine regions around the world – traditionally expect to receive sufficient rainfall in the Vitis vinifera growing season and so do not require irrigation. This is not true for the vineyards of Australia, the planet’s most arid continent. Its temperate latitudes for the most part receive sparser rainfall than Europe, and in some regions that rainfall comes at times that do not suit the grape growing season. Australia has few mountainous landforms and rivers and comparatively little arable soil for European-style agriculture. For these reasons, alongside cultural ones, Australia has a different wine history from that of Europe.

Ruth Morgan. “Sanitary Citizenship in the Settler Colonial City: Race, health, and hygiene in interwar urban Australia,” in M. Newlands, and C. Hensen (eds) Critical Approaches to the Australian Blue Humanities, London: Routledge, 2024, pp. 69⎼81.
This chapter argues for the closer integration of historical analyses of hydrosocial relations into the blue humanities by attending to the expressions and consequences of sanitary citizenship in urban settler Australia. Focusing on interwar Perth, Darwin, and Melbourne, this chapter reveals the ways that freshwater has been historically implicated in the social and moral fabric of settler Australian cities. In these growing cities, the availability of clean freshwater supplies was a means for authorities to govern both urban spaces as well as the raced, classed, and gendered bodies that resided in them. Practices of sanitary surveillance allowed for the exclusion and inclusion of particular bodies, according to their perceived ability and willingness to conform to the expectations of the sanitary state. As the examples in this chapter suggest, this regime provided for the rise of a discriminatory sanitary order that especially marginalised non-white bodies in order to physically and morally protect the settler colonial city.

Cassandra Rowe, Corey J. A. Bradshaw and Michael Bird. “Indigenous fire management began more than 11,000 years ago: new research,” The Conversation (12 March 2024).
Wildfire burns between 3.94 million and 5.19 million square kilometres of land every year worldwide. If that area were a single country, it would be the seventh largest in the world. In Australia, most fire occurs in the vast tropical savannas of the country’s north. In new research published in Nature Geoscience, we show Indigenous management of fire in these regions began at least 11,000 years ago – and possibly as long as 40,000 years ago.

Teresa Shewry and Philip Steer. “Uncertain Waters and Irony in Australian Settler Literatures,” Environmental Humanities 16, no. 2 (2024), pp. 351⎼370.
Critics are increasingly recognizing the presence of irony in environmental cultures, often stressing its ability to highlight disjunctions between the individual’s convictions and their compromised behaviors. This article extends this work by taking up the relationship between irony and settler-colonial imaginaries in writings about unpredictable bodies of water. Focusing on settler writing in Australia, the article juxtaposes nineteenth-century author Henry Lawson and contemporary novelist Jane Rawson to argue that irony constitutes a form of environmental knowledge, calling up norms and hierarchies regarding water but also creating openings toward waters that cannot be given meaning. Lawson’s writings about ephemeral rivers and lakes stress their divergence from metropolitan ideas of water’s continuity, presence, and visibility. Largely ignoring Indigenous peoples’ relationships with water, his ironies of overturned expectations and norms make contact with but also disparage water in unfamiliar forms. By contrast, Rawson’s A Wrong Turn at the Office of Unmade Lists (2013) employs irony to grasp how climate-changed floodwater disrupts settler norms founded upon the erasure of floodplains and of Indigenous and colonial histories of urban rivers. Juxtaposing Rawson with Lawson illuminates an ongoing need to be cautious about the ideals that irony may evoke in response to changing and uncertain waters. At the same time, irony provides a multivalent tool to critically address what Mark Rifkin calls “settler common sense,” to glimpse the persistence of Indigenous knowledge and perspectives, and to acknowledge occluded forms of environmental agency.

Alexandra Crosby, Ilaria Vanni, and Shannon Foster, The Green Square Atlas of Water Stories (Mapping Edges, 2024).
The Green Square Atlas of Water Stories maps, materialises and activates social and environmental histories and practices of water in Green Square. We invite you to choose a portal through which you can enter the archives and flow through time and space. Be guided by a camellia, a pub sign and a dugong. Take a walk in the area before, during or after. The Green Square Atlas is brought to you by the Mapping Edges Research Studio at the University of Technology Sydney.

David Waldron, Kelly Ann Blake and Shannen Mennen. “In the 1800s, colonial settlers moved Ballarat’s Yarrowee River. The impacts are still felt today.” The Conversation (3 November 2023).
The discovery of gold in Ballarat in 1851 transformed its landscape to a staggering degree. Within days, and despite the news being initially suppressed, hundreds of men had gathered along the Yarrowee River. Over the next few weeks, the waterways of the Yarrowee River and of Gnarr Creek were diverted into water courses to support the search for gold. Our new interactive map, Yarrowee River History: Peel to Prest (which takes its name from the two streets that serve as borders for the mapping), interrogates the long-term effects of this water diversion on community and Country. A collaboration between Federation University, the Wadawurrung Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation and the city of Ballarat, our project overlays historical maps with Google Maps to illustrate how the area changed.

Environmental Governance

Alessandro Antonello and Margaret Cook. “Environmental historians, policy, and governance” in Emily O’Gorman, William San Martín, Mark Carey, and Sandra Swart (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Environmental History, London: Routledge, 2023, pp. 399⎼412.
This chapter explores how environmental historians might interact with, and have interacted with, policymaking and the broader suite of environmental governance that operates at many jurisdictional scales. It offers frameworks, concepts, and examples for the historian’s toolbox. It explores the nature of “policy” and encourages historians to appreciate the significant and complex policy studies literature. It touches upon the larger tradition of “historians and policy”, especially as practiced in the United States and Britain. The chapter then focuses on a range of specific areas and challenges in which historians have demonstrated skill and effectiveness in contributing to environmental policymaking, including around access to environmental data and information, in cultivating and encouraging policy deliberation and community engagement, and in participating in interdisciplinary “communities of practice” for environmental policymaking and ongoing practice. The weight of experience and evidence from historians and other scholars participating in policymaking suggests that contributing to policymaking and governance is difficult and time consuming, and that sustained work must be combined with patience and tenacity to achieve even small improvements and changes.

Jamie Ashworth. “‘Forever changed’: Women, Revelation, and the Apocalypse in Wellington, New Zealand, 1846⎼1853,” Arcandia, June 2024.
It is impossible to document the literary and environmental history of Aotearoa without acknowledging the Apocalyptic forces that have shaped the archipelago. Against the usual assertion that “Apocalypses imply that humans have no control over what will happen,” the changes wrought by colonialism were imposed by people upon others, and, by extension, their environments. The country’s environment, in particular, serves as a reminder of the intensity of the programme of “systematic colonisation” employed by the British Crown in its mission to exploit the natural resources under their occupation. One example is that of Wellington, first colonised by the imperialist New Zealand Company in 1839. The region consists of a series of valleys and hills, once mostly covered in forest, swamps, and temperate grassland. With the arrival of European colonists, these environments would be appropriated and irreversibly altered, pushing Māori to the wayside as their land was acquired and exploited.

Alexander Boyd. “Protect the land. Poison the sea. An environmental history of the Kirkcudbright Training Area and the firing of depleted uranium by the British Army (1982⎼2013),” Sociology Compass 18, no. 1 (2024), e13133.
Located in the South West of Scotland, the Kirkcudbright Training Area, alongside the extensive Dundrennan weapons ranges, have been used since the Second World War for the training of the British Army. From the Cold War to today, Dundrennan has been the testing ground for the majority of British armoured vehicles, and the controversial firing of depleted uranium shells which took place from 1982 to 2013. This paper examines the response to the firings from protestors, campaigners and environmental campaign groups, and outlines why Scottish nationalists found common ground with them in opposing the actions of the Ministry of Defence (MOD). The response by the MOD, and in particular the Defence Infrastructure Organisation (DIO), to accusations of environmental mismanagement of the site are also discussed here. This counter narrative, which stresses the role of military conservation practices (known as ‘khaki conservation’) disseminated through the DIO publication Sanctuary is also scrutinised, noting the tensions between the requirements of the military and its environmental impact.

Amelia Hine, Chris Gibson, and Chantel Carr. “Green hydrogen regions: emergent spatial imaginaries and material politics of energy transition,” Regional Studies 58, no. 8 (2024), pp. 1618⎼1635.
This paper analyses the discursive and material politics of energy transition, focusing on promotion of Australian industrial regions as ‘green hydrogen hubs’. Regions are key spatial imaginaries in transition projects promoted by state-capitalist coalitions. First-to-market investments target regions with suitable infrastructures and workforces, anticipating future decarbonised energy markets. Yet, far from an orderly transition, such projects confront competing regional imaginaries and conflicts across governance scales, with hydrogen’s troublesome material limitations precipitating hedging tactics among established energy-intensive firms. Scholars of decarbonisation, ‘green capitalism’ and energy transitions must pay closer attention to materiality and the complexity of regional contestations and asymmetries.

Ruth Morgan. Climate Change and International History: Negotiating Science, Global Change, and Environmental Justice, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024.
Exploring how climate change has configured the international arena since the 1950s, this book reveals the ways that climate change emerged and evolved as an international problem, and how states, scientists and non-governmental organizations have engaged in diplomatic efforts to address it. Developing amidst the Cold War, decolonization and a growing transnational environmental consciousness, it asks how this wider historical context has shaped international responses to the greatest threat to humankind to date. Thinking beyond the science of climate change to the way it is received and responded to, Ruth Morgan shows how climate science has been mobilised in the political sphere, paying particular attention to the North-South dynamics of climate diplomacy. The privileging of climate science and the mobilisation of climate scepticism are explored to consider how they have undermined efforts to remedy this planetary problem. Studying climate change and international history in tandem, this book explains the origins of the debates around this environmental emergency, the response of political leaders attempting to address the threat, and the barriers to creating an international regime to resolve the climate crisis.

Paul Govind, Donna Houston, Michelle Lim, Andrew McGregor, Emily O’Gorman, Sandie Suchet-Pearson, and Jonathan Symons. “Offsetting,” Environmental Humanities 16, no. 2 (2024), pp. 426⎼432.
This lexicon brings together perspectives from the environmental humanities and law to examine “biodiversity offsetting” as enabling deeply problematic, neoliberal, and settler-colonial concepts, sets of practices and regulatory frameworks that are becoming increasingly common within planning law. We argue below that the concept of “slow violence” helps to explain the cumulative destruction enabled by biodiversity offsetting practices. More specifically, legal and regulatory frameworks that support biodiversity offsetting perpetuate damaging nature-culture “hyper-separations” that proliferate slow violence in diverse contexts.

Gender

Harrison Croft. “‘Are you happy now?’: women gauge readers and postwar Victoria,” History Australia 21, no. 2 (2024), pp. 244⎼260.
Victoria’s State Rivers and Water Supply Commission employed more than 150 gauge readers in the postwar period. Theirs was a unique labour: not quite a volunteer role, not quite a career. Gauge readers were often the wives and daughters of farming men, and their remuneration was meagre. This article explores the informal remarks left by the gauge readers on the forms they supplied to the Commission and finds intersections that further add to the dynamic labour histories of postwar Victoria. This article argues that the gauge readers utilised the forms effectively to bargain for improved labour conditions, despite their geographical and hierarchical distance from the Commission’s central office in Melbourne.

Ruby Ekkel. “Real Men Don’t Kill Koalas: Gender and Conservationism in the Queensland Koala Open Season of 1927,” Australian Historical Studies, published online 31 July 2024.
In July 1927, the Queensland state government declared an open season on koalas, in which more than 600,000 koalas were shot, poisoned, or trapped. In the broad-based and emotional backlash which ensued, gender ideologies featured significantly. Concepts of authentically Australian forms of masculinity and femininity were mobilised in attempts to end the destruction; koala-killing was framed as a debasement of an idealised ‘bushman’ identity and koala fur wearing as a betrayal of an idealised category of inherently caring womanhood. The interests of parents and children came to the fore in a campaign concerned with preserving the popular ‘native bear’ for the enjoyment of future generations. This article draws out how gendered understandings of koalas and koala-killing contributed to the animals’ reclassification from an economic resource to an anthropomorphised friend and symbol, whose slaughter was conceived by many as unmanly and un-Australian.

Katie Holmes and Karen Twigg. “Saving Hattah Lakes: Changing Masculinities and the Campaigns for a National Park, 1900⎼1960,” Australian Historical Studies (2024), pp. 1⎼21.
Hattah Lakes is a network of lakes in Victoria’s north-west in a region known as the Mallee. This article focuses on three white men who were critical to saving the Lakes: a bushman, a naturalist, and a scientist. All recognised the unique nature of the Lakes and each operated within changing understandings of masculinity as they sought to protect the Lakes from development. These three men viewed the Lakes as a place of natural beauty and abundant wildlife which needed to be cherished and protected, but they were also men who in different ways profited directly or indirectly from the exploitation of the land. Their relationships to the Lakes were shaped by gendered and racial ideologies that privileged different ways of knowing the area: as a bush landscape; as a wonderland of birds and trees; as a sophisticated natural system to be studied.

Ruth Morgan. “‘Propagandists for the Soil’: Gender, Erosion and the Murray Valley in the Mid-Twentieth Century,” Australian Historical Studies (2024).
This article studies the contributions of a trio of settler Australian women to a wider conversation about soil and water conservation in the Australian Alps in the mid-twentieth century. The women discussed here began their interventions during the war years and continued their efforts into the immediate postwar decade. Their education and labour as well as, to varying degrees, their family’s affluence and esteem, and wartime afforded these women new opportunities to engage directly with the challenges of soil degradation and to share the insights they drew from these firsthand experiences. Focusing on the contributions of Jocelyn Henderson, Maisie Fawcett and Elyne Mitchell, this article argues that soil conservation in 1940s and 1950s southeastern Australia was a profoundly gendered project that only gained legitimacy and authority as its importance became recognised by state governments.

History of Science

Warwick Anderson. “Islands and Beaches in Science and Technology Studies,” Science, Technology, & Human Values (2024).
The Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) annually awards the John Desmond Bernal Prize to one or more individuals who have made distinguished contributions to the field of Science and Technology Studies. Past winners have included founders of the field, along with outstanding scholars who have devoted their careers to the understanding of the social dimensions of science and technology. This article is the revised text of Warwick Anderson’s 2023 Bernal Lecture.

Jarrod Hore. “History of the Earth Sciences from the South,” Handbook of the Historiography of the Earth and Environmental Sciences (2023), pp. 1⎼21.
The history of the earth sciences has predominantly revolved around the accumulation of knowledge within north Atlantic institutions and networks. This chapter examines a range of recent attempts to resituate this narrative within wider frames and argues for the particular importance of southern perspectives. By exploring southern archives, materials, knowledges, and networks, it becomes evident that the development of modern thinking about the planet extends well beyond the European revelation of deep time. Incorporating these perspectives reveals the interplay between Indigenous geomythologies, imperial and colonial struggles, and concurrent investments in the earth and its pasts within a globalized world. While histories of geology and geoscience have traditionally focused on the construction of new temporalities, this chapter proposes that historians should consider spatiality alongside temporality. By embracing the spatial axis of earth science, historians can gain a more comprehensive understanding of the subfield, accounting for material, political, anthropological, and potentially postcolonial dimensions. I suggest that this exploration of a place-line – how horizons of possible thought differ from place to place – within the history of the earth sciences offers promising avenues for future research.

Guy Geltner. “Public Health in Preindustrial Europe: Urban and Rural Practices,” Medicina nei secoli. Journal of History of Medicine and Medical Humanities 36, no. 1 (2024).
Recent revisions to the medical history of western Europe between the twelfth and sixteenth century established that public health far predates Euro-American modernity and straddles the urban/rural divide and diverse occupational groups. Like numerous past societies, this civilization too monitored behaviors and manipulated environments in order to improve health outcomes by combining a culturally specific common sense with a prevalent natural-philosophical paradigm, in this case Galenism. The present review explains some of the preventative programs that urban and rural communities in Europe devised at the time, and their scientific and spiritual underpinnings. Beyond disputing these groups’ longstanding reputation for hygienic apathy and ignorance, the broadened historical perspective shows that practicing public health can mean different things in different contexts.

Peter B. McQuillan, Ted Edwards, and Jenny Camilleri. “Oswald Bertram Lower (1864⎼1925): A South Australian Pioneer in the Discovery of Australia’s Biodiversity,” Historical Records of Australian Science 35 (2024), pp. 1⎼15.
An Adelaide-born pharmacist, Oswald B. Lower, is a neglected figure in the pantheon of early Australian amateur entomologists. Specialising in Lepidoptera, he worked mainly around Adelaide and Broken Hill where he discovered hundreds of new species, especially in the semi-arid zone of southern Australia. Lower named almost 1000 valid new species between 1892 and 1923 based upon his own material and specimens sourced from contacts in other parts of Australia. His legacy of 40 000 specimens, assembled between the 1880s and early 1920s, forms the nucleus of the outstanding Lepidoptera collection at the South Australian Museum. Many are sourced from locations now lost or degraded and the collection will be an invaluable tool in the emerging challenge of habitat restoration in Australia.

Libby Robin. “Joan Burton Paton (1916—2000),” Australian Dictionary of Biography, online 7 February 2024.
Joan Burton Paton (1916–2000), ornithologist, biochemist, educator, and conservationist, was born on 1 September 1916 at Neutral Bay, Sydney, youngest of five children of (Sir) John Burton Cleland, medical practitioner, microbiologist, and pathologist, and his wife Dora Isabel, née Paton, both South Australian born. When Joan was three her father was appointed professor of pathology at the University of Adelaide and the family relocated to South Australia. After her paternal grandmother died on 31 March 1928 they moved into the historic Cleland family home, Gleeville-under-the-Hills, at Beaumont, where she lived for the rest of her life.

Jessica Urwin. “Pamela Anne Wills (1927-1999),” Australian Dictionary of Biography, online 2024.
Pamela Anne Wills (1927–1999), research biologist and radiology scientist, was born on 4 December 1927 at Rockdale, Sydney, elder child of Sydney-born parents Alec Prideaux Wills, analytical chemist, and his wife Marjorie Winifred Sarah, née Goodman. At the time of her death, she was the only woman scientist to have reached the position of senior principal research scientist at the AAEC. In describing her last months, the bulletin reflected her stoicism and persistence in the face of hardship, characteristics that had enabled her career to flourish, irrespective of the challenges she faced as a woman in radiation science.

More-than-Human Histories

Stephen Muecke, Alessandro Antonello, Tully Barnett, Amy T. Matthews, and Stephen Zagala. “Nine Methodological Principles for the Posthumanities,” in A. Franklin (ed.) The Routledge International Handbook of More-than-Human Studies, Routledge, 2023, pp. 361⎼375.
This chapter expands on nine methodological principles in the posthumanities as an emergent research area. Posthuman thought, as it decolonises the relationships between the human and the non-human, is forging a practical conceptual architecture and set of methods to investigate and enact connectedness, belonging and responsibility. In the process, enlightenment naturalism, rationality and secularism are contrasted with non-Western systems that have invented concepts that slide across the nature/culture binary. These principles pragmatically and materially consider human and posthuman questions, focussing in particular on the capacity for artworks to provide embodied syntheses of the concepts and methods in posthumanities’ research. These artistic expressions model the creativity and flexibility required for humanity to adapt to its new habitats and environmental crises. We propose Indigenous territorial modes of belonging, with their techniques of ecological management, as correctives to destructive modernisation. These corrections occur through embodied, cooperative, collaborative and respectful approaches to thinking beyond the human, to the posthuman, and more-than-human, ecologies, economies, habitats and living Earth systems.

Claire Brennan. “Writing the More-than-Human History of Northern Australia’s Many Waters: Environmental history, the blue humanities, and the challenge of entanglement,” in Maxine Newlands, and Claire Hensen (eds) Critical Approaches to the Australian Blue Humanities, Routledge, 2023, pp. 46⎼57.
This chapter explores the ways in which Australian history is framed, and the place of inland and oceanic waters in the thinking of Australia’s historians. Where water features in Australian history, it tends to be inland rather than oceanic, and such waters and their unreliable presence have also informed Australian environmental historians in their writing of the Australian continent’s more-than-human history. However, Australia is surrounded by ocean, and the blue humanities offers Australian environmental historians an opportunity to reframe the history of the continent to include all its waters and the ways in which they mingle. This chapter argues that tropical North Queensland offers a useful region in which to explore the entanglements of continent and coast, of fresh and salt waters, and that environmental history can be enriched by such an approach.

Gay Hawkins and Ben Dibley. Making Animals Public: Inside the ABC’s natural history archive, Sydney: Sydney University Press 2024.
Making Animals Public: Inside the ABC’s Natural History Archive traces the cultural and political evolution of the natural history animal on the ABC. It explores different modes of capture from cages to cameras; what has come to count as a natural history animal over time; and the various sites they have inhabited – from nature, to the nation, to the environment, to the planet. In early natural history programs audiences were invited to watch as sovereign humans there to learn or be entertained by animals that were exotic or aesthetic or scientifically interesting. Whatever the framing, these animals were resolutely other. In recent times, natural history animals have become more assertive. They are now posing uncomfortable questions to human viewers about exploitation, extinction and mutual implication in catastrophic whole earth processes like climate change. Using a wide range of screen examples ranging from the 1950s to the 2020s, Making Animals Public focuses on shifting cultural and sociotechnical practices in ABC natural history television. Combining science and technology studies, screen studies and critical animal studies, this book develops an innovative interdisciplinary analysis of how televisual animality is crafted and made believable.

Ruby Ekkel. “Mimicking Lyrebirds in Multispecies History,” Environment and History 30, no. 2 (2024).
On 5 July 1931, Australian radio listeners in all mainland states could switch on their wireless sets to hear the sounds of squawking cockatoos, cackling kookaburras, morose mopoke owls, and twittering pilot-birds broadcast into their living rooms. City-dwellers responded enthusiastically, commenting on feelings of intimacy with a geographically distant bush environment. The novel programming by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) was apparently discussed ‘at every turn’ in the following days.1 One man, whose friends invited him to a shared listening in their home, recalled how the nearby bells of St Paul’s Cathedral in Melbourne melded with the layered natural soundscape emitting from the radio.2 Later, the transmission was conveyed to Tasmania and then, with more difficulty, to Europe and the United States, where it was apparently a ‘hit’.3 Only one animal, however, was being broadcast over the airwaves: a male superb lyrebird nick-named Joe, who lived in Sherbrooke Forest, Victoria.

Simon Farley. “Flora and Failure: a History of Plants and People on the Parkville Campus”. In Dhoombak Goobgoowana: A History of Indigenous Australia and the University of Melbourne, Volume 1: Truth, edited by Ross L. Jones, James Waghorne and Marcia Langton Carlton: University of Melbourne Publishing, 2024.
This chapter explores the history of plants and those who have studied them on the Parkville campus of the University of Melbourne. It begins with an examination of the use of various plants in the pre-colonial Wurundjeri lifeway, then discusses how both that lifeway and the plant communities it depended on were altered by the establishment of the University in the 1850s. This is followed by a discussion of how Indigenous plant lore has been routinely ignored or dismissed by settler scholars at the University, with a focus on founding professor of botany Alfred James Ewart. Finally, the chapter considers how the gap between Indigenous and settler knowledges about plants might be bridged.’

Simon Farley. “Mateship with Brumbies: Horses, Defiance and Indigeneity in the Australian Alps,” Journal of Australian Studies 47, no. 2 (2023), pp. 256⎼272.
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. “On the Wing: Holidays with the birds,” Australian Birdlife 13 (2024): pp. 40⎼43.
Birdwatching holidays have come a long way in Australia since the early days, but the compelling lure of birds ⎼ and the people who love them ⎼ remains the same.

Emily O’Gorman and Andrea Gaynor. “Histories in, of and for More-than-Human Worlds,” in A. Franklin (ed) The Routledge International Handbook of More-than-Human Studies, London: Routledge, 2023, pp. 308⎼321.
This chapter examines emerging approaches in environmental history that engage with interdisciplinary more-than-human and multispecies scholarship. These more-than-human histories point towards new and possible modes of historical, and indeed wider scholarly, analysis. We contextualise these engagements within broader changes in environmental history since its emergence as a self-conscious sub-discipline in the 1970s, including responses to the growth of the relatively new field of environmental humanities within which more-than-human approaches have flourished. We argue that while more-than-human scholarship and environmental history present some challenges to each other, there are opportunities for both to further enrich their approaches through deeper and sustained dialogue with each other. Here, we outline an established approach to ‘more-than-human histories’ and describe how it can be further extended through an attentiveness to processes of multispecies ‘worlding’ and ‘the arts of noticing’ in historical methods and analysis. We then provide two case studies of more-than-human histories from our own research.

Alison Pouliot. Meetings with Remarkable Mushrooms: Forays with Fungi across Hemispheres, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023.
What can we learn from the lives of fungi? Splitting time between the northern and southern hemispheres, ecologist Alison Pouliot ensures that she experiences two autumns per year in the pursuit of fungi—from Australia’s deserts to Iceland’s glaciers to America’s Cascade Mountains. In Meetings with Remarkable Mushrooms, we journey alongside Pouliot, magnifiers in hand, as she travels the world. With Pouliot as our guide, we smell fire-loving truffles that transform their scent after burning to lure mammals who eat them and, ultimately, spread their spores. We spot the eerie glow of the ghost fungus, a deceptive entity that looks like an edible oyster mushroom but will soon heave back out—along with everything else in your stomach—if you take a bite. And we crawl alongside vegetable caterpillars, which are neither vegetable nor caterpillar but a fungus that devours insects from the inside out. Featuring stunning color photographs of these mycological miracles, Meetings with Remarkable Mushrooms shows that understanding fungi is fundamental for harmonizing with the natural world.

Reviews

Erin Stewart Mauldin. “Enslavers’ Big Lie: Debunking the Relationship of Climate and Slavery,” Agricultural History 98, no. 1 (2024), pp. 103⎼112.

Russell McGregor. “Book review of “John Büsst: Bohemian artist and saviour of reef and rainforest” by Iain McCalman. Sydney, Australia, NewSouth, 2024,” Australian Policy and History 26 (2024).

Russell McGregor. “Book review of” The Fin de Siecle Imagination in Australia” by Mark Hearn. London, UK, Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.” Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 110 (2024), pp. 101⎼103.

Julie McIntyre. “Histories of Global Wine,” Agricultural History 98, no. 2 (2024), pp. 270⎼276.

Jessia Urwin. “Saving the Reef: The Human Story Behind One of Australia’s Greatest Environmental Treasures, by Rohan Lloyd. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2022.” Australian Historical Studies (2024): pp. 1⎼2.

Amanda Wells. “Wells on Asdal and Huse, Nature-Made Economy: Cod, Capital, and the Great Economization of the Ocean”, for H-Environment, March 2024.

Urban and Rural Place and Practice

Jamie Ashworth. “‘To tame what may be wild’: Forestry, conservation and informational dispersal in Wellington Province,” New Zealand Journal of Public History 10(1), 2024, pp. 1⎼19.
After arriving in New Zealand in 1840, the settler-poet William Golder wrote a series of verses on the natural environment in and around his new home of Port Nicholson. In 1853, while staying at Manaia Station, just south of what would become Masterton, Golder turned his focus to the ‘wild’ forests of the Hutt Valley, and how they contrasted with the wide expanses of the Wairarapa plains. In this poem – simply entitled Thoughts on the Wairarapa – Golder went on to lament that the ‘belts of forests’ that dotted Wairarapa’s landscapes, though they would ‘break the force of storms’ for station-owners, amounted to little more than ‘waste wilds’. Golder’s writings exemplify a conflict that was occurring within settler society, and an often overlooked aspect of settler colonialism as a whole: the ‘problem’ of what colonists should do about the ‘wild, desolate forest’ that then covered much of New Zealand.

Mark Butz. Tales from two cities: Canberra-Queanbeyan across two centuries, Canberra: Learnscapes, 2024.
We take a lot for granted about how cities come to be what they are, how they continue to satisfy or else evolve into a different form, and who has helped to make these things happen. Queanbeyan and Canberra are distinct cities that sit side-by-side. They share a lot of history, despite being in different jurisdictions, and despite differences in age, origin and size. This work combines elements of environmental and social history to outline how the two came to be together, how they have grown up together and influenced each other over time, how the image and identity of each has evolved, and how attitudes have changed in both directions. A sweeping selection of ‘tales’ highlights some of the people who have played roles, large and small, in shaping the two cities across two centuries, and some of the events and ‘icons’ that express the respective characters of the two cities. The people have come from many different countries and have played many different roles. Despite some great challenges, together they represent hope, enterprise and hard work, and they inspire pride in the places where we live. Beyond shared history, the two cities have a shared stake in the future. Each will be stronger because of the other, and because of the efforts of those on whose shoulders we stand.

Robyn Dunlop. “Environmental and Colonial Histories: Art, Memoir and Gardens in the Flinders Ranges, South Australia,” Journal of Australian Studies 48, no. 3 (2024), pp. 396⎼409.
This article is concerned with a pressing question of the 21st century: how do we negotiate places with complex colonial pasts? In the Mid North of South Australia, rugged mountain ranges rise up from stony plains. Adnyamathanha-speaking people have lived here and maintained connections to Country for tens of thousands of years. In the late 1920s, artist Hans Heysen travelled to the area known as the Flinders Ranges and stayed at Aroona, an outstation on a pastoral property, painting landscapes of a dry, uninhabited place. At the same time, a memoir of colonial settler J. F. Howard was printed that openly described attempts at dispossession of Aboriginal people for pastoral interests. With a focus on gardens and food in representations of Flinders Ranges landscapes, this article revisits old material with new concerns, arguing that the intersection of environmental and colonial histories offers productive territory for grappling with complex pasts.

John Dwyer. Weeding between the Lines. South Yarra: Australian Garden History Society, 2023.
John Dwyer, KC, brings his legal mind, philosophical training and knowledge gained doing a PhD on weeds, to this collection of essays about plants that some deem to be in the wrong place, and what these tell us about our relationship with nature. These essays make an important contribution to understanding Australia’s cultural landscape. They trace not only the story of how introduced species – indigenous and exotic – came to be part of the landscape but also cast light on how we bring to gardening not only botanical choices but also aesthetic and nostalgic ones. The 200-page book, published by the Australian Garden History Society, which promotes knowledge of historic gardens, significant landscapes and research into their history. It examines gardens and gardening in their widest social, historic, literary, artistic and scientific context.

Ruth Gamble and Alexander E. Davis. “Bordering Ladakh, Again: from Ecological Flows to Cartographic Competition,” Asian Studies Review 48, no. 1 (2024), pp. 179⎼199.
In August 2019, the Indian government dissolved the state of Jammu and Kashmir, designating its Northern region as the Union Territory of Ladakh. Two months later, it released a new Political Map of India on which Ladakh was drawn as one of India’s largest territories. Like most representations of territory on political maps, the claims made were simplified. India’s rendering did not acknowledge that Pakistan and China administered much of Ladakh’s territory; nor did it represent the region’s intricate, multi-ethnic population, topography, or ecosystems. This article approaches the construction of this political map historically. Rather than using regional history to bolster any state’s claims, we argue that the confusion over the map reflects a disconnect between the abstractions of state territory and the realities of high-altitude socio-ecologies. We compare the socio-ecologically and climatically embedded bordering practices of pre-territorial Tibetan–Ladakhi states outlined in local language sources with the abstract understanding of territorialised borders that the new map represents. The Tibetan–Ladakhi approach, which concentrated on pathways and mountain-pass checkpoints, allowed for social and ecological flows around and through these checkpoints. By contrast, the current bordering regimes have bifurcated communities, demanded fixedness, and required three large armies to defend arbitrary borders.

Yuqi Yang, Maria Ignatieva, Andrea Gaynor, and Chundi Chen, “Urban biodiversity in design: Insights into the debate on native versus non-native plants and bees in Western Australia,” Urban Forestry & Urban Greening 98 (2024), 128391.
Native plants in Western Australia have been highly valued in urban environments due to their endemicity, adaptivity to local conditions and their positive impact on local identity. However, the process of urbanisation often leads to the destruction or significant alteration of native landscapes to meet amenity demands and diverse aesthetic preferences, ecological and functional requirements that vary across societies and over time. This paper examines the role of native and non-native plant species in urban areas of Western Australia with particular reference to the needs of bees (both honeybees and Australian native bees). The analysis draws on the perspectives, vision, and practical experiences of landscape practitioners, beekeepers, and ecologists specialising in native bees and plant pollination. The findings suggest that urban biodiversity in Western Australia inherently involves a combination of native and non-native plant species. Consequently, designing plant arrangements that attract a diverse range of pollinators, including both native and non-native bees, necessitates a specific approach. The results showing that all landscape practitioner respondents have used non-native plants in design practices and acknowledged them as a part of urban biodiversity in Western Australia. All ecologist respondents and 31 % of beekeeper respondents agreed on the existence of competition between native and non-native bees. While ecologist respondents emphasised the significance of native plants for native bees, they still hold positive attitude towards the use of non-native plants in urban landscapes. This research provides valuable guidance for designing urban landscapes that support a diverse range of pollinators and contribute to the conservation of biodiversity in Western Australia. Three key guidance for bee botanic garden plant selections are: (1) Promoting interdisciplinary research and collaboration; (2) Maximising site value and ecosystem integration when considering plant selections; and (3) Incorporating diverse plant collections for varied purposes, such as native plant collection, spontaneous gardens, orchards and preserved remnant bush gardens.

Katie Holmes. “The Inspector, the Men and the Mallee: Establishing a Soldier Settlement in 1919⎼20,” in G. Grote, and A. Carlà (eds) Changing Borders and Challenging Belonging: Policy Change and Private Experience, Peter Lang, 2024, pp. 213⎼238.
This edited volume seeks to investigate the repercussions of major political events relating to changing borders and challenges to belonging, and Katie Holmes’ chapter focuses on the Australian context of policy enforcement with the ill- fated settlement scheme of war veterans and their individual plight in the Australian outback. This example demonstrates that a policy which originated in the idea that the state would create a kind of welfare system for its veteran soldiers while, at the same time, continue to colonise the Australian continent could nevertheless have severe consequences on these individuals due to the shortcomings of the plan.

Rebecca Campbell, Kaitlyn Height, Gina Hawkes, Sonia Graham, Silja Schrader, Louise Blessington, and Scott McKinnon. “Meanings, materials and competences of area-wide weed management in cropping systems,” Agricultural Systems 212 (December 2023), 103776.
Area-wide collaboration across private and public property boundaries can enhance the management of weeds and minimise the spread of herbicide resistance. Yet we know little about the practices individual land managers engage in to achieve area-wide weed management (AWWM). This paper uses Social Practice Theory (SPT) as a framework to understand how cropping land managers engage with the practices of AWWM, and what the drivers and barriers are to their participation. 30 qualitative interviews were undertaken with land managers in Australian cropping regions of the Darling Downs (Queensland), Gwydir (New South Wales), Riverina (New South Wales) and Sunraysia (Victoria). Thematic analysis of the interviews explored the three dimensions of SPT—meanings, materials, and competences—of AWWM and the interactions between these elements. Most of the research on collective management of weeds has focused on formal groups in grazing systems. This study provides new insights into how and why weeds are largely managed independently in cropping systems and proposes ways growers may be supported to adopt more collaborative practices to address this landscape-scale problem.

Mike Roche. “Edward Phillips Turner’s 1935 tour of Japanese forests,” Australian Forest History Society Newsletter, 91 (2024), pp. 3⎼7.
In 1935, Edward Phillips Turner, the retired Director of New Zealand’s State Forest Service (SFS), spent six weeks from September to November on a forest tour of Japan. This visit occurred at a time when foresters in New Zealand (NZ) and Australia tended to look to British imperial or continental European forestry as models (Swain’s “heretical” US inspirations excepted). This note revisits his journey, considers his itinerary, and reflects on the place Japan occupied in Phillips Turner’s “forest sense”.

Josh Woodward. “Glorious in Spring, Exhilarating in Winter: Advertising Mount Buffalo in Walkabout Magazine, 1934-1939,” Australian Historical Studies 55, no. 3 (2024), pp. 544⎼564.
This article examines advertisements for Mount Buffalo National Park, published in the Australian National Travel Association (ANTA)’s Walkabout magazine in the mid- to late 1930s. Situating these texts in the wider context of ANTA’s documentary archive, I argue that they reveal how ANTA both intuited and sought to shape middle-class settler Australians’ identification and interaction with nature and the nation. Furthermore, ANTA’s estimation of what kinds of experiences middle-class tourists wanted demonstrates mid-century ideas around harnessing nature for development through mass recreation. These advertisements also evoked an idealised vision of Australian nature as an egalitarian and classless playground, where youthful and healthy settlers enjoyed the nation’s great outdoors. The extent to which this vision was ANTA’s alone and the extent to which ANTA produced it according to its perception of the values and aspirations of Walkabout’s middle-class audience is a key consideration of this article.