Themes
Animals
Narwhals have endured and thrived in their sea-ice environment for at least the past one million years, living in familial pods and following established seasonal migration patterns within the Arctic Ocean. However, they remain a cryptic group of marine animals, avoiding contact with humans, sensitive to oceanic disturbances, with little known about the details of their social and cultural lives. In addition to scientific research, narwhals have also been subjected to Indigenous and Western cultural representation, both historically and in contemporary contexts. While these representations have contrasted markedly with biological interpretations of narwhals, they have proved to be enduring to the point that many people are unsure of the habitat, physiology or even the existence of the elusive marine mammals. Narwhals have been culturally implicated in human lives in ways that conflict with or deny their watery ontology, knowledge and perspectives, or indeed the need to protect their environment. In considering the human and nonhuman cultural relationships that narwhals are a part of, this chapter reflects on how these relationships contribute to narwhal endangerment, and thinks through ways of making space and time for narwhals and their Arctic cohabitants.
Alice Manfield (1878–1960) was a naturalist, photographer, and mountain guide on Mount Buffalo, in southeastern Australia. She embodied emerging ways of understanding and relating to native flora and fauna, publishing the first known photographs of male lyrebirds and attributing her success to long-term familiarity with these endangered animals and their environment. For credibility and emotional appeal, she also invoked her family’s colonial heritage: the Manfields participated in the dispossession of the local Mogullumbidj people and other Indigenous groups for whom Mount Buffalo, or Dordordonga, was sacred. Drawing on her pictorial and literary archive, this article argues that Manfield connected nostalgia for ‘pioneering’ settler colonialism with what were framed as more enlightened, intimate engagements with the threatened environment. In post-Federation Australia, this combination fostered settler territoriality and elided the displacement of Aboriginal people and knowledge. Through her tours and publications, Manfield encouraged deep familiarity with colonised landscapes and strengthened settler affinity with native animals, who were increasingly recruited as affirming indigenes. More broadly, this article is concerned with changing styles of settler-colonial environmental knowledge production and circulation in the early twentieth century, which drew on notions of friendship and benevolent protection while remaining tied to earlier forms of colonial domination.
Through the figure of journalist and philanthropist Edward Wilson (1813–1878), this article explores the settler-colonial dimensions of the mid-nineteenth century acclimatisation movement in Australia. In the latter half of the 1850s, Wilson became obsessed with the new science of acclimatisation, which promoted the transportation of plants and animals across the planet for a variety of purposes. By importing familiar wildlife, especially birds, to Australia from the metropole, Wilson and his fellow acclimatisers hoped to ‘improve’ Australian landscapes and, consequently, the humans dwelling within those landscapes. In doing so, they also aimed to create a likewise ‘improved’ emulation of metropolitan society. By drawing links between Wilson’s promotion of acclimatisation, his rejection of convict transportation, and his interest in ‘civilising’ the Aboriginal peoples of Victoria, this article adumbrates the extent to which settler colonialism has shaped settlers’ feelings towards and interactions with flora and fauna.
Jean French, and Russell McGregor, “Cranespotting: Billie Gill, birding pioneer”; in: Australian Birdlife 14 (2025) pp. 34−37.
Women birders in this country don’t get enough recognition. This article helps redress that neglect by honouring one of Australia’s greatest woman birders, Billie Gill (1923-2015). She was one of a trio of birdwatchers who, on the Normanton floodplains on a steamy October morning in 1966, realised that the Brolga-like birds in front of them were not Brolgas at all. Thus the Sarus Crane was added to the Australian list. She became so renowned for her birding expertise that her home in Innisfail, north Queensland, became a mecca for visiting birders, local and international. Her conservation efforts extended beyond birds, into, among others, the save the reef campaigns of the 1960s and 70s. All this and much more were achieved while Billie was busy raising her eight children, making ends meet, and caring for her husband who was in poor health from his war service. Her life and achievements deserve to be honoured and doing so will help raise the profile of women birders more generally.
Russell McGregor, Enchantment by Birds: A history of birdwatching in 22 species (Scribe, 2024).
Enchantment by birds is commonplace. Birdwatchers merely go a step further than others and actively seek to be enchanted. This book tells why they take that extra step. It takes the reader on a series of excursions into birdwatching’s past, venturing forward to the present. With an intriguing cast of characters, avian as well as human, its lively narratives explore the emotional and aesthetic impulses behind the pastime as well as its scientific and conservationist components. Its stories of 22 Australian birds range widely: from wordy squabbles over bird names to the artistic finessing of field guides; from the Paradise Parrot’s tragic fall into extinction to the everyday enjoyment of a Magpie’s carol; from the evolution of citizen science to the boom in birding tourism. Interlacing them all is the insight that birdwatching is a means by which modern, urban people reach out to touch the wild. A primal desire to connect with nature lies at the heart of the pastime. Enchantment by Birds not only offers a compelling exposition of what makes birders tick; it also tells us, imaginatively and informatively, why birds have a special place in our hearts.
The American, Roger Tory Peterson, has been the single most influential figure in the evolution of birding field guides around the world. He was also a major contributor to the awakening of an environmental consciousness among the wider public in the second half of the twentieth century. In Australia, he provided a powerful impetus to the renovation of the field guide genre from the 1960s onward; and his Australian followers, like Peterson himself, were driven by a conviction that field guides are potent contributors to the conservationist cause. This article explores the myriad ways in which Peterson helped shape Australian birding field guides, including an exposition of his personal friendship with one of Australia’s major field guide authors, Graham Pizzey.
Famine does not emerge in a vacuum but takes place in specific political, social, and natural environments in which all elements are intertwined. These interconnections played out vividly during the Soviet famines of 1921–1923, 1932–1933, and 1946–1947 in Ukraine. Each of these famines imposed significant pressures on the human, natural, and material worlds. As pivotal events in Ukrainian and Soviet history, they became major human existential crises of the twentieth century. This thesis seeks to complicate the understanding of human survival practices during the famines. Survival depended on a number of important factors, including human agency and the availability of resources. The study explores what resources were available to the starving across domestic and environmental spaces, such as kitchen gardens, fields, forests, water reservoirs and wetlands, and how the starving made use of them. Moving around the household as well as environmental and industrial landscapes, it further explores the significance of food waste in the survival practices of the starving. By ‘following’ the traces of waste in urban and rural landscapes, including, among others, dumpsters, slaughterhouses, cattle cemeteries and railway stations, the thesis charts the topography of waste and illuminates the critical changes in human–food and human–waste relationships in times of extremes. Looking at the larger scale of interactions with the environment, the study examines how famines impacted human-animal relationships and how Soviet state policies affected the livelihoods of animals, both domestic and wild. Taking into account the devastating impact of famines on animals, the study suggests approaching famines as multispecies catastrophes. Lastly, focusing on material objects as resources for famine survival, e.g. household items, clothes, coins, and jewellery objects, this research explores the changes in the essential meaning of things amidst times of extreme crises and violence. Focusing on the entangled histories of famine survival in times of extreme crisis, the study explores the impact of losses brought by famine experiences on individual and public memory.
Skubii, Iryna, “Towards an Animal Sensitive History of Famines: Animals, the Environment, and Soviet Famines in Ukraine”; in: East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies. Special Issue. Beyond Anthropocentrism in Ukrainian Studies (ed. by Tanya Richardson and Darya Tsymbalyuk) (2025).
Throughout history, famines have led to the deterioration of economic and environmental conditions in rural and urban areas, causing both people and domestic animals to die from malnutrition. However, histories of famine usually present them as human catastrophes alone, minimizing the fact that the impact of famine on animals is equally profound. At the same time that animals have suffered from hunger, they have been physically exploited for labour, in addition to being slaughtered and consumed en masse by humans due to food scarcity. In Ukraine, the Soviet collectivization of agriculture and dekulakization resulted in changes in human-animal relations and the forced confiscation of livestock. The lack of sufficient fodder for animals on both the collective farms and in households due to excessive requisitions brought domestic animals to the brink of death. Those taken into collective farms also lacked sufficient food, which resulted in the spread of animal epidemic diseases. Focusing on the famines of 1921–1923, 1932–1933, and 1946–1947 in Soviet Ukraine as case studies, this article examines the impact of famine on the survival, health, and living habitats of both domestic and wild animals, such as cats and dogs, cattle and horses, and gophers. In discussing an animal-sensitive 1 I am grateful to the editors of this issue, Tanya Richardson and Darya Tsymbalyuk, for inviting me to contribute and for their guidance and generosity in commenting on my earlier drafts, pushing me to explore the relationships between humans and environment from an interdisciplinary perspective. I am thankful to the two reviewers who provided their constructive feedback, which helped me develop and clarify my early ideas. My sincere gratitude goes to my thesis supervisor, Rebecca Manley, for commenting on the earlier versions of this text and for many insightful discussions about this project. I am also grateful to Darya Tsymbalyuk for suggesting the title of this article, which could be considered in dialogue with an earlier insightful study by Olga Andriewsky on the social history of famine as a new direction for scholarship on the Holodomor in Ukraine (Andriewsky). I am thankful to the journal editor-in-chief, Serhiy Bilenky, for the important questions upon which I reflect in my conclusion. history of famine, this article aims to answer three major theoretical and methodological questions: 1) Is there a place for animals in the history of famines? 2) What has historically been the impact of famine conditions on animals? 3) What does the history of animals in famines reveal about famines as historical events, animal-human and human-animal relationships, and how the dynamics of human-animal relations change in times of extreme crisis?
Climate
Deb Anderson, and Pepi Ronals, “It’s Personal: Women’s Writing on Weather Disaster in the Context of Climate Crisis in Australia”; in: P. Calvi (ed.), The Literary Journalist as a Naturalist (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), pp. 301−318.
This chapter considers the state of environmental and nature writing in Australia by proffering a lens onto thematic change in long-form journalism on extreme weather. Women lead the way there, by providing a direct response to climate crisis and the deficits of daily journalism that is both personal and distinctively Australian. The chapter’s main questions might be formulated as follows: How well has objectivity served journalism in this era of climate catastrophe and how have women met the challenge of writing convincingly about this crisis in Australia by bearing witness to distinct moments of disaster experience?
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.
Diseases
During the Civil War, southern Appalachia’s isolation provided a refuge for deserters, runaway slaves, and refugees. However, that same remoteness meant that when troop movements and animal foraging inevitably encroached on mountain communities, they brought new diseases that Appalachian bodies and communities could not combat. The effects of Civil War epidemics among both humans and animals stretched far beyond the Confederate surrender. This chapter surveys the various human and animal epidemics carried into and out of the mountains during the Civil War, from smallpox brought by Union soldiers to Cherokee communities to the hog cholera that devastated farmers’ sources of food, and connects them to the postwar economic displacement of Appalachian farmers.
Originating in south-western China, the Third Plague Pandemic reached the Pearl River Delta in the early 1890s, whereupon steamships took the disease to port cities worldwide. We examine the impact of responses to plague on the built environment in Hong Kong, a British colony, as well as the comparable experiences of Honolulu and San Francisco. Bubonic plague is not the result of polluted water, but officials drawing on contemporary understandings of miasmic theory believed it to be so. Fearing the epidemic would spread beyond crowded Chinese districts, governments quarantined affected areas, carrying out house-to-house inspections and in America, controlled burnings of condemned buildings. To improve sanitation, the Hong Kong government commissioned reports that recommended a sewerage system, lower density housing, and rat control, but large-scale urban redevelopment was not undertaken due to high costs, and water infrastructure would prove to be ineffective in the face of twentieth-century population growth.
Gender
This article analyses presentations and representations of a complex gender performance in the early twentieth-century Australian media. It explores how this individual, known as Miss Brace, navigated a public persona that appeared to unsettle contemporary assumptions about gender identity, through a lifelong campaign to secure white settler women’s greater access to agricultural and horticultural opportunities. The article argues that Brace mobilised a powerful status as a wealthy, white, mobile individual, supported by transnational and local networks with white women. Examining the many reports about Brace’s public-facing activities over more than a decade, the article analyses how the press positioned this gender presentation in relation to management of human and nonhuman resources. These representations held consequences for how both the human and nonhuman were understood as resources and who could manipulate and extract value from them.
Ruby Ekkel, “Real Men Don’t Kill Koalas: Gender and Conservationism in the Queensland Koala Open Season of 1927”; in: Australian Historical Studies 56, no. 2 (2025) pp. 274−292.
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.
What drove a small group of Melbourne women to form Australia’s first women’s walking club in 1922? Building on Melissa Harper’s study of bushwalking’s explosion in popularity in the early twentieth century and drawing on the records of the Melbourne Women’s Walking Club (MWWC), this article asks what participation in the male-dominated pastime of organised bushwalking meant to women, both as a physical encounter with nature and as a form of community. MWWC members drew solace and excitement from spending time in natural spaces and held genuine affection for the places and wildlife they often fought to protect from development or destruction. For women, bushwalking could also represent a temporary and thrilling escape from domestic spaces and responsibilities, an avenue for close relationships with likeminded women, and an opportunity to experiment with new and feminist modes of dressing and behaving.
In the early 2000s international business scholar Ann Matasar declared of the rapidly globalising grape wine sector that no other industry had ‘so resolutely excluded women from positions of influence for so long.’ Following Florine Livat and Clara Jaffré that women on the supply side of wine remain understudied, this article draws upon a large-scale oral history project (Treading Out the Vintage 2000–2003) to make visible women as industry decision-makers between the 1960s and 1990s. This qualitative data set nuances Matasar’s findings about the relatively limited opportunities for women to exert industry influence in a historically male domain. With family farming as the main entry point to the Australian industry, few women became decision-makers in this era, compared with women in urban sectors of the economy that benefited from gains in gender equality. Women who attained industry influence demonstrated enthusiasm and resilience while experiencing sexism and, often, balancing reproductive and domestic labour with agricultural business.
Ideology
In the context of accelerating environmental change, some scholarship in the environmental humanities suggests that contemporary environmental crises require a new story. In contrast, this article argues on behalf of old stories and local, place-based attachments. It engages the field of ‘religion and ecology’, which was shaped (among many other influences) by two US religious thinkers: Thomas Berry (1914–2009) and Thomas Merton (1915–1968). Berry famously argued that Western societies needed a new story to address environmental crises on a cosmological scale. Through close readings and historical contextualization of Berry’s ‘The New Story’ (1974) and Merton’s ‘The Wild Places’ (1968), the article aims to show that scholars of religion and ecology can put traditional materials—old stories—to use in service of contemporary aims—the defense of particular places threatened by unjust economies.
Scholars have written detailed studies of evolving European interpretations of the changing environment of Aotearoa New Zealand, as well as producing a sizeable body of work on Maori systems of thought as tangata whenua (Indigenous people of the land). While several studies have examined the environmental history of the Chinese in New Zealand, with one exception, we simply do not have any knowledge of the environmental views of nineteenth-century New Zealand’s third-largest ethnic group. This short exploratory article examines the plurality of environmental perspectives of the Cantonese migrants who came in increasing numbers to Aotearoa from the mid-1860s. It highlights the manner in which Cantonese deployed concepts such as fungsui/fengshui 風水 (literally, wind and water) to interpret Aotearoa environments as well as the importance of imported deities in drawing New Zealand into Chinese cosmologies.
The term kaitiakitanga, describing Māori customs of care for the natural world and other taonga (treasured entities), has become a cornerstone of environmental discourse in Aotearoa New Zealand. Its prominence in public policy can be traced to the 1980s, particularly through the leadership of Nganeko Minhinnick and Te Puuaha ki Manuka, a collective of Tainui hapū (sociopolitical groups of related extended families) connected to the Waikato River and Manukau Harbour. During this period, Nganeko Minhinnick advanced the Manukau Harbour claim before the Waitangi Tribunal, invoking kaitiakitanga as a central principle. At its core, the claim sought the restoration of Māori authority to exercise their traditional rights and responsibilities over the harbour. Claimants drew strategic parallels between kaitiakitanga and the existing institution of Lake Guardians, environmental advisory bodies tasked with protecting several of Aotearoa’s lakes. The Waitangi Tribunal subsequently recommended the establishment of a similar institution, the Kaitiaki o Manuka, to serve as Māori Guardians. While bureaucrats immediately embraced the idea, archival evidence shows that claimants quickly distanced themselves from it. They recognised that the transplantation of a Western advisory model into a Māori context undermined their broader aspirations for the substantive return of authority. This article examines the evolution of kaitiakitanga, from its emergence in the tireless leadership and work of Nganeko Minhinnick to its entry into resource management legislation in the 1980s, highlighting the challenges Māori have faced—and continue to face—in ensuring their concepts of environmental use and care are returned to prominence in Aotearoa.
Media
The cryosphere is more than a physical system: it is a cultural matter too. People have always lived with glaciers, sea ice, snow and permafrost, but until the twentieth century that experience and its meanings were relatively localised. With the advent of Antarctic and Himalayan exploration in the early twentieth century, along with the rise of cinema, the cryosphere as a potentially unified global entity could begin to coalesce and be filled with meaning. The three cryosphere films — Nanook, Great White Silence and Epic of Everest — are famed and remembered for the people at their heart. But in linking them as cryospheric films in this era of climate change, I think it’s worthwhile and indeed enjoyable to look beyond, behind and around the men to the icy worlds they inhabited and traversed. We can view them as an unintentional and coincidental suite.
This photo essay explores the ways in which archaeology and photography work together and intervene in the world, to focus on landscapes that have been overlooked or actively ignored. It considers the site of a dynamite factory that was built by Alfred Nobel on the Ardeer Peninsula, Scotland, which has now been designated as a brownfield. The prevailing narrative is of industrial progress followed by ruination; where institutional archives memorialise Alfred Nobel, the technology of dynamite manufacture, and the built environment, they ignore the lives of those who worked there. This narrative sits alongside the way the present landscape is viewed as derelict and in need of redevelopment, ignoring the fauna and flora that thrive there. We take an other-than-human approach and consider how multiple species and processes come together at Ardeer. A vibrant and lively landscape is brought to the fore in terms of an archaeology of factory workers and a heritage site as an ecology.
This entry provides an overview of film, television and streaming platform media depicting gender- and sexually-diverse characters, themes and narratives, and the emergence of scholarship on the topic in relation to queer studies. Contrary to the pedestrian claim that LGBTQ+ peoples and communities were, until recently, invisibilized in mainstream film and television, or only depicted in underground and art-house texts, queer scholarship has long maintained the fact that varied and diverse depictions have always been a part of the production across these two media forms. The substantial shifts in depiction over the past two decades, however, have provided fertile areas of study for queer scholarship, and it is increasingly recognized that film and television play a substantial cultural role in queer lives.
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.
Science
Jamie Ashworth, “Cartographic Traces of Cultural Change: Land Surveying and Environmental Imperialism in the Wairarapa, 1842−1853”; in: New Zealand Journal of History 59, no. 1 (2025) pp. 50−78.
This article presents an analysis of three cartographic depictions of land in Wairarapa and its immediate surroundings, portraying how these maps effected cultural change in the region from initial surveys until the first official purchases of land. Grounded in the historiography of British colonial cartography, the article observes the textual representations of resources that would have proved significant to colonist groups, and how European settlers interpreted and shaped New Zealand’s environments within these texts to suit their intentions of exploiting land resources. Significantly, this article presents a new perspective on activities executed by settler groups that invariably furthered imperialism and subjected Māori to significant social, political, and environmental changes within a shifting colonial milieu, using names and terms to ‘indigenize’ colonists in this ‘new land’. The surveying work of these groups displays the use of maps as dedicated instruments in asserting land ownership and environmental control in early colonial Wairarapa.
The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw a burst of interest by European powers in the scientific exploration of the Pacific. Well-equipped expeditions were sent to the far side of the world, although the technology of the time limited navigators’ ability to record their routes accurately. The journals and other publications produced by European expeditions to the Pacific are storehouses of observations of places and people, and the self-consciously scientific expeditions of this period provide particularly rich descriptions of the physical world they had set out to document. In addition, scientific expeditions brought back to Europe a vast array of physical specimens used to define species, as well as descriptions and drawings of people, landscapes, cultural objects, plants, and animals. However, the value of these records is diminished through uncertainty about where specimens were collected, and about the locations in which observations were made. The Coral Discovery project seeks to map scientific voyages to the Pacific completed by 1834 in order to clarify issues of coral taxonomy. Land provides the project with a way to map these voyages and trace the provenance of their specimens. Places named within navigators’ journals provide a more accurate way of mapping the locations visited by vessels than the multitude of calculated coordinates laboriously produced during the voyages.
This article interrogates the positioning of British colonial meteorology in Malaysia and Singapore from the 1940s to 1960. This period spanned a global conflict and an internecine war, effecting profound sociopolitical changes from which neither Malaysia nor Singapore would emerge the same. The meteorological services were essential to Britain’s armed conflicts, providing vital weather information to the army, navy and, especially, the air forces, as well as supporting the aviation and shipping industry often in difficult and dangerous circumstances. This article argues that British military policy in South East Asia and the specific concerns of the colonial government in Malaya directly commanded the meteorological agenda on the ground during this period, with a secondary but significant impact on tropical climate and weather research. It thus addresses the interplay of science, colonialism and military interest from the perspective of a region that has featured little in the history of science.
Water
Alessandro Antonello, “Possessing and Protecting the Southern Ocean: Connection and Mediation in the Antarctic Work of Douglas Mawson and Alan Villiers”; in: M. Newlands and C. Hansen (eds.), Critical Approaches to the Australian Blue Humanities (Taylor & Francis, 2025), pp. 35−45.
The Southern Ocean has been a space of Australian imagination and exertions since invasion and colonisation began in 1788. Australia’s relationship with the Southern Ocean has been characterised by connected logics of territorial possession and environmental and resource protection. This chapter concentrates on two figures embodying and extending that relationship in the early decades of the twentieth century. It looks to the geologist and explorer Douglas Mawson and his expansionist and technological rhetoric and oceanic boundary work from the 1910s to 1930s. It looks also to the writer and one-time whaler Alan Villiers, whose journalistic account of a Norwegian whaling voyage aboard the Sir James Clark Ross in 1923–24 – and the presence of a small group of Australians on it – enthused the Australian reading public. Mawson and Villiers articulated connections and boundaries between Australians and others – friends, neighbours, and competitors – and used the power of wireless radio telegraphy and press media to activate the Southern Ocean as a place continuous and simultaneous with the Australian continent and nation.
Located downstream from substantial irrigation extraction at the “end” of the Murray–Darling River system, South Australia (SA) struggles to maintain flows and the health of the rivers within its borders. Analysis of early twentieth century engineering reports reveals that this problem is not new, beginning in the 1880s with the growth of irrigation in Australia and the riparian demands of the eastern, upstream states. I use the theory of path dependency to analyse the history of the Murray–Darling Basin from a South Australian perspective to argue that the state’s current water issues stem from cultural, institutional, and technological lock-ins shaped by its geo-political position that made it vulnerable to upstream demands for water. As SA’s negotiations for a larger water allocation failed, it turned to construction of an enviro-technical network of weirs, locks and barrages designed to assist navigation, regulate the river’s flow, keep water fresh for landholders and towns, prevent the ingress of salty sea water, and mitigate the consequences of upstream irrigation. With construction of each component the state’s hydro-engineering scheme engineers warned that with increasing extraction these strategies would only buy time and bigger-scale structures would be essential in the future to alleviate accelerating problems. Within decades SA experienced the foretold problems of diminishing flows, increasing salinity, environmental degradation and declining water quality, problems that continue and with climate change are likely to grow worse. Only a fundamental shift in cultural, institutional, and technological lock-ins can change a future trajectory that could improve the health of the river.
The concept of waste pervades contemporary water policy and the polarised debates about river management in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin. However, the preoccupation with waste, and its associated notions of efficiency and productivity, is not merely a reaction to the relatively recent environmental critique prompted by excessive extraction from rivers and streams. We argue that the fixation with eradicating waste is embedded in the Australian colonial political imagination, where it has served as a powerful catalyst for projects of river transformation and as justification for territorial control of water. Initially control was exerted by Australian colonies and then later by state governments. A close examination of South Australia’s portion of the River Murray between 1880 and 1940 identifies four sites that were perceived as wasteful: the ocean − which the River Murray runs, wetlands, lakes and the atmosphere. To eliminate waste from and above the land surface, hydro-engineers and settler authorities transformed the lower River Murray with weirs, locks and barrages, at the same time as they altered society–water relations. Waste was articulated and acted on from within colonial processes with such force that the effects continue to set the parameters for today’s water policies and wider settler societal relations with rivers.
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.
Australia’s urban water systems face ever-increasing pressures from high population growth and environmental change. Addressing these pressures requires envisaging and creating more resilient and sustainable water systems. This means going beyond reliance on the kind of engineering-led technical solutions that historically have carried most weight in Australian water policy. This report aims to contribute to this change. It draws on findings from a major Australian Research Council-funded project, ‘Water and the Making of Urban Australia’ (DP180100807), conducted by Professor Andrea Gaynor (UWA), Associate Professor Lionel Frost (Monash), Professor Emerita Jenny Gregory AM (UWA), Associate Professor Ruth Morgan (ANU), Professor Martin Shanahan (UniSA), and Professor Emeritus Peter Spearritt (UQ). This research project provides the first integrated study of the provision, use and cultures of water in Australia’s five mainland capital cities from 1900 to the present. Such knowledge is crucial to developing a financially and environmentally sustainable long-term policy framework.
In an era of increasing enthusiasm for recycling and water conservation, we trace the history of urban Australian efforts to re-use the plant nutrients in human excrement to produce food. From the widespread use of nightsoil on market gardens to experiments with sewage farming in multiple Australian cities, only Melbourne has maintained nutrient re-use through sewage farming. Where other cities had insufficient political support to enable the expenditure, planning and technical adaptation needed to productively use increasing sewage output, Melbourne, located on an enclosed bay unsuitable for the expedient disposal of raw sewage, had institutional leadership that saw sufficient investment for the sewage farm to become a socially accepted long-term success. The legacies of these histories persist into the present.
Plans are underway to greatly increase rates of groundwater extraction from the Northern Territory’s Cambrian Limestone Aquifer (CLA), particularly above the Beetaloo sub-basin, to allow expansion of shale gas and agricultural industries. We analyse current groundwater regulations in the NT, and the state of knowledge regarding key aspects of the region’s hydrogeology and values sustained by groundwater. We find that the current rules governing the administration of groundwater licencing in areas without a Water Allocation Plan (WAP) – the Top End and Arid Zone rules – are poorly suited to protect ecological, Indigenous socio-cultural and other water use values. These rules (as currently applied) allow the depletion of substantial groundwater storage in areas that fall within the ‘arid zone’ (as defined in NT policy). Such depletion risks the reduction or loss of groundwater flows to ecosystems and stygofauna habitat and reduced throughflow of groundwater between different regions, within the highly connected CLA system. This may disrupt water flows that sustain local livelihoods and those that are integral to Indigenous peoples’ beliefs and cultural practices. The new WAP that applies over much of the Beetaloo sub-basin (Georgina-Wiso WAP) is also deficient in key areas. It has failed to comply with national water policy, in that no substantive steps have been taken to understand Indigenous cultural and ecological values sustained by groundwater prior to setting an Estimated Sustainable Yield. A more precautionary, inclusive approach to determining groundwater regulations would involve a) setting of conservative water extraction limits combined with trigger levels for ecosystem protection and b) co-management in partnership with Aboriginal peoples, with both consultation and decision-making processes that recognise their inherent rights and interests in water. This will be critical to avoiding long-term environmental and socio-cultural harm from over-extraction of groundwater.
Sue Jackson and Lana Hartwig, “The Struggle for Water Justice in NSW”; in: H. Norman (ed.), Land Back: Aboriginal land rights in New South Wales, today and always (UNSW Press, 2025), pp. 87−103.
In its preliminary statements the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1983 (NSW) (ALRA) affirms historical Aboriginal ownership and occupation of land and water and acknowledges the significance and importance of both to Aboriginal people of NSW. It also acknowledges the fact that the amount of land and water set aside for Aboriginal people had progressively declined before the ALRA was enacted. However, the legislation does not include specific water rights provisions. This is not surprising given that at the time the ALRA was introduced rights to water were attached to land and were only transferrable with the sale of land titles.
Rivers and societies coevolve and emerge through continued engagement over space and time, acting in conjunction to produce dynamic riverscapes. Research on flow regimes has advanced understanding of the temporal dimensions of ecohydrological relationships but has largely neglected the social structures and human experience of time spent living in relation with rivers. We highlight seasonal calendars as a means of creatively organizing and visually representing the temporal dimensions of rivers, which, in both research and practical conservation actions, tend to receive less attention than spatial dimensions. Through 3 case studies relating to major rivers in Australia and South America, we show how seasonal calendars articulate conceptualizations of river time by riparian human communities. Seasonal calendars produced with the participation of local communities can enhance transdisciplinary knowledge production and promote collaboration among different communities of practice—including researchers, conservation practitioners, policymakers, Indigenous peoples, and local communities. Our cases demonstrate that calendars are a tool for articulating and analyzing the many ways that Indigenous people and local communities understand, value, utilize, and shape their biodiverse riverscapes.
The world faces multiple water crises, including overextraction, flooding, ecosystem degradation and inequitable safe water access. Insufficient funding and ineffective implementation impede progress in water access, while, in part, a misdiagnosis of the causes has prioritized some responses over others (for example, hard over soft infrastructure). We reframe the responses to mitigating the world’s water crises using a ‘beyond growth’ framing and compare it to mainstream thinking. Beyond growth is systems thinking that prioritizes the most disadvantaged. It seeks to decouple economic growth from environmental degradation by overcoming policy capture and inertia and by fostering place-based and justice-principled institutional changes.
In mid-twentieth-century Aotearoa/New Zealand, the Pākehā (settler) poet J. R. Hervey encounters a “squat citadel spraying power”—a hydroelectric dam—and finds that it has turned the river into “dumb, disciplined waters” (43). A decade later, the Māori poet Hone Tuwhare (Ngāpuhi) draws on his experiences as a worker on hydroelectric dam projects to also describe their environmental impact as a forcible act of silencing: “Nowhere is there greater fuss/to tear out the river’s tongue” (“Sea” 30). At first glance, the similarity between Hervey and Tuwhare’s portrayals of rivers rendered “dumb” simply attests to the far-flung extent of the modernist belief that hydroelectric infrastructure contributed to civilization’s necessary work of pacifying unruly nature. As Patrick McCully puts it in his history of large dams, aptly titled Silenced Rivers (1996), such infrastructure has come to “symbolize the progress of humanity from a life ruled by nature and superstition to one where nature is ruled by science, and superstition vanquished by rationality” (237). Framed by this binary opposition, literature seems to offer a powerful vehicle through which rivers might speak against the extractivist forces that would seek to silence them. Thus, Paul Kingsnorth aligns his recent poetic response to the “wild and blue, raging and unchanneled” rivers of Patagonia, Songs from the Blue River (2018), with theologian Thomas Berry’s insight that the “modern project” is predicated upon silencing these bodies of water: “We are not talking to the river, we are not listening to the river. We have broken the great conversation” (qtd. in Kingsnorth). Yet such straightforward assertions are complicated by the earlier examples of Hervey and Tuwhare, whose distinct cultural perspectives prompt questions both about the source of a river’s speech and the ability to understand what it might have to say.
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This post explores Māori responses to British colonial policies in nineteenth-century Aotearoa New Zealand, focusing on the Wairarapa coast and the resistance to Governor George Grey’s assimilationist “flour and sugar” strategy. While colonial authorities sought to integrate Māori into the settler-capitalist economy through land alienation and pastoralist reforms, Māori leaders such as Ngātuere Tāwhirimātea Tāwhao opposed land sales and defended traditional cultivation and occupation practices. Other groups adapted strategically, modifying tuku whenua customs to consolidate ancestral ties and prevent settler claims. The case of Te Aitu-o-te-Rangi Jury illustrates how Māori women navigated land ownership within patriarchal and colonial frameworks. Through selective adoption of European crops and cultivation methods, Māori maintained cultural continuity and ecological stewardship. Far from passive subjects, Māori engaged in both overt resistance and adaptive negotiation, demonstrating that adaptation did not equate to cultural erasure, but rather reflected deliberate strategies to sustain sovereignty, kinship, and environmental care under colonial pressure.
Building on Blood and Dirt: Prison Labour and the Making of New Zealand (Bridget Williams Books: 2023), this research charts the construction by prisoners of State Highways 4, 46, 47 and 48 through Aotearoa’s central plateau (and Tongariro National Park in particular). Beneficent language of development and modernisation smooths over the colonial dispossession, forced labour and class antagonism at the heart of these highways. The study of prison-built infrastructure also reveals the dialectical nature of appropriation and exploitation, extra-human and human, within the web of life.
Wooden postcards as novelty items have been used to mark occasions of significance, to advertise products, demonstrate technologies or just for fun and amusement. One example that I acquired second hand relates to the New Zealand Centennial Exhibition – measuring 59/16″ x 35/8″ x 1/16″, postmarked 2 May 1940 and sent to an address in Christchurch. This anniversary marked 100 years since the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi and the incorporation of New Zealand into the British Empire. There was an array of publications, events, memorials, re-enactments, postage stamps and, not least, a large exhibition pavilion near the present-day Wellington airport, visited by 2.6 million over the course of 6 months (noting that New Zealand’s population was 1.6 million in 1939). Government departments including the State Forest Service and companies had displays and memorabilia such as the wooden postcard in the exhibition hall.
The book takes the view that science and ecologists are at the heart of our understanding of Australian alpine areas and have been since Europeans first arrived in Australia. It has significant wide-ranging updates on climate and climate change research findings on alpine weather, fire, plants communities, insects and mammals. It also updates Aboriginal management developments and issues such as feral horses, Snowy Hydro 2 and threats to National Park status.
This article is based on a panel from the 2025 World Congress of Environmental History held in Oulu, Finland. The authors discussed the transdisciplinary field of environmental humanities as it is practiced and understood across the globe, with perspectives from Australia, South America, Europe, and South Africa. Brought together by Libby Robin, the panel represents people from across the spectrum of experience, and methodological backgrounds.
Many thanks to Daniel Rothenburg and Amanda Wells for preparing this publication round-up! If you would like to have your work featured in our next round-up, subscribe to our newsletter and keep an eye out for our next call for submissions.