Alanna Kamp

Guest editorial: Historical geographies down under

This special issue appears as Australian Geographer celebrates its 90th year of publication. The sub-disciplinary field of historical geography is an apt focus, forming a bridge between the discipline’s rich and varied past, and its burgeoning future. The twelve contributions to this special issue not only demonstrate the vitality of Australian historical geography but also underline its significance and value for geographical thinking and our understanding of contemporary society and space. Investigations ‘of the lines of influence and connection which bind... together’ the disciplines of history and geography (Ogborn 1999, 97) are not new; nevertheless, the development of historical geography, as a defined sub-discipline of geography in the anglophone world, has been attributed to the fairly recent work of Henry Clifford Darby. Between the 1930s and 1960s, Darby led British scholars in the establishment of ‘a new historical geography, distinct from history but sharing with it a broad borderland without clear boundaries’ (Coppock 2002, xv). In Darby’s view, historical geography was one of the two ‘pillars’ of geography (the other being geomorphology) as ‘[a]ll geography is historical geography, either actual or potential’ (1953, 6). Darby’s version of historical geography, which focused on cartography and its use in the investigation of landscape change, gradually spread to other areas of the English-speaking world, such as Australia and New Zealand. In the USA, meanwhile, Carl Sauer, of the Berkeley School, was developing a distinct brand of North American historical geography that drew from the German Landschaft tradition and thus took on a much more ‘cultural’ approach to investigations of geographies of the past (Heffernan 2009, 333). The quantitative revolution of the 1950s and 1960s left little room for investigating ‘the history behind geography’ (per Darby 1953, 6). However, under the guidance of Darby and Sauer, the number of scholars engaging with historical geography in the West proliferated (including Andrew Clark, Fred Kniffen, Alan Baker, Robin Butlin and Donald Meinig), such that in 1975 the British–Canadian Symposium on Historical Geography (later the International Conference of Historical Geographers) was born, as was the Journal of Historical Geography (Baker 2016; Schein 2001). By the 1980s, following the development of humanistic geography, calls were made to ‘bring history back in’ to the study of human geography (Driver 1988, 497). Since then, geographers such as Jeanne Kay, Mona Domosh, Karen Morin, Lawrence Berg, Gillian Rose, Miles Ogborn and Felix Driver have utilised poststructural, feminist and postcolonial perspectives to draw particular attention to issues of power in the practice of historical geography and in the practices of geography in the past. This includes methodological concerns about using the archives, the links between colonialism, empire building and the history of geography, and the androand ethno-centric nature of the historical geography tradition. With increasing engagements with larger debates in the social sciences, the past 20–30 years have been termed the ‘phase of eclecticism’ as definitions and approaches to historical geography continue to be varied, contested and nuanced (Clayton 2000, 338; Heffernan 1997; Morin and Berg 1999; Schein 2001). Recent research in the sub-discipline has focused on a plethora of topics including environmental histories (often intersecting with political histories of Europe’s settler colonies), questions of empire (such as representations of people, places and landscapes

Chinese Australian women’s ‘homemaking’ and contributions to the family economy in White Australia

ABSTRACT This paper draws upon qualitative interview data to present a historical geography of ‘homemaking’ and economic activity among Chinese Australian women during the White Australia Policy era. An analysis of interview material indicates that some women dedicated their lives to unpaid work in the home, while other women worked in family businesses in subordinate positions. In some instances, Chinese Australian women took on more responsibility in these businesses in ways that challenged the ‘front’/‘back’ gender divide. This economic participation reflected the need for Chinese Australian women to contribute to the survival of their families and experience roles and subjectivities that challenged the patriarchal division of gendered labour and space. This complex historical geography of Chinese Australian family economies in the White Australia era therefore challenges traditional feminist assertions that ‘the home’ is a universal site of female oppression and Orientalist assumptions that Confucian family systems were practised uniformly by all overseas Chinese.

The Virtues and Challenges of Comparative Analyses of Immigration, Migrant Settlement and Transnationalism

In this chapter we examine some of the insights that can be gained from comparative analyses of immigration, migrant settlement and transnationalism. There has been a series of calls for comparative approaches to migration research across the social sciences and humanities (for example, Campbell, 1995; Green, 1994; Vertovec, 1999). Drawing upon this literature, in the first section of this chapter we outline the primary benefits of comparative analyses. These include insights into the structural conditions of immigrant experiences and subjectivities, and the culturally varied responses to, and legacies of, international migration. In this way we highlight how comparative analyses can offer a bulwark against generalizations regarding the modes, frequency and pressures of migratory movement as well as the communications between migrant groups and their ‘home’. In the second section of this chapter, we utilize data obtained in two Australian research projects — the Transnationalism and Citizenship Project and the Challenging Racism Project — to compare immigrant groups across two Australian cities (Brisbane and Sydney) with their Canadian counterparts. Comparative approaches to migration research eschew both erroneous generalization and naive particularism. In order to present a balanced appraisal of comparative analyses of immigration and transnationalism, we also chart some of the challenges of this approach.

Managing ethnic diversity: meanings and practices from an international perspective

This book is one of the recent publications of the Research in Migration and Ethnic Relations Series published in association with the European Research Centre on Migration and Ethnic Relations (ERCOMER), Ultrecht University. Edited by Reza Hasmath, the book is concerned with the management of ethnic diversity in contemporary multicultural societies. This is a timely publication given the current global context which is seeing increasing movements of people across national borders, increased fears of the ‘other’ in the post-9/11 world, and recent announcements in European nations that multiculturalism has failed. In Hasmath’s opening chapter it is stated that the book aims ‘to examine how ethnic diversity is managed across various national contexts’ and how ‘manifestations and meanings of ethnicity vary from place to place’ (p. 6). The collection of chapters achieves this objective in its consideration of current forms of multiculturalism and the ways they are linked to different modes of managing ethnic diversity, the strengths and weaknesses of current management models, problems encountered in contemporary ethnically diverse societies, and possible solutions to such struggles in various national contexts. Hasmath’s opening chapter provides the foundations for those discussions by providing a concise overview of the history, various definitions, meanings and uses of the term ‘ethnicity’ and highlighting the important relationship between ethnic identity and political processes. Each contribution, after Hasmath’s opening, draws on case studies from North America (Canada and the United States of America), Asia (China and Taiwan) Australasia (Australia and New Zealand), and/or Europe (France, United Kingdom, Austria, Germany and Italy). Despite the geographical reach and pertinence of these case studies, it is apparent even from this listing that analyses of European/Western experiences prevail. Canadian case studies especially dominate – appearing in six of the 13 chapters – while South American nations and ethnically diverse nations in South-East Asia (such as Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia) do not feature at all. As such, the reader may be somewhat disappointed by the promise of ‘an international perspective’. The reader may also be surprised that the United States does not figure more prominently in Managing Ethnic Diversity given its history of large-scale immigration, unique demographic make-up and challenges in the post-9/ 11 context. In fact, the pertinence of geopolitical events post-9/11 is not afforded much significance or dealt with in detail in the Western case studies throughout the volume. Overall the lack of engagement with links between heightened Islamophobia and multicultural struggles in the post-9/11 context is surprising given that the significance of the issue has been highlighted in recent publications such as Muslim Asian Ethnicity Vol. 13, No. 4, September 2012, 473–479