Andrea Gaynor

Animal Agendas: Conflict over Productive Animals in Twentieth-Century Australian Cities

Over the course of the twentieth century, the number of productive nonhuman animals (livestock and poultry) in Australian cities declined dramatically. This decline resulted—at least in part—from an imaginative geography, in which productive animals were deemed inappropriate occupants of urban spaces. A class-based prioritization of amenity, privacy, order, and the protection of real property values—as well as a gender order within which animal-keeping was not recognized as a legitimate economic activity for women—shaped this imaginative geography of animals that found its most critical expression in local government regulations. However, there were different imaginative geographies among women and men—mostly those from the working class—whose emotional and economic relationships with productive animals led them to advocate for those animals as legitimate and desirable urban inhabitants.

Regulation, resistance and the residential area: The keeping of productive animals in twentieth‐century Perth, Western Australia

Increasingly throughout the twentieth century in Australia, efforts have been made to control or prohibit the keeping of productive animals in residential areas. However, this attempted ‘public invasion of private space’ has been continually subverted by those who regard such productive use of residential property as legitimate. Nevertheless, the existing regulations require urgent revision as they are clearly ideological in their privileging of the externalities of consumption over those of production.

Can environmental history save the world

As a ‘genre of history’ in Australia environmental history is relatively new, emerging in the 1960s and 70s from encounters between history, geography and the natural sciences in the context of growing environmental concern and activism. Interdisciplinary in orientation, the field also exhibited an unusually high level of engagement with current environmental issues and organisations. In this era of national research priorities and debates about the role and purpose of university-based research, it therefore seemed fair to ask: ‘can environmental history save the world?’ In response, a panel of new and established researchers offer their perspectives on issues of relevance and utility within this diverse and dynamic genre. This article has been peer-reviewed.

Landscape histories: Mapping environmental and ecological change through the landscape art of the Swan River Region of Western Australia

What can works of landscape art tell us about past ecologies? This article de- scribes a pilot study in which a method for systematically recording the aesthetic, ecological and environmental content of landscape artworks was investigated. Using database software that allows for the identification and evaluation of relationships between aesthetic criteria (such as style) and environmental con- tent (such as vegetation characteristics), we surveyed landscape artworks of the Swan River region of Western Australia created between 1827 and 1950. The database was first populated with aesthetic and ecological surveys of selected artworks, then the data was analysed in order to identify patterns of ecological change that are readily amenable to historical explanation. The veracity of such explanations was supported by a more fine-grained analysis of a specific site, for which the depiction of the environment in artworks was compared with that in written and photographic sources. Collectively, the artworks appeared to reflect probable changes in the prevalence of large trees and the broad composition of flora, with the site-specific study finding more specific correspondences between artworks and other sources. Although further research is required in order to expand and verify findings, these initial results suggest that there is scope for more extensive use of fine art in the production of the environmental histories and historical ecologies that increasingly inform ecological restoration and management projects.

Engineers Engaging Community: Water and Energy

Water and energy are fundamental elements of community well-being and economic development, and a key focus of engineering efforts the world over. As such, they offer outstanding opportunities for the development of socially just engineering practices. This work examines the engineering of water and energy systems with a focus on issues of social justice and sustainability. A key theme running through the work is engaging community on water and energy engineering projects: How is this achieved in diverse contexts? And, what can we learn from past failures and successes in water and energy engineering? The book includes a detailed case study of issues involved in the provision of water and energy, among other needs, in a developing and newly independent nation, East Timor.

Shifting Baselines or Shifting Currents? An Environmental History of Fish and Fishing in the South-West Capes Region of Western Australia

The South-west Capes region of Western Australia is one of high marine biodiversity but relatively low productivity. Still the region’s waters have long provided food for the local Noongar people and sustained commercial and recreational fishing since the nineteenth century, when activities were loosely regulated, if at all. But from the mid- to late-twentieth century, as catch rates apparently declined while the popularity and reach of recreational fishing increased, policies governing fishing in the region became increasingly restrictive and fiercely contested. This chapter therefore endeavours to disentangle the strands of policy, perception, and fish populations in the Capes region, evaluating evidence of change in the region’s fish populations over the long run, and accounting for it with reference to social contexts, fishing intensity and practices, and change in the regional environment. It ultimately suggests that the movements and abundance of fish have varied considerably over time due to biophysical and ecological influences, and claims of depletion have sometimes reflected cultural anxieties rather than environmental change. However, there is also a long history of human interventions in the region’s marine ecosystems. Such interventions, shaped by complex cultural and economic factors, have left short- and longer-term imprints on the region’s ecosystems.

State, Scientists and Citizens: Conserving Lake Magenta and Dragon Rocks, Western Australia

The story of efforts to establish two major nature reserves in the south-eastern wheatbelt of Western Australia illuminates some of the many factors shaping the interaction of citizens, scientists, land management bureaucracies, and other stakeholders around the creation of conservation reserves in a semi-arid region in the mid-20th century. This article highlights the significance of citizen scientists as well as professionals in the reservation process, and traces the increasingly strained relationship between Lands and conservation bureaucracies in the context of the rise of the new environment movement. It also points to the importance of international ideas about conservation aims and methods, and suggests that although shifting appraisals of the productive potential of the land were critical to the outcome of negotiations over the proposed reserves, in this period these semi-arid lands were increasingly valued for their scientific and intrinsic qualities.

Antipodean Eco-nazis? The Organic Gardening and Farming Movement and Far-right Ecology in Postwar Australia

Abstract The 1940s saw the emergence in Australia of an organic gardening and farming movement with links to the far right involving both personal connections and ideological convergences. Themes of natural law, unity of soil and people, and anti-urbanism—all attractive to far-right ideologues—can be found within the discourse of the early organic movement. However, not all of these themes were central to the movement, and organic advocates did not adopt a far-right agenda en masse. Though attractive to some as a romantic reaction to modernity, this article argues that organics encompassed a range of political standpoints.

Lawnscaping Perth: Water Supply, Gardens, and Scarcity, 1890-1925

While Perth’s climate has been getting drier for at least four decades, its citizens maintain an ongoing commitment to year-round green lawns and gardens (or “lawnscapes”), and a resistance to water restrictions that is more pronounced than in other Australian state capital cities. This article demonstrates that these features of contemporary Perth emerged from, and continue to bear the imprint of, an earlier socio-natural system that brought together a town water supply, sprinkler technology, plants, and a multidimensional cultural desire for environmental modification. As important markers of civilization and prosperity, Perth’s emergent lawnscapes assuaged colonial anxieties about the settlement’s status. Conspicuously shaped by collective understandings of imperial urban hierarchies, residents’ lawnscaping projects were also driven by their bodily experience of sand, heat, and dust: they were in part a response to the challenge of keeping homes and families clean and cool in a city of hot summers and ubiquitous sand.

The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia

and foremost as a means of substantiating settlers’ claims to superiority and of absorbing the Indigenous presence within settler space’’ (97). One might even infer that the failure of the attempt was more useful than its success. Nanni is more interested in how Christianity, European rationalism, linear timeconsciousness, racialism, and industrialism meshed into a single time-regime than in how these forces sometimes clashed with each other. He recognises, but does not pursue, the paradox that missionaries, Protestants in the main, were the bearers of an antiquated ‘‘monastic’’ conception of time. His primary focus is on mechanisms of control, and while he recognises that linear time-consciousness could sometimes be turned back upon the rulers, he sees European time mainly as an instrument of subjugation. For example, he equates Christianity with conceptions of linear time, yet ignores the Christian idea of apocalyptic time, which, as other scholars have shown, was integral to the ideology of ‘‘Indigenous’’ protest movements like the ‘‘cattle killings’’ among Xhosa people in the 1850s. Missionary schools like Lovedale produced many leaders of the African liberation movement, something Nanni sees as ironical, although, as he notes in passing, at least some missionaries anticipated and encouraged nationalist aspirations. Following E. P. Thompson and other Marxist historians, Nanni models the ‘‘resistance’’ of the indigenous to European temporal rule on that of European workers, but, unlike them, he pays little attention to the rival conceptions of time that inspired their resistance. His aim is ‘‘to understand how Europeans themselves viewed Indigenous temporalities’’ rather than to offer ‘‘anthropological commentary on Indigenous knowledge systems’’ (12 13). So, for example, drawing astutely on contemporary sources, he discusses how Europeans and Aborigines each demarcated the seasons of the year but stops short of examining the deeper structures in which Aboriginal conceptions of time were embedded. ‘‘Time as a continuum’’, writes W. E. H. Stanner in his celebrated essay on ‘‘The Dreaming’’, ‘‘is only hazily present in the Aboriginal mind. What might be called social time is, in a sense, bent into cycles or circles’’. Perhaps, as a doctoral student, Nanni was nervous about crossing the frontier between history and anthropology, or interpreting Aboriginal responses to European time regimes in the light of such insights. I am sorry he felt so constrained. Instead of a catalogue of ‘‘damaged bells, broken curfews and desecrated Sabbaths’’ (20), he might have attempted a history from both sides, if not from below. The big challenge of post-colonial history, surely, is to interpret European rule from the perspective of the colonised as well as the colonisers.