Graeme Wynn

Discovering the antipodes

Abstract Recent work on the past of Australia and New Zealand is surveyed in terms broadly relevant to the many evolving geographies of European settlement overseas since the eighteenth century. Although there was uncertainty about the future of historical geography in the antipodes during the late 1960s, a good deal has been accomplished in the last six years. Recent work has been strongly empirical as historical geographers, and others, have sought to understand the complexity of local development. In this process of discovery, there are immense possibilities for further work. New questions asked of new sources, incisive analyses and thoughtful syntheses will reveal much about the development of society and setting in these outposts of nineteenth-century European expansion.

'On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic' in Environmental History

George Perkins Marsh is both the hero and the foil of this paper. His well-known book, Man and Nature, and his reputation as the fountainhead of the conservation movement lie at the very centre of the story offered here. But this account also casts some doubt upon the precedence generally attributed to some of Marshs ecological claims, and questions the wisdom of placing Marsh and other historical figures on pedestals that elevate them too readily and too markedly above their peers. It does this by probing the reception of Marshs ideas in New Zealand in the 1870s, by considering the ideas of largely-forgotten Titus Smith about human impacts upon the vegetation of Nova Scotia in the nineteenth century, and by wondering about the implications of these tales of environmental un derstanding from two colonial realms for the practice of environmental history in the twenty-first century. This is thus both an engagement with Marsh and a story about stories, about how they are constructed, about how they travel and about how they influence the ways in which historians present the past and speak to the future.

54, 40 or Fight: Writing Within and Across Borders in North American Environmental History

The tongue-in-cheek title of this chapter invokes a slogan popular among American residents of the Oregon Country and associated with Democratic candidate James K. Polk in the US Presidential campaign of 1844. The numbers refer to the northern latitudinal limit of territory then held jointly by the United States and Canada (an area beyond the boundary along the 49th parallel agreed to in 1846), that Polk claimed for the United States and promised to fight for if necessary. Polk’s demands emerged out of a complex domestic political scene, and were twinned with a plan to annex Texas, all part of a grand policy of manifest destiny.1 The slogan has been largely forgotten in Britain and the United States, but it remains in play in Canada, invoked occasionally by nationalists fearful of American influence, and adopted by a successful rock band, that has saved the numbers (54, 40) but lost the fight.

The Power of Words and the Tides of History: Reflections on Man and Nature and Silent Spring

This paper focuses on two “classics” of environmental writing, George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature, published in 1864 and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published a century later. It raises a series of questions about the power and knowledge conveyed by words: Did these books advance unprecedented arguments? Where did their claims come from? Where did they go? How did they work? Were they framed in particularly novel and/or compelling ways? What facilitated their dissemination? How did they gain purchase? When and where were they challenged (if at all)? When and where were they most influential? How did these books gain the reputations they achieved? Considering these questions requires close attention to the tides of history, and the ways in which the words of Marsh and Carson worked in the world. More prosaically this examination draws attention to the economic and social conjunctures in which these books operated.

Southern African Geomorphology: Recent trends and new directions, Peter Holmes and Michael Meadows (Eds.) : book review

South Africa holds an important place in the development of geomorphology as a distinct field of inquiry focused on understanding the Earth’s physical landscapes. As Bernard Moon notes in the Foreword to this volume (p. i), “The southern African landscape is an incomparable natural laboratory for the geomorphologist.” Encompassing a wide range of landscape types and landforms of “a prodigious range of ages,” it attracted the attention, early in the 20th century, of several prominent scholars including geologist Alex du Toit, the empirically and descriptively-minded geographer John Wellington and the geomorphologist Lester King, all of whom produced important books. Geomorphology gained autonomy as a subdiscipline late in the 19th century, as geology turned to focus on stratigraphy and palaeontology, and physical geography (later physiography or geomorphology) emerged as the study of landforms. Concerned to reinforce this separation, the American William Morris Davis, geomorphology ’s first great synthesiser, downplayed the importance of the form-producing processes still of interest to some geologists, and insisted that geographers attend to them “only in so far as they aid the observation and description of the forms of today.” His enormously compelling notion of the “Geographical Cycle” (published in 1899) set the frame of geomorphological thinking through the early 20th century. It envisaged a standard sequence of landscape change, playing out over millennia, that began with uplift of the land surface and traced its subsequent gradual denudation and transformation, through “a whole series of sequential forms,” into “a low plain of imperceptible relief.” This “cycle” might be modified, but in its essential (and implicitly most widespread) form it saw the transformation over time of mountains into hills and valleys and broadening plains as a consequence of erosion by a generalised set of forces among which rain and running water were by far the most important. By this seductive account, landscapes passed through stages – youth, maturity and old age – and once alert to the characteristic forms of each, anyone (it seemed) could understand why any particular landscape looked the way it did. Such was the didactic power of this conceptual model that its basic tenets were bread-and-butter to British undergraduates (and likely others elsewhere), well into the 1960s. Few among these (at-least-for-examination-purposes) neoDavisians learned of Lester King’s sustained argument, first mooted in South African Scenery: A Textbook of Geomorphology published in 1942, then abstracted in a 1947 address, arguing that the African continent included many “queer departures from normal in its topography” (p. 403), and ultimately given pointed expression in his Morphology of the Earth (1962, pp. 162–163) where he pulled no punches in declaring that “The classic account of the ‘Normal Cycle of Erosion’ as expounded by W.M. Davis has proved regrettably in error,” and that it was a “negative and obliterating conception resulting from cerebral analysis rather than from observation,” that had produced “sterility in geomorphic thought and retarded progress in the subject severely.” Influenced by observations of the South African landscape – which Australian geomorphologist C.R. Twidale (1992) suggests, inspired him to “geomorphological heresy”(although earlier investigators in Europe prefigured some of his substantive findings) – King insisted that slopes and scarp-faces retreated parallel to themselves, and that the continuous lowering of slopes integral to Davis’s model, “never existed as a process of landscape development apart from terrains of rocks so weak that they cannot maintain a free face and detrital slope,” or in cases in which groundcover vegetation favoured soil creep over surface erosion. These were strong words, positing a very different understanding of slope retreat and landscape formation, and King’s ideas had a large influence on the development of geomorphology in the southern hemisphere. Their effect was much more muted in Britain and North America. There a “reductionist revolution” – built upon a broadly Newtonian commitment to measurement, experiment and law-finding, which gained momentum after 1945, brought a very different critique to bear on Davisian orthodoxy and dramatically reshaped work on fluvial and slope processes in particular (see Kennedy, 2006, chapter 8 for summary). Provided with a manifesto by Strahler ’s (1952) paper “Dynamic basis of geomorphology,” which sought to replace qualitative and impressionistic descriptions of land forms with “mathematical expressions to serve as quantitative natural laws,” this rebellion steered the mainstream of geomorphological inquiry towards quantitative and experimental investigations of processes, operating (for the most part) at very small temporal and spatial scales. Political and intellectual isolation, and a continuing fascination with macroscale inquiry limited uptake of these new approaches in South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, and as late as 1988 a volume edited by Moon and Dardis, The Geomorphology of Southern Africa, sought to provide a broad account of what one of the editors called “the landscapes around us” by bridging the gap between “general geomorphological theory” and local environments. Much has changed since, as new international collaborations, new research tools (such as optically stimulated luminescence and isotope dating methods and those provided by Geographic Information Science) and improved channels of communication (opened up by the World Wide Web as well as by changing political circumstances) have spawned a dramatic growth in geomorphological research in and on the region in the last quarter century. That work, which has sought to bring Anglo-American approaches to bear on southern African landscapes, to elucidate process as well as form, is the main focus of this book, which offers “a thematic and systematic” (but inevitably incomplete) overview of the field, with a strong focus on developments in South Africa. The book includes 14 chapters between a brief preface and a slightly longer, forward-looking conclusion. It is the work of 24 authors, eight affiliated with English universities, three with universities in Australia, Canada and the West Indies, and the remainder from South Africa. The 14 chapters are presented without attempt to group or cluster them in any way, and most offer synopses of the relevant recent literature. Taken as offered, they are all useful points of reference on Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa, 2015 Vol. 70, No. 1, 95–96, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0035919X.2014.996625

Book reviews: Stelter, G.A. and Artibise, A.F.J. editors, 1986: Power and place. Canadian urban development in the North American context. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. vi + 398 pp. £24.50 cloth

real economic growth. If this is the case for national government policies, then for local government it is even more important not to stand in the way of structural economic change but instead concentrate on facilitating it and mitigating its social consequences. These conclusions are reinforced by two cleverly located chapters by Knight on the inexorable advance of the ’knowledge capitals’ that are the new type of world city and by Ewers and Wolmann on the increasing complexity of the socioeconomic problems which are going to keep big city politicians fully occupied. With this set of messages weighing down upon them, the authors of the final two brief