Lionel Frost

Pacific centuries : Pacific and Pacific Rim history since the sixteenth century

Introduction: Pacific Centuries Emerging 1. Spanish Profitability in the Pacific: The Philippines in the 16th and 17th Centuries Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giralez 2. The Great Silk Exchange: How the World was Connected and Developed Debin Ma 3. Islands in the Rim: Ecology and History in and around the Pacific, 1521-1996 John R. McNeill 4. Maritime Trade and the Agro-ecology of South China Robert B. Marks 5. Rice is a Luxury, Not a Necessity: The Sources of Asian Growth A.J.H. Latham Gold Rushes and the Trans-Pacific Wheat Trade: California and Australia, 1848 to 1857 James Gerber 7. American Trade Dollars in Nineteenth Century China David J. St. Clair 8. Alfred Crosbys Ecological Imperialism Reconsidered: A Case Study of European Settlement and Environmental Change on the Pacific Rim Warwick Frost 9. Economic Motivations for China-United States Rapproachment in 1971 Lori Warner 10. Migration and Perceptions of Identity: The Case of Singapore and Malaysian Perceptions of the Australian Identity (1966-1996) Kevin Blackburn

Football history off the field: Utilising archived accounting reports to challenge “myths” about the history of an Australian football club

The Australian Football League (AFL) is the largest professional sports competition in Australia. Most AFL clubs began as amateur bodies in the nineteenth century, but to survive they have had to adapt to changes in demand and production costs by adopting a commercial management approach. Because financial management is seen by most club members as secondary to the core business of winning games, accounting data is generally invisible in football histories. We use a range of accounting information from annual reports, committee Minute Books and media commentaries from 1910 to 1917 to demonstrate how financial data can be used to enhance our understanding of the history of one AFL club – Carlton. In particular, we show how previously overlooked accounting records can enrich the history of this sporting club as well as challenge long held “myths”, thus creating new understandings of Australian football history.

Suburbia and infant death in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Adelaide

Altogether, as a place of education Adelaide falls far short of the mark; as a place of amusement it is hopeless; and as a village — well, it is tolerably clean, and comparatively healthy. Thistle Anderson (1905)

The history of American cities and suburbs: an outsider's view

Songwriter Robbie Robertson, who was born in Toronto in 1944, has said that observing America from a Canadian perspective gave him “a window to look through, so that I didn’t take things for granted.” Often it is an outsider who can see best what is distinctive about a particular place by noticing what goes unnoticed by natives. To Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders, much about the cities of the United States is instantly recognizable, but there are instructive differences as well. Cities in these three nations are dominated by dispersed, car-dependent suburbs, which in form and function vary hardly at all from place to place. In other respects, however, urban sprawl and car dependence have affected cities in different ways. In most American cities, the population, number of jobs, and the amount of living space in the old inner-city neighborhoods have been reduced by expressways and the flight of taxpayers and services to the suburbs. Brownfields—abandoned service stations, warehouses, and so on—lie vacant and vandalized, scarring the landscape and discouraging investment. Downtowns with gleaming new office blocks are generally dead and dangerous after dark. Yet not everywhere is like this, as anyone who has explored the downtowns and inner neighborhoods of Toronto, Vancouver, Melbourne, or Adelaide on foot or by public transport can testify. These cities have higher densities of residents and jobs in their old cores and a greater reliance on public transport than is generally the case in America, where such characteristics are associated with intensively built-up metropolises such as New York, Chicago, and Boston. Even though Perth is one of the most sprawling cities in the world, its per capita gasoline consumption is less than half that of Houston, Phoenix, and Detroit. In Melbourne, another dispersed city, more than 20 percent of commuters use public transport; in Los Angeles and other similar American cities, the figure is less than 10 percent. The population of Melbourne’s old inner areas is rising,

Goverment and the Colonial Economies: An Alternative View

Government is one of the crucial institutions that shape the development of economies and in a recent issue of this journal H. M. Boot contributed a useful survey of its effects on Australia during the colonial period. Boot emphasized the beneficial effects of government in terms of creating stability and secure property rights, but also argued that important decisions about capital works came to be influenced more by political expediency than by sound economic criteria. This flawed decision-making process created a significant field of unproductive investments which ‘crowded out’ private-sector activity and weakened the economy. The purpose of this article is to examine this argument closely and critically. It will argue that there is no evidence to support the contention that politicians saw public works simply as an opportunity to buy votes and that an awareness of the costs of unproductive investment forced Parliament to use market-based criteria to assess proposed spending. The article will suggest an alternative explanation of the failure of the private sector to generate sufficient investment to increase the rate of economic growth, and of the extent to which public investment crowded out the private sector.

The Contribution of the Urban Sector to Australian Economic Development Before 1914

This article examines the contribution of the urban sector to Australian economic development before the First World War. This contribution has often been seen in negative terms: contemporary observers generally thought that the major cities were to large and drained resources from the productive sectors of the economy, while some modern historians have portrayed cities as centres of poverty and environmental disamenity. The article evaluates these claims and presents a case for the urban sector having been a powerful stimulus to economic growth. The problems which Australian urbanization created did not stem from cities being too large, with more inhabitants than the number of well-paying jobs; rather, the general preference for low-density suburban living, and the ability of most of the population to be able to afford to live that way, meant that the cities would be expensive to build and difficult to service in a cost-effective way.

The fire gap and the greater durability of nineteenth century cities

This paper discusses the economic and townscape effects of large‐scale urban fires and the marked reduction of the problem in developed world cities during the nineteenth century. At that time a ‘fire gap’, or divergence between the increasing urban population and the falling absolute number of fires, demonstrably emerged. The paper outlines two processes — construction and rebuilding in less flammable materials, and increases in house lot size — which made for a more durable urban environment. This fortunate result, which in general owed little to the effects of urban planning and replanning, was largely a product of rising incomes. Examples are drawn from cities in Britain, North America, and Australia, and are contrasted with cities in the pre‐modern Third World.

How long do households remain in housing affordability stress

Abstract We develop a model that specifies the duration of housing affordability stress for particular types of households. Using panel data from Australia, households are considered in semi- and parametric analysis against different household characteristics, revealing whether these characteristics predict the duration of housing affordability stress. For most types of households, an experience of housing affordability stress lasts less than one year. A group of household types disproportionately made up of renters and sole persons remains in stress for longer periods. Chronic housing affordability stress occurs if the duration of stress lasts for more than three years. Linking the duration of stress to household types, and demographic, financial and educational characteristics makes it possible to design more targeted, and therefore more efficient housing affordability policies.

Water technology and the urban environment: water, sewerage, and disease in San Francisco and Melbourne before 1920

The challenges cities face in supplying safe water and disposing effectively of sewage and wastewater are affected by historical and environmental conditions and the long-lasting effects of choices of infrastructure. This article provides case studies of two similar cities, San Francisco and Melbourne, from the mid-nineteenth-century gold rushes to 1920, to show how differences in geography and governance structure can shape water technologies in a path-dependent way. While the two cities developed safe water supplies early in their histories, these were not well integrated with sewerage systems. The use of typhoid death rates, which provide a proxy for water quality and urban pollution, reveals the impact of defective water technology on the urban environment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Water and the making of Californian and Australian Cities: introduction

The articles in this special issue draw on examples from Californian and Australian history to consider how people have met the challenges of securing adequate water supplies and managing water issues in urban settings. Through studies in which water, an issue that is of universal relevance, is central to the narrative, the collection aims to combine detailed empirical case studies with comparative studies of broader processes. The aim of this introductory article is to identify the scope for comparative histories of Californian and Australian cities, based on historical and geographic features that are common to the two regions, and to consider long-term influences on the ways in which the demand for and supply of water was managed in different cities.