Ruth A. Morgan

Histories for an Uncertain Future: Environmental History and Climate Change

Abstract In the wake of a decade of crippling droughts, cyclones, floods and fires, and warnings that as a result of anthropogenic climate change such events will be more frequent and intense in the future, historical research into Australian weather and climate is growing. The focus of these studies ranges from the quotidian to the extreme and from the lay to the scientific, offering insights into the experience, measurement, interpretation and prediction of weather and climates since British colonisation. In doing so, they engage with familiar themes of Australian environmental history, such as adaptation, local knowledge, expertise, Western science, sustainability and economic development, as well as demonstrating emerging interests in anxiety, risk and resilience. Here I consider this recent historical research on Australias climate and its variability, as well as the implications of anthropogenic climate change for the ways in which we undertake writing history.

Diagnosing the Dry: Historical Case Notes from Southwest Western Australia, 1945–2007

Long regarded for its reliable winter rainfall, the Southwest region of Western Australia was beset by unexpected dry conditions in the early 1970s whose persistence was baffling. The gradual growth of scientific interest in the region’s rainfall, as this article contends, was strongly influenced by political, social, and economic concerns about the challenges posed by drought and climate change. The experience of rainfall decline coincided with international scientific and political interest in the global climate and the perception that it was deviating from its “normal” state. Indeed, this extended “dry” provided an Australian link to international concerns regarding anthropogenic global warming. This article argues that the historical, political, and economic importance of the Southwest’s agricultural industries has led policy makers and researchers to perceive the region’s changing climatic conditions as pathological and in need of diagnosis.

The Allure of Climate and Water Independence: Desalination Projects in Perth and San Diego

In the past decade, Perth and San Diego have both added desalination technology to their suite of water resources. In both contexts, the “independence” that desalination purportedly offers is a shorthand for diversification and drought-proofing in places where future water supplies appear uncertain. Yet the rhetoric of independence may be little more than an illusion, at best, simplifying, or at worst, misrepresenting, the complexity of water management in the face of climate change, climate variability, and population growth. Focusing on desalination, this article examines the different paths that Perth and San Diego have taken toward “independent” water supplies. It explores the cultural and political resonance of independence in these Western contexts, and argues that the invocation of independence is more a rhetorical strategy for political gain than a realistic approach to urban water management.

Premodern Streams of Thought in Twenty-First-Century Water Management

It has become a truism to observe that the world faces a “water crisis.”1 Since the early 1990s, scientists and commentators have studied and debated the myriad socioeconomic, geopolitical, and ecological problems that have contributed to, and will result from, our state of “peak water.” Already in some parts of the world, water consumption exceeds the amount of water that is naturally replenished each year.2 According to the 2009 edition of The World’s Water, nearly two out of three people in the world could be living under conditions of water stress in the year 2025.3 This frightening situation, which has resulted from the (mis)management of the world’s waterways, looks set to worsen over the decades ahead as climate change and other pressures take their toll. Governments, activists, and scholars have produced many potential solutions to the world’s water crisis. Activist Maude Barlow in her important book The Blue Covenant argues for a global covenant on water that is centered on the premise of the inalienable human right to clean water. Under this covenant, people and their governments would protect and conserve the world’s water supplies, ensure water for those in both the global North and the global South, and seek the peaceful resolution of disputes regarding water between states.4 Scientists Meena Palaniappan and Peter H. Gleick advocate a “soft path for water,” which combines water resource management with an emphasis on efficiency, productivity, equity, and community participation.5 Others, meanwhile, have advised governments to leave the problem

Climate and Empire in the Nineteenth Century

This chapter examines key areas of historical research on climate and climatology during the nineteenth century in the context of empire and colonialism. This research ranges from the reconstruction of past climates and their impacts to the study of medical climatology, understandings of climate change and climate modification, the practice of colonial climatology, and the emergence of a ‘global’ climate. Although scholars have tended to examine these topics separately, common themes emerge when they are brought together; these themes include climate and environmental determinism, scientific cultures and practices, geographies of knowledge and risk, the application of science to economic development, and ideas of spatial and temporal scale.

Overcoming Abundance: Social Capital and Managing Floods in Inner Melbourne during the Nineteenth Century

Before effective drainage and flood protection systems were built in the early twentieth century, areas of inner Melbourne close to the Yarra River were prone to flooding. An overabundance of water and a need to limit its impact on lives, livelihoods, and the built environment drove changes in the engineered structure of a rapidly growing city. Through a case study of a working-class district, we consider how private citizens, drawing on stocks of social capital, responded to major floods in 1863 and 1891. In addition to the process of “top-down” governing, as revealed in public documents, less visible “bottom-up” pressure from local communities played an important role in influencing improvements in water-related infrastructure, such as flood mitigation works. By the turn of the twentieth century, this local pressure increasingly manifested in a centralist approach to water management, whereby metropolitan-wide public authorities took greater charge of local environmental problems.

AHS Classics: Rural History and Environmental History

Studying rural history and environmental history in Australian Historical Studies reveals a shared effort to challenge the colonial narrative of the settlement of rural Australia that continues to hold sway in popular representations of the national past. Rather than finding distinct spheres of urban and rural Australia, it reveals instead the processes by which these areas have been mutually constitutive, whether through cultural representations, economic exchanges, or the application of science and technology. Rather than confirming the dichotomy of nature and culture of the city and the bush, it highlights instead the wider cultural and ecological implications of settler Australians’ diverse engagements with an ancient and Aboriginal land. By transcending disciplinary and spatial boundaries, rural and environmental historians reveal the complexities of colonisation and the networks of exchange that have shaped Australians and their environments since 1788. In their hands, history becomes an important form of knowledge for making sense of rural and environmental change in the twenty-first century.

Farming on the Fringe: Agriculture and Climate Variability in the Western Australian Wheat Belt, 1890s to 1980s

In August 2011, the Australian Climate Commission confirmed earlier findings that since the 1970s the southwest of Western Australia has experienced a decline of winter rainfall. This drying trend has posed significant challenges to the management of urban and rural water supplies, as well as farmland, because of the region’s Mediterranean climate of wet winters and long, dry summers. For the state’s wheat belt, which lies within this region, the persistence of drier winters has contributed to the growing suite of environmental and socioeconomic difficulties facing farmers and rural towns. One of the causes of this decline in winter rains is the shift of rain-bearing fronts toward the southwest coast. The eastern fringe of the wheat belt, therefore, has experienced some of the more acute consequences of this drying trend such as a shorter growing season and a decline in wheat yields.1 The scientific association of this drying trend with anthropogenic climate change suggests that these drier conditions will persist well into the twenty-first century.

Gardens of Fire: An Investigative Memoir

accomplishment of a joint enterprise, where the job and the glory go to the husband” (37). While Alexander does not explicitly refer to this model in her biography of Jane Franklin, this is a key overlapping area of concern between the two books (and is commented upon by Taylor 159). Taylor does a good job in recreating the political climate of India and Australia just after the Federation of the colonies, including the times of near crisis in which Harry’s diplomatic nature and careful approach held together fraying allegiances. Taylor presents her reader with a Harry Northcote who was not as exciting or divisive as Alexander’s Jane Franklin, but who carried out the political offices to which he was born with “prudence, astuteness and judgement” (202). While the book is on the whole less successful when it comes to depicting the “ambience” created by cultural endeavour in remote locations of Empire, Taylor’s account of Alice Northcote’s involvement with the First Australian Exhibition of Women’s Work (AEWW) in 1907 is thorough and insightful. In a nuanced reading of this enterprise, Taylor does not fall into the trap of attributing it with an overtly feminist agenda, but at the same time recognises the significance of its female-centredness. She identifies the AEWW as “a fitting climax to Alice’s colonial career” (171). This biography is a very detailed one, as one would expect with such sprawling subject matter and backgrounds, ranging from London and Montreal to Bombay, Melbourne and Sydney. Taylor does supply her readers with a “Dramatis Personae” and useful summaries at the end of each section, but the action of these interesting lives is sometimes obscured by the accruing detail. A little more judicious editing would have gone a long way with this book. Both The Ambitions of Jane Franklin and The Old World and the New undertake the important work of locating individual experiences and relationships within historical narratives of Empire. They sensitively depict the struggles and challenges of a geographically displaced British ruling class while not shrinking from commentary on the damage wrought by colonisation, particularly for indigenous populations. In doing so, they show how historical biography can indeed function as a window through which we may catch glimpses of a different world.

Cosmopolitan Conservationists: Greening Modern Sydney

present them to the Court in such a way that they most closely conform to those aspects of the legal formulary which best assist his client’s case’ (39). Although Stephen was not embedded in Melbourne life and establishment circles, his accomplishments as a barrister saw him appointed as a Judge of the Victorian Supreme Court in 1970 and then of the High Court in 1972. Stephen adopted the judicial approach that there needed to be ‘a high degree of judicial independence from the executive and a keenly felt sense of restraint on the part of courts in expressing idiosyncratic views on matters of social policy’ (90). Malcolm Fraser’s decision to appoint him Governor-General in 1981 meant that Stephen was not part of the activist Mason Court. Stephen was appointed as the type of man who could restore public confidence in the office of Governor-General following Sir John Kerr’s controversial dismissal of the Whitlam Government in 1975. Ayres points out that Kerr under the Whitlam Government was the only Governor-General of Australia ever to make state visits to foreign countries as distinct from representing Australia at international gatherings of heads of state or their representatives on the occasion of a coronation or funeral. Such state visits began under Kerr and lapsed under his successor, Sir Zelman Cowen. Their development into a regular and important feature of the role was, Ayres concludes, Stephen’s ‘most significant and expansionary contribution to the nature of the office’ (98). Also important was his decision in 1983 to study Malcolm Fraser’s advice for a double dissolution election for a number of hours before eventually accepting the advice. The delay of some hours saw Bob Hawke replace Bill Hayden as Leader of the Opposition and the Australian Labor Party win the election. The good relations that he enjoyed with the new Labor government saw Hawke appoint Stephen to the new post of Ambassador for the Environment in 1989 in which position he supported Australia’s successful bid to prohibit mining in Antarctica. Other significant diplomatic appointments followed, with what Ayres describes as mixed results: chairman of the second strand of the Northern Ireland peace talks which made disappointing progress in 1991, and more successfully as judge on the international tribunals investigating war crimes in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and special envoy of the UN Secretary-General to resolve political conflicts in Bangladesh. His five knighthoods including the Garter, Ayres concludes in this thoroughly researched and well written biography, were a fitting tribute because ‘he has done so much’ (249).