Thomas Griffiths

Hunters and collectors : the antiquarian imagination in Australia

Part I. Collection: 1. Hunting culture 2. Victorian skulduggery 3. The stone age 4. The nuclear family Part II. Possession: 5. Past silences 6. The natural history of Melbourne 7. Land rites 8. Journeys to the centre Part III. Preservation: 9. The discipline of memory 10. Keeping places 11. Progress through preservation 12. History and natural history Epilogue.

Ecology and empire : environmental history of settler societies

Ecology and Empire examines the relationship between the expansion of empire and the environmental experience of the extra-European world. For the first time it moves the debate beyond the North American frontier by comparing the experience of settler societies in Australia, South Africa and Latin America. From Australian water management and the crisis of deforestation in Latin America, to beef farming in the Transvaal, this topical book provides a broad comparative historical approach to the impact of humanity on the ecological systems on which settler societies base their livelihood.

Environmental history in Australasia

Australia and New Zealand share a southern, settler society history and an affectionate and competitive cultural solidarity. Their social and political affinity as British colonies and dominions, and the early unity they felt as regions of ‘Australasia’, justifies a joint assessment of their environmental history and historiography. This essay begins with an exploration of their common experience as lands and nations and focuses on the strong role of science in shaping environmental history and policy in both countries. We argue that this privileging of science (especially agricultural science) in environmental policy — itself a legacy of British imperialism — has given a distinctive quality to the practice of environmental history in Australasia. But the common, imported settler experience of these two countries has increasingly found itself exposed to the long-term influences of very different physical environments and Indigenous inheritances. We will outline the character of these local cultural and natural determinants because they ultimately define Australian and New Zealand environmental historiography as more contrastive than similar, and promise to drive their countries in divergent directions. One of the virtues of environmental history is that it has often demanded categories of analysis other than the nation, so we will begin this article by comparing the histories of Australia and New Zealand and by scrutinizing the concept of ‘Australasia’.

Environmental History, Australian Style

Australia has been a leader in the recent emergence of ‘the environmental humanities’. One of the core disciplines of the new field is environmental history, which has developed a distinctive style in Australia since the 1970s. Understanding the continents unusual human and natural histories has elicited a peculiarly intimate relationship to deep time, and settler Australians have been required to learn a very different ecology and to comprehend the last ice age as a human experience. An understanding of anthropogenic climate change urgently requires these longer-term historical and environmental analyses, as well as century-scale histories of science and philosophy, and studies of human and social resilience from both the ancient past and the unfolding present. This article argues that Australia, with its remarkable Indigenous inheritance, unique natural history and compressed settler revolution, offers striking parables for a world facing transformative environmental change.

Introduction: Listening to Antarctica

In 2011, we commemorated a series of Antarctic anniversaries: the centenary of Douglas Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition, 100 years since the attainment of the South Pole, 75 years since the coming into force of the Australian Antarctic Territory and 50 years since the ratification of the Antarctic Treaty. On planet Earth today, it could be said that we inhabit the Antarctic moment. Each year now, tens of thousands of tourists visit a realm that, just a few generations ago, was virtually unknown. Over the past century we have learned just how different is the Antarctic from the Arctic, and Antarctica has moved from the geographical periphery of our consciousness to the centre of our scientific and intellectual concerns. The physics and politics of global warming have turned our eyes towards the great southern ice cap, which has 90 per cent of the world’s land ice and 70 per cent of the globe’s fresh water. The same industrial capitalism that has unleashed carbon has given us a planetary consciousness that reveals a calving berg as not just a random, local act of nature, but instead as the frightening frontier of a possibly irreversible global, historical event. Understanding ice — its history and its future — has turned out to be a key to understanding climate change and to securing a human future. The great white continent has never before gripped our imagination or dictated our destiny with such power.

Secrets of the Forest: Discovering History in Melbourne's Ash Range@@@Taming the Great South Land: A History of the Conquest of Nature in Australia

Examining the ways European society rapidly, radically transformed Australias physical and human landscapes, the author writes of repeated environmental devastation - from the early slaughter of seals and whales to the destructive spread of sheep, through gold rushes and land settlement to British nuclear tests and the modern mining and timber industries. The author shows how Enlightenment ideas of progress, economic growth and development were reconstructed on Australian soil, and how the promise of the conquest of nature became a mockery in fact, resulting in the mass dislocation and destruction of indigenous populations.