Taming The Great South Land

Taming the Great South Land is the first full-length landscape history of an entire continent occupied by one nation. It is also, in William Lines's telling, a brutal and controversial story. Examining the ways European society rapidly, radically transformed Australia's physical and human landscapes, the author writes candidly 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. Lines 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. This shocking narrative, thoroughly researched and accessibly written, combines environmental, social, and political history to hard-hitting effect. Taming the Great South Land is the first full-length landscape history of an entire continent occupied by one nation. It is also, in William Lines's telling, a brutal and controversial story. Examining the ways European society rapidly, radically transformed Australia's physical and human landscapes, the author writes candidly 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. Lines 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. This shocking narrative, thoroughly researched and accessibly written, combines environmental, social, and political history to hard-hitting effect.

Text, Theory, Space is a landmark in post-colonial criticism and theory. Focusing on two white settler societies, South Africa and Australia, the contributors investigate the meaning of 'the South' as an aesthetic, political, geographical and cultural space. Drawing upon a wide range of disciplines which include literature, history, urban and cultural geography, politics and anthropology, the contributors examine crucial issues including: * defining what 'the South' encompasses * investigating ideas of space, history, land and landscape * claiming, naming and possessing land * national and personal boundaries * questions of race, gender and nationalism

The papers in this volume of essays arose out of a lively conversation involving theologians, religuious leaders, biblical scholars, historians, philosophers, ethicists, youth workers, poets and welfare activists in Canberra in 2000.

British imperialism was almost unparalleled in its historical and geographical reach, leaving a legacy of entrenched social transformation in nations and cultures in every part of the globe. Colonial annexation and government were based on an all-encompassing system that integrated and controlled political, economic, social and ethnic relations, and required a similar annexation and control of natural resources and nature itself. Colonial ideologies were expressed not only in the progressive exploitation of nature but also in the emerging discourses of conservation. At the start of the 21st century, the conservation of nature is of undiminished importance in post-colonial societies, yet the legacy of colonial thinking endures. What should conservation look like today, and what (indeed, whose) ideas should it be based upon? Decolonizing Nature explores the influence of the colonial legacy on contemporary conservation and on ideas about the relationships between people, polities and nature in countries and cultures that were once part of the British Empire. It locates the historical development of the theory and practice of conservation - at both the periphery and the centre - firmly within the context of this legacy, and considers its significance today. It highlights the present and future challenges to conservationists of contemporary global neo-colonialism The contributors to this volume include both academics and conservation practitioners. They provide wide-ranging and insightful perspectives on the need for, and practical ways to achieve new forms of informed ethical engagement between people and nature.

This book examines the deep connection Australians have with their climate to understand contemporary views on human-induced climate change. It is the first study of the Australian relationship with La Niña and it explains how fundamental this relationship is to the climate change debate both locally and globally. While unease with the Australian environment was a hallmark of early settler relations with a new continent, this book argues that the climate itself quickly became a source of hope and linked to progress. Once observed, weather patterns coalesced into recognizable cycles of wet and dry years and Australians adopted a belief in the certainty of good seasons. It was this optimistic response to climate linked to La Niña that laid the groundwork for this relationship with the Australian environment. This book will appeal to scholars and students of the environmental humanities, history and science as well as anyone concerned about climate change.

The Land's Wild Music explores the home terrains and the writing of four great American writers of place—Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Terry Tempest Williams, and James Galvin. In their work and its relationship with their home places, Tredinnick, an Australian writer, searches for answers to such questions such as whether it’s possible for a writer to make an authentic witness of a place; how one captures the landscape as it truly is; and how one joins the place in witness so that its lyric becomes one’s own and enters into one’s own work. He asks what it might mean to enact an ecological imagination of the world and whether it might be possible to see the work—and the writer—as part of the place itself. The work is a meditation on the nature of landscape and its power to shape the lives and syntax of men and women. It is animated by the author’s encounters with Lopez, Matthiessen, Williams, and Galvin, by critical readings of their work, and by the author’s engagement with the landscapes that have shaped these writers and their writing—the Cascades, Long Island, the Colorado Plateau, and the high prairies of the Rocky Mountains. Tredinnick seeks “the spring of nature writing deep in the nature of a place itself, carried in a writer’s wild self inside and resonated over and over again at the desk until it is a work in which the place itself sings.”

The long-awaited history that will change the way Australians think about their country. The Water Dreamers is the story of the settlement of Australia: of the scarcity of water and the need to fill an imagined silence with the sounds of civilisation. From the moment the First Fleeters stepped ashore, water determined progress. The Tank Stream that flowed through what is now the Sydney CBD provided fresh water until settlers and their livestock fouled it. Then water from a nearby swamp was piped into the growing settlement. When it ran dry sights were set further afield. The Water Dreamers is an illuminating account of the ways people have imagined and interpreted Australia while struggling to understand this continent and striving to conquer its obstacles. It’s an environmental history and a cultural history with an unmistakable sense of how, today, we are part of that continuing story.

"The land surveyors stood at a particular point in New Zealand's colonisation, implementing its principles on the ground and acting as mediators between cultures. For the Crown surveying was an essential part of the process of converting Maori customary tenure into Crown-derived grants. It was a means by which the British began to make the country their own."--BOOK JACKET.