"Editorial" for Environment and History 4, no.2, Australia special issue (June, 1998)
There is an urgency and a fracture to Australian environmental history…
There is an urgency and a fracture to Australian environmental history…
This paper examines age as a parameter in colonial and recent science. It then recounts attempts to impose an ordered progression of age classes on the forests of Victoria and Queensland according to the classical principles of forestry transmuted through an imperial model.
The authors identify two distinct forms of masculinity, Australian and Cuban, and proceed to show how men and their rhetoric are overtaken, then transformed, by political and environmental developments not of their choosing.
This article argues that during the interwar period in Australia, contrary to assertions that social, political and economic pressures stifled environmental debate, there were a wide range of interests pushing for conservation, the development of National Parks and limits on development schemes.
This article traces contentious debates throughout the years leading up to and following the creation of the Australian Forestry School, between and among leading foresters throughout the British Empire born outside of Australia on the one hand, and, on the other, professionally trained foresters and Australian politicians who had been born in Australia.
This article examines the conflicts behind the scenes, within the AAS, between the AAS and the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Authority (SMA), and within the SMA. It argues that the scientists’ conflict with the SMA over plans for the summit area of Mount Kosciusko (now Kosciuszko) not only established ecology as a scientific basis for conservation thinking: It foreshadowed the current idea that management of a healthy country involves recognition of the links between aesthetic and scientific thinking.