settlements

An introduction to seven articles—five of which are written by current doctoral or recent postdoctoral students—that explore ideas, themes, and methods relating to research in the field in New Zealand.

Jocelyn Thorpe, currently an assistant professor of women’s studies at Memorial University of Newfoundland, talks about her work on the social construction of the Temagami region as a wilderness area and its implications for the Teme-Augama Anishnabai.

Lawrence Culver, Carson Center fellow from June to December 2010, speaks about his research project “Manifest Disaster: Climate and the Making of America.”

The authors take Shucheng County as a case study to reconstruct the variations of population and land use in the last 500 years, and to examine their influence on the environmental changes in this region.

This article examines of the daily journals covering the first decade of Dutch VOC occupation of South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, and the origins of European exploration, exploitation and conservation of natural resources at the Cape.

Using New Zealand as a case study, Beattie demonstrates the strength of settler beliefs in the connections between existing environments, environmental transformation, and their own health.

Tasmania (formerly known as Van Diemen’s Land) received approximately 72,000 convicts, mainly from the British Isles and Ireland, between 1803 and 1853. This article focuses on the environmental experience of this unusual settler population, especially in the first decades of settlement.

This article, using colonial New Zealand as a case-study, and integrating environment, empire and religion into a single analytic framework, contends that Christian and environmental discourses interpenetrated and interacted in irreducibly complex ways during the long nineteenth century.

Urban environmental history comprises both human and ecological experience; the two were and are inseparable, and their interaction is dynamic. This essay explores the human and bioregional history of the Penrith Lakes Scheme at Castlereagh in outer Western Sydney as a case study in integrating the two approaches.