(Fwd) HISTORIOGRAPHY SERIES: Garden, Australian Environmental

[STEFANIE S. RIXECKER]

FYI.  Cross-posted from H-Environment w/ permission.

Stefanie Rixecker
ECOFEM Coordinator

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The second in the H-Environment Historiography Series is Don Garden's
contribution on Australian Environmental History. Dr. Garden originally
delivered this historiography at a session he organized for the 2000
meeting of the American Society for Environmental History, Tacoma,
Washington. The session was entitled "Across Continents: A Rountable on the
Practice of Environmental History Outside the United States." James
McCann's preceding contribution on climate in African historiography was
also first delivered at this session. The H-Environment Historiography
Series is archived on-line at
<http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~environ/historiography/>.

A full bibliography of Australian environmental history appears below at
the end of the article.

--------------------------------------------

WHERE ARE THE HISTORIANS? AUSTRALIAN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY
Don Garden, History Department, University of Melbourne

1. Introduction

Like many academics scattered around the globe, part of my daily routine is
to read the e-mails emanating from the American Society for Environmental
History. Clearly, in the United States, at least, environmental history is
thriving as a sophisticated multi-disciplinary study.

This daily e-mail diet also makes me conscious that while environmental
history is alive in Australia, it is not as well nourished and is not in
such good health. As a teaching area environmental history has developed
slowly and while subjects which we would recognise as environmental history
are being taught, and research is being undertaken, very little is located
our History departments or called environmental history.

To the best of my knowledge, in only one other Australian university is
there an undergraduate subject in Australian environmental history, though
there are some courses that have a broader context. I am only aware of a
tiny number of environmental history postgraduates in History departments.

A quick survey of the references in the reading guides for my own
Australian environmental history undergraduate subject indicates that there
would not be one work in ten which has been written by a person who could
described as essentially an historian. The vast majority emanates from a
broad range of discipline and multi-disciplinary bases.

In some respects that is one of the great strengths of environmental
history - it interweaves a richness of disciplines, expertise and
perspectives. That is part of its intellectual appeal and pragmatic value.

But in other respects it is a source of concern because it demonstrates the
low level of attention that the environment receives from Australian
historians in their writing and teaching.

The absence of specific historical studies informed by an environmental
history perspective is compounded by there being insufficient attention to
the environment in broader Australian historical studies. Generally, there
is little more than token recognition that historically the environment was
a factor in both Aboriginal and European cultures and economies.

This is surprising in a country in which the environment is such an
ever-present factor. We occupy a large land in which distance and

remoteness have shaped human lives. We have tried to reproduce a European
culture and agriculture in the driest continent, much of which has
exceptionally low fertility. As a result enormous areas of Australia are
degraded or salinated, and many of our few rivers have been truncated and
fouled. We have a unique flora and fauna much of which has been either
extincted or driven close to it.

And yet all we have tended to see in our histories has been some factoring
in of the environment as an aspect of cultural determinism, notably
distance, the bush and climate, and their role in shaping personal
character and national identity. To some extent this is an off-shoot of the
Turner frontier thesis in the U.S.

Why have Australian historians been so tardy? Why do we not yet have the
analyses like those of David Lowenthal, Alfred Crosby, Donald Worster,
Roderick Nash, William Cronon and Carolyn Merchant? - to name just a few of
the more obvious.

I will address that question later. First, I should not like to give the
impression that in Australia there is no historical or contemporary
environmental consciousness. I will give a quick outline of where matters
stand, and then look for some explanations for the absence of historians.

2. Discovering the environment

As all of you would be aware, the emergence of environmental history,
perhaps especially in European settler societies, has been part of an
historiographical 'revolution' which in the last three decades has seen a
considerable broadening of areas of interest in history and new approaches
to how it is conceptualised.

Environmental history emerged in parallel with gender and race history. In
each case a mounting sense of community concern since the 1960s resulted in
a focussing of attention on the historical antecedents of a current issue,
and this has generated a new area of historical study.

A desire to protect and preserve the environment was not new to post World
War II, or even to this century. But clearly there has been mounting
environmental consciousness since World War II, and particularly since the
1960s, because of the increasing rapidity with which humans are destroying
the planet.

In this as so many other ways Australians have tended to be derivative,
gradually catching on to what was being said and written overseas,
particularly in North America and Britain. There, a substantial volume of
literature began to appear from the late 1950s into the 1970s that drew
attention to the way humans were abusing the planet, coming from such
authors as Vance Packard, Paul and Ann Erlich, Rachel Carson and Gordon
Ratray Taylor.

Some Australians also read the emerging literature which advocated the need
for a new ethic if humans and the planet were to survive - to be ecocentric
rather than anthropocentric - from such authors as John Passmore, Jeremy
Swift, and David Suzuki.

These concerns stimulated a small body of 'environmental literature' in
Australia. Probably by chance, 1966 was an important year as it saw the
publication of three major works which drew attention to the alarming
degradation of our continent. None was by an historian, and all books have
graphic titles. They are:

Jock Marshall, The Great Extermination: A Guide to Anglo-Australian
Cupidity, Wickedness and Waste . Marshall was a zoologist.

Vincent Serventy, A Continent in Danger. Serventy is a naturalist

Alan Moorehead, The Fatal Impact: The Invasion of the South Pacific
1767-1840, Moorhead is a writer/novelist.

Another interesting contribution in the 1969 was from Eric Rolls, They All
Ran Wild, The Story of Pests on the Land in Australia. Rolls was a farmer.

Jumping ahead a little, a book which has been described as having a
significant impact was Charles Birch, Confronting the Future, 1975. While
not gaining wide popular readership appears to have received some attention
among some of political leaders and opinion makers.

These were part of a small body of literature that began to reassess the
European occupation of Australia and it interaction with the natural
environment. Since then, the flow has increased, and so has the proportion
stemming from the academy.

In the academic sphere much of the early work that we would see as falling
within the gambit of environmental history was undertaken by geographers.
Of some significance were four imports, three of whom were transients -
D.W. Meinig (On the Margins of the Good Earth), Michael Williams (The
Making of the South Australian Landscape), and R.L. Heathcote (Back of
Bourke). Incidentally, they established a valuable tradition of transients
that was continued in the 1990s by Stephen Pyne with his fire history of
Australia.

The other imported geographer in the 1960s was Joe Powell who has stayed
and has made an invaluable contribution to the study of Australian
environmental history.

I do not have time to survey the volume and nature of Australian
environmental history produced since the 1970s, but it is worth noting that
the names which in the late 1990s became probably best known for their
writing environmental history were Tim Flannery, a mammologist, and Eric
Rolls, by then a retired farmer.

But there have been historians of note including Keith Hancock to whom I
will return; Geoffrey Bolton who pioneered undergraduate teaching and wrote
the first general environmental history; and Tom Griffiths, who is probably
the best known environmental historian in the academic arena, especially
for his two books, Secrets of the Forest (1993) and Hunters and Collectors,
(1996).

But generally among most Australian historians there has been little
interest in such matters as the impact on environment of economic activity
and ecological imperialism on the environment, perhaps largely because of
continuing domination of a traditional interpretation of Australian history.

3. The traditional historian and the environment

'The very soil suffered from the ruthlessness of the invaders. The most
precious possessions of Australia are her rivers, whose even flow is
protected by the forests which stand around their mountain sources and the
trees which line the banks. The invaders hated trees. The early governors
forbade them to clear the river banks, but these prohibitions were soon
forgotten, and in the second half of the nineteenth century tree-murder by
ring-barking devastated the country on a gigantic scale... The greed of the
pioneers caused them to devastate hundreds of thousands of acres of
forest-land which they could not hope to till or to graze effectively. To
punish their folly the land brought forth for them bracken and poor scrub
and other rubbish. They ruined valuable timber to make a few wretched
farms, but this was not the end of their folly. Placid low-banked rivers
frequently gave place to water-channels which in rainy weather whirl along
useless muddy waters threatening ruin to good alluvial lands, and which in
time of drought parch into hard, cracked mud...

The advent of the white man with his ready-made civilisation has violently
disturbed the delicate balance of nature established for centuries in the
most isolated of continents. The Englishman eats out the Aborigine. English
trout displace the native black-fish from mountain streams. And, to
compensate for the rapid extinction of the native bear... Australia has
been presented with the rabbit... It has made new deserts...

Australia has suffered too much from the greed or ignorance of her
invaders.'

Keith Hancock, Australia, 1930, pp.30-31

I have often shown this passage to groups and asked them to identify its
source and period. No-one yet has recognised these as the words of one of
Australia's greatest historians, Sir Keith Hancock, which were published as
long ago as 1930.

The passage provides an illustration of some of my remarks, and a
counterpoint to others.

Historians, like the wider community, have by and large had a particular
perspective of Australia, its history, and the rights and role of Europeans
within it. Putting it fairly simplistically, the conventional view of
Australian history was:

The British in the eighteenth century discovered an essentially open and
untouched land. The relatively small number of so-called 'stone-age',
nomadic inhabitants were primitives who did not effectively occupy the
land. They did not cultivate it, they did not build permanent homes, they
did not graze animals, they did not delineate lines of property with
fences, and they did not have a clear hierarchical form of government.
Therefore, to the British the land was terra nullius - open or unoccupied
land - and so it was legitimate for the British to occupy the continent.

By contrast, the traditional view of post-invasion history was a Whig
interpretation. It was celebratory history, providing a validation for our
past, praising the struggles of the pioneers who with blood sweat and tears
conquered nature in a large, alien and hostile land and developed its
resources.

Through effective occupation these pioneers began to make the wilderness
productive, as God wished. The brave and resourceful pioneers mastered a
harsh and hostile land, and turned wasteland into wealth. Theirs was a
story of free enterprise, of entrepreneurial spirit, of brave and hard
working men (and sometimes their wives) creating a new nation, a new
Britannia but with advanced democratic institutions and greater
socio-economic equity. Even among left-leaning historians, Australian
history was an heroic history of class struggle by white men in which
women, Aborigines and the environment were merely part of the backdrop.

Much of the way we conceptualised our history was focussed on the evolving
democratic process, the wealth created by the pastoral industry and the
gold rushes, the stimulus to agriculture from the selection acts, and the
development of a national identity and ethos which focussed upon the tall,
lean bronzed bushman who came to epitomise the distinctive Australian.

In essence, until 1970s and even largely since, the environment has been
ignored by the vast majority of Australian historians except insofar as it
was seen as a platform for human activity and a source of raw materials,
production and wealth.

However, as cited above, as long ago 1930 Sir Keith Hancock had
'discovered' the environment in the sense that he drew attention to some of
the destructive elements of British occupation and factored aspects of the
environment into his work. (After a distinguished academic career in
Britain and Canberra he turned to environmental history in his retirement
and in 1972 published one of the earliest and best regional studies,
Discovering Monaro.)

But few others have followed his lead. While gender history and race
history have gained ground in challenging the traditional view of the past
- becoming what is disparagingly known as 'black armband history' because
they mourn rather than praise the past - environmental history has not
attracted the same attention, nor derision.

4. Where are the Historians?

In July when I commence teaching environmental history I will probably have
about twenty-five to thirty students in my subject. By contrast, and this
is a quick sample, the Italian Renaissance and Hitler's Germany will each
have about 100, Witches and Witchcraft 85, Slavery in U.S. 75 and
Australia's Sporting Culture 40.

The numbers enrolling in my subject do not excite colleagues, and there has
been some evidence of an attitude that it has been very nice trying out
this trendy new subject, but as it lacks appeal let's do some real history
instead.

The fact that Australian environmental history so few students must be due
to several causes, but some consideration of the problem may help us to
understand the situation. I think there are two parts to the explanation -
the general community level of environmental awareness and concern, and the
more specific problems faced by environmental history.

First the general community interest - and I would see enrolments in the
subject at least partly as a reflection of poor interest in environmental
issues among students. This is somewhat unexpected as the current
generation have more environmental studies in their school curricula than
any previous generation. But perhaps one result is that the environment is
passe except for the enthusiasts.

Environmental consciousness is not generally high in Australian society,
though whether it is less so than elsewhere is open to question. Arguably
this is another way in which environment has been a cultural determinant in
Australia. Ours is a harsh land with brown and parched paddocks and
scrublands rather than the green fertile fields and forests of North
America and Britain. Historically, to British immigrants such land was not
highly valued economically or aesthetically. That it was fragile and easily
degraded was either not recognised or was not considered important.
Together with our small population, this meant that for at least a century
it seemed easier to open up more land than to care for the old.

Because it was such a disappointing country in many respects, British
settlers also sought to 'improve' it by introducing and acclimatising a
large diversity of familiar species. Together with less intentional
imports, this has left a devastating legacy of feral animal pests and weed
species.

This sense of inferiority has run deep in Australian culture and historical
traditions. It is a manifestation of British attitudes - their concept of
'progress' and the three C's - Christianity, Capitalism and Contempt for
all that was not British or European. Except maybe for the last, such views
are still deeply rooted in our culture.

The strength of such attitudes may help to explain why Australia did not
produce grand conservation figures like the Americans Henry Thoreau, George
Perkins Marsh, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, or Gifford Pinchot. While
historically there were men who wrote and campaigned for conservation, the
Australian lobby consisted of a few public servants assisted by some public
spirited individuals and a handful of prominent bush walkers. They are not
figures of grand philosophy or public inspiration.

Environmental issues did not emerge as a significant public concern until
the late 1960s and early 1970s, stimulated substantially by the drowning of
Lake Pedder in Tasmania. Due partly to a number of high-profile disputes
such as the attempt to dam the Franklin River (also in Tasmania) the
environment became a relatively key political in 1980s and spawned a number
of small Green parties which had some degree of success in the 1980s.
However, with the economic downturn at the end of the 1980s it lost
momentum and remained fairly weak in the 1990s.

My subject commenced in 1994 - with hindsight, this was poor timing.

So perhaps part of the explanation for the fairly emaciated state of
environmental history in Australia is general community and student apathy
about environmental issues.

Historians

But part of my explanation for the paucity of environmental history must
look to the history profession. Like the general community, historians'
minds are elsewhere thinking about other matters because the environment
does not rate high on their list of priorities. While the environment has
moved at least onto the periphery of consciousness as far as politics and
general population are concerned, Australian historians as a group have not
shown themselves to be any more attuned or sensitive to its significance
historically or contemporarily than the broader population.

On one level, that may not be very surprising. But historians are educated
and aware. They tend to be reasonably left-liberal politically, and have
concern for notions of social equity, class equity, ethnic equity and
gender equity. But the concept of inter-generational equity has not
penetrated. It is simply not on their agenda

There may also be some aspects about the nature of environmental history
which makes it problematic for historians. One of these is lack of
confidence and the difficulty of defining exactly what environmental
history is. How often have we been asked what environmental history is? I,
for one, sometimes get responses of reasonably blank incomprehension when I
try to explain.

There seems to be some uncertainty about what environmental history is even
among its practitioners. At the Australian Historical Association
conference in 1998 much of the environmental history session was spent in
trying to define the study and justify it. The Journal of American History
round table about environmental history in 1990 exhibited similar variance
among practitioners.

Essentially, this is because within the parameters of environmental history
there falls such a great diversity of types of knowledge and methodology,
emanating from a diversity of discipline areas. Environmental history
combines history, geography, fine arts, history and philosophy of science,
besides input from zoology, botany, chemistry, ecology and many other areas.

It is so amorphous, so all-embracing in its areas of interest that very
little of the past can be excluded from its scope because it is not
possible to separate humans and their societies from their environment.
Almost any human history has an aspect of environmental history.

Perhaps this broad, vaguely-defined, widely encompassing study has little
appeal to the profession, and causes a sense of unease and need for
justification among practitioners because it is not a 'pure' form of
history.

Then there is the negative cloud hanging over environmental history. I have
heard one historian characterise it, with a bit of a sneer, as within the
whig tradition - history which pursues an emergence from dark to light, to
a bright future in which environmental consciousness has saved the planet.
In fact, the opposite is more true of much environmental history and, as
Simon Schama wrote in Landscape and Memory - environmental history is a
dismal tale.

Inescapably, one of its negatives with environmental history, and very much
in Australian environmental history, is its tendency to be a mournful and
pessimistic subject - it is largely about understanding black events - the
degradation of environment, ruthless and thoughtless exploitation,
destruction of ecosystems, extinctions or threatened extinctions. I warn my
students of this, and not to become depressed about it all - but I find it
hard to make environmental history a cheerful study.

Conclusion

Two or three years ago I gave a seminar in Britain on teaching Australian
environmental history and was surprised when my audience expressed some
envy at the rich variety of material I had to draw upon for my
undergraduate subject. They apparently had much less, and felt there was
little chance to emulate a course such as mine in Britain. I came away
feeling much more confident about the state of environmental history in
Australia.

Perhaps relatively we are fortunate, but there is still a long way to go,
and we need many more historians to engage with the study before it can
achieve its full potential.


AUSTRALIAN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY (in progress)
Don Garden, University of Melbourne

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REGIONAL/LOCAL STUDIES

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------- End of forwarded message -------

************************************
Dr. Stefanie S. Rixecker, Senior Lecturer
Environmental Management & Design Division
Lincoln University, Canterbury
PO Box 84
Aotearoa New Zealand
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Fax: 64-03-325-3841
************************************