Taming the Great South Land

Taming the Great South Land
Author: William J Lines
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 380
Release: 1991-01-01
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 9780520078307

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.

Land Use in Australia

Land Use in Australia
Author: Richard Thackway
Publisher: ANU Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2018-02-01
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1921934425

Land Use in Australia: Past, Present and Future, is a compilation of invited chapters from Australia’s leading specialists in land use policy and planning and land management. Chapters present many widely recognised issues involved in Australia’s land use policy and planning, including limited understanding and poor awareness of: the rich history of poor decisions on land use planning and management across different levels of governmentthe discontinuities between providers of national biophysical informationthe tools, data and information to improve national land use decision-making outcomesthe poor synthesis and integration between science to policy to natural resource management and resource conditionthe benefits of land use practitioners engaging in connection, cooperation, mutual inquiry and collective social learnings. The aims of the book are threefold: 1) provide a review of the current status of land use policy and planning in Australia; 2) provide a resource to inform and influence the development of land use policy and planning; and 3) provide a sound contribution to Australia’s public–private land use debates in the future. The audience for the book includes government and non-government land management agencies from state and national bodies, universities and researchers.

Wetlands in a Dry Land

Wetlands in a Dry Land
Author: Emily O'Gorman
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2021-07-13
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 0295749040

In the name of agriculture, urban growth, and disease control, humans have drained, filled, or otherwise destroyed nearly 87 percent of the world’s wetlands over the past three centuries. Unintended consequences include biodiversity loss, poor water quality, and the erosion of cultural sites, and only in the past few decades have wetlands been widely recognized as worth preserving. Emily O’Gorman asks, What has counted as a wetland, for whom, and with what consequences? Using the Murray-Darling Basin—a massive river system in eastern Australia that includes over 30,000 wetland areas—as a case study and drawing on archival research and original interviews, O’Gorman examines how people and animals have shaped wetlands from the late nineteenth century to today. She illuminates deeper dynamics by relating how Aboriginal peoples acted then and now as custodians of the landscape, despite the policies of the Australian government; how the movements of water birds affected farmers; and how mosquitoes have defied efforts to fully understand, let alone control, them. Situating the region’s history within global environmental humanities conversations, O’Gorman argues that we need to understand wetlands as socioecological landscapes in order to create new kinds of relationships with and futures for these places.

Australian Soil and Land Survey Field Handbook

Australian Soil and Land Survey Field Handbook
Author: National Committee on Soil and Terrain,
Publisher: CSIRO PUBLISHING
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2009-03-31
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0643098615

The Australian Soil and Land Survey Field Handbook specifies methods and terminology for soil and land surveys. It has been widely used throughout Australia, providing one reference set of definitions for the characterisation of landform, vegetation, land surface, soil and substrate. The book advocates that a comprehensive suite of land and soil attributes be recorded in a uniform manner. This approach is more useful than the allocation of land or soil to preconceived types or classes. The third edition includes revised chapters on location and vegetation as well as some new landform elements. These updates have been guided by the National Committee on Soil and Terrain, a steering committee comprising representatives from key federal, state and territory land resource assessment agencies. Essential reading for all professionals involved in land resource surveys, this book will also be of value to students and educators in soil science, geography, ecology, agriculture, forestry, resource management, planning, landscape architecture and engineering.

Anti-Slavery and Australia

Anti-Slavery and Australia
Author: Jane Lydon
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2021-03-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0429817339

Bringing the histories of British anti-slavery and Australian colonization together changes our view of both. This book explores the anti-slavery movement in imperial scope, arguing that colonization in Australasia facilitated emancipation in the Caribbean, even as abolition powerfully shaped the Settler Revolution. The anti-slavery campaign was deeply entwined with the administration of the empire and its diverse peoples, as well as the radical changes demanded by industrialization and rapid social change in Britain. Abolition posed problems to which colonial expansion provided the answer, intimately linking the end of slavery to systematic colonization and Indigenous dispossession. By defining slavery in the Caribbean as the opposite of freedom, a lasting impact of abolition was to relegate other forms of oppression to lesser status, or to deny them. Through the shared concerns of abolitionists, slave-owners, and colonizers, a plastic ideology of ‘free labour’ was embedded within post-emancipation imperialist geopolitics, justifying the proliferation of new forms of unfree labour and defining new racial categories. The celebration of abolition has overshadowed post-emancipation continuities and transformations of slavery that continue to shape the modern world.

The Biggest Estate on Earth

The Biggest Estate on Earth
Author: Bill Gammage
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Total Pages: 464
Release: 2012
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 174331132X

Explodes the myth that pre-settlement Australia was an untamed wilderness revealing the complex, country-wide systems of land management used by Aboriginal people.

Beyond Communal and Individual Ownership

Beyond Communal and Individual Ownership
Author: Leon Terrill
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2015-10-05
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1317525078

Over the last decade, Australian governments have introduced a series of land reforms in communities on Indigenous land. This book is the first in-depth study of these significant and far reaching reforms. It explains how the reforms came about, what they do and their consequences for Indigenous landowners and community residents. It also revisits the rationale for their introduction and discusses the significant gap between public debate about the reforms and their actual impact. Drawing on international research, the book describes how it is necessary to move beyond the concepts of communal and individual ownership in order to understand the true significance of the reforms. The book's fresh perspective on land reform and careful assessment of key land reform theories will be of interest to scholars of indigenous land rights, land law, indigenous studies and aboriginal culture not only in Australia but also in any other country with an interest in indigenous land rights.

Australia

Australia
Author: Roff Martin Smith
Publisher: National Geographic Society
Total Pages: 316
Release: 1999
Genre: Travel
ISBN:

Full-color photographs depict all sides of Australia: its urban and rural landscapes, its wildlife, its sealife, its sixty-thousand-year-old Aboriginal culture, and the rest of its society.

The Land Before Avocado

The Land Before Avocado
Author: Richard Glover
Publisher: HarperCollins Australia
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2018-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1460711009

The new book from the bestselling author of Flesh Wounds. A funny and frank look at the way Australia used to be - and just how far we have come. 'It was simpler time'. We had more fun back then'. 'Everyone could afford a house'. There's plenty of nostalgia right now for the Australia of the past, but what was it really like? In The Land Before Avocado, Richard Glover takes a journey to an almost unrecognisable Australia. It's a vivid portrait of a quite peculiar land: a place that is scary and weird, dangerous and incomprehensible, and, now and then, surprisingly appealing. It's the Australia of his childhood. The Australia of the late '60s and early '70s. Let's break the news now: they didn't have avocado. It's a place of funny clothing and food that was appalling, but amusingly so. It is also the land of staggeringly awful attitudes - often enshrined in law - towards anybody who didn't fit in. The Land Before Avocado will make you laugh and cry, feel angry and inspired. And leave you wondering how bizarre things were, not so long ago. Most of all, it will make you realise how far we've come - and how much further we can go. PRAISE Richard Glover's just-published The Land Before Avocado is a wonderful and witty journey back in time to life in the early 1970s. For a start, he deftly reclaims the book's title fruit from those who have positioned it as a proxy for all that is wrong with today's supposedly feckless and spendthrift young adults. Rather than maligning the avocado (and young people), he cleverly appropriates the fruit as an exemplar of how far we have come since the 1970s' Richard Wakelin, Australian Financial Review 'This is vintage Glover - warm, wise and very, very funny. Brimming with excruciating insights into life in the late sixties and early seventies, The Land Before Avocado explains why this was the cultural revolution we had to have' Hugh Mackay 'Hilarious and horrifying, this is the ultimate intergenerational conversation starter' Annabel Crabb PRAISE FOR FLESH WOUNDS 'A funny, moving, very entertaining memoir' Bill Bryson, New York Times 'The best Australian memoir I've read is Richard Glover's Flesh Wounds' Greg Sheridan, The Australian

Let the Land Speak

Let the Land Speak
Author: Jackie French
Publisher: HarperCollins Australia
Total Pages: 593
Release: 2013-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1743099010

From one of our most respected and award-winning authors, Jackie French, comes a fascinating and fresh interpretation of Australian history, focusing on how the land itself, rather than social forces, has shaped the major events that led to modern Australia. to understand the present, you need to understand the past. to understand Australia's history, you need to look at how the land has shaped not just our past, but will continue to shape our future.From highly respected, award-winning author Jackie French comes a new and fascinating interpretation of Australian history, focusing on how the land itself, rather than social forces, shaped the major events that led to modern Australia. Our history is mostly written by those who live, work and research in cities, but it's the land itself which has shaped our history far more powerfully and significantly than we realise. Reinterpreting the history we think we all know - from the indigenous women who shaped the land, from terra Incognita to Eureka, from Federation to Gallipoli and beyond, Jackie French shows us that to understand our history, we need to understand our land. taking us behind history and the accepted version of events, she also shows us that there's so much we don't understand about our history because we simply don't understand the way life was lived at the time. Eye-opening, refreshing, completely fascinating and unforgettable, LEt tHE LAND SPEAK will transform the way we understand the role and influence of the land and how it has shaped our nation.