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Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies sheds new light on the history of geography through the biographies of distinguished practitioners from New Zealand, Britain, Ireland, and Hungary. Volume 41 focuses on inclusivity, highlighting the contribution of geography to numerous fields, and examining the role of portraiture in the history of geography for the first time.With a particular emphasis on the role of portraiture, this volume is richly illustrated, and explores how imagers can contribute to visual methods used in geographical studies.The volume explores the lives of 6 prominent geographers, including Dame Evelyn Stokes, a New Zealand geographer who did pioneering work with Maori communities, and Ferenc Fodor, a Hungarian geographer who lived through both World Wars. Combined, their lives cover 200 years of history, and touch on numerous fields from historical geography to popular geography.

This book explores how women spearheaded the democratic suffrage campaign in colonial Queensland engaging with international debates on women's activism, leadership, advocacy, print culture, and social movements.Australian Women's Justice provides a nuanced reading of the diversity and differences of the women's movement in Queensland, from the time of first white colonisation, federation to World War 1 by new research on key women's organisations: notably the Women's Equal Franchise Association and the Women's Peace Army. Framed through the lives of women suffrage participants, including their encounters with First Nations women, it also looks beyond microhistory to explore broader themes of the intersection of race, gender, property, war, and empire in the colonial context. Campaigns for enfranchisement and property rights and against conscription connect this story with larger international movements for women and labour, and organisations such as the League of Nations.This book will be of interest to students and researchers of Australian feminism and suffragism, as well as historians of feminist, labour, and peace movements both in Australia and internationally.

This book provides a comprehensive environmental history of how Australia's rainforests developed, the influence of Aborigines and pioneers, farmers and loggers, and of efforts to protect rainforests, to help us better understand current issues and debates surrounding their conservation and use.While interest in rainforests and the movement for their conservation are often mistakenly portrayed as features of the last few decades, the debate over human usage of rainforests stretches well back into the nineteenth century. In the modern world, rainforests are generally considered the most attractive of the ecosystems, being seen as lush, vibrant, immense, mysterious, spiritual and romantic. Rainforests hold a special place; both providing a direct link to Gondwanaland and the dinosaurs and today being the home of endangered species and highly rich in biodiversity. They are also a critical part of Australia's heritage. Indeed, large areas of Australian rainforests are now covered by World Heritage Listing. However, they also represent a dissonant heritage. What exactly constitutes rainforest, how it should be managed and used, and how much should be protected are all issues which remain hotly contested. Debates around rainforests are particularly dominated by the contradiction of competing views and uses – seeing rainforests either as untapped resources for agriculture and forestry versus valuing and preserving them as attractive and sublime natural wonders. Australia fits into this global story as a prime example but is also of interest for its aspects that are exceptional, including the intensity of clearing at certain periods and for its place in the early development of national parks.This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Environmental History, Australian History and Comparative History.

Mallee Country tells the powerful history of mallee lands and people across southern Australia from Deep Time to the present. Carefully shaped and managed by Aboriginal people for over 50,000 years, mallee country was dramatically transformed by settlers, first with sheep and rabbits, then by flattening and burning the mallee to make way for wheat. Government backed settlement schemes devastated lives and country, but some farmers learnt how to survive the droughts, dust storms, mice, locusts and salinity - as well as the vagaries of international markets - and became some of Australia's most resilient agriculturalists. In mallee country, innovation and tenacity have been neighbours to hardship and failure.Mallee Country is a story of how land and people shape each other. It is the story of how a landscape once derided by settlers as a ‘howling wilderness'covered in ‘dismal scrub'became home to citizens who delighted in mallee fauna and flora and fought to conserve it for future generations. And it is the story of the dreams, sweat and sorrows of people who face an uncertain future of depopulation and climate change with creativity and hope.

Mallee Country tells the powerful history of mallee lands and people across southern Australia from Deep Time to the present. Carefully shaped and managed by Aboriginal people for over 50,000 years, mallee country was dramatically transformed by settlers, first with sheep and rabbits, then by flattening and burning the mallee to make way for wheat. Government backed settlement schemes devastated lives and country, but some farmers learnt how to survive the droughts, dust storms, mice, locusts and salinity – as well as the vagaries of international markets – to become some of Australia's most resilient agriculturalists. In mallee country, innovation and tenacity have been neighbours to hardship and failure. Mallee Country is a story of how land and people shape each other. It is the story of how a landscape once derided by settlers as a'howling wilderness'covered in'dismal scrub'became home to citizens who delighted in mallee fauna and flora, and fought to conserve it for future generations. And it is the story of the dreams, sweat and sorrows of people who face an uncertain future of depopulation and climate change with creativity and hope.'...a rich compendium that exposes the roots of many callous policies that continue state-sanctioned assaults on people and ecosystems. As tales of mass fish death, of drought-relief packages, and of billions of dollars allocated to dams and pipelines inundate the news, Mallee Country is a sobering reminder that we've seen it before. What is different now is the scale and urgency of the problems. Mallee Country is an urgent environmental history for these troubled times. As the authors forewarn, the super-imposition of rapid climate change will bring longer-term and wider-reaching consequences to the Mallee...Mallee Country can be read as a history for the future; a warning of what happens when we forget to remember.'— Lilian Pearce, Australian Book Review

In 1915, news of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps landing and the slaughter at Gallipoli stirred tens of thousands of young men to go to war.They answered the call and formed battalions of the Australian Imperial Force. By the time the new recruits were combat ready, the campaign at Gallipoli had ended. Their battlefields became the muddy paddocks of France and Belgium.Based on eyewitness account, Eyewitnesses at the Somme traces the story of one of these battalions, the 55th, from its birth in the dusty camps of Egypt through three years of brutal, bloody conflict on the bitter western front.When the Great War ended in 1918, over 500 of the 3,000 men who served in the 55th had been slain and another 1,000 wounded. Eyewitnesses at the Somme, shares personal stories of Australian men as they stared down the horrors of war with determination, courage and comradeship. With chapters devoted to the significant battles at Fromelles, Doignies, Polygon Wood, Pronne and Bellicourt, this book tells the story of one battalion, but in doing so it encapsulates the experiences of many Australians on the Western Front.

The history of Aborigines in Van Diemen's Land is long. The first Tasmanians lived in isolation for as many as 300 generations after the flooding of Bass Strait. Their struggle against almost insurmountable odds is one worthy of respect and admiration, not to mention serious attention. This broad-ranging book is a comprehensive and critical account of that epic survival up to the present day. Starting from antiquity, the book examines the devastating arrival of Europeans and subsequent colonisation, warfare and exile. It emphasises the regionalism and separateness, a consistent feature of Aboriginal life since time immemorial that has led to the distinct identities we see in the present, including the unique place of the islanders of Bass Strait. Carefully researched, using the findings of archaeologists and extensive documentary evidence, some only recently uncovered, this important book fills a long-time gap in Tasmanian history.

For a British Empire that stretched across much of the globe at the start of the nineteenth century, the interiors of Africa and Australia remained intriguing mysteries. The challenge of opening these continents to imperial influence fell to a proto-professional coterie of determined explorers. They sought knowledge, adventure, and fame, but often experienced confusion, fear, and failure. The Last Blank Spaces follows the arc of these explorations, from idea to practice, from intention to outcome, from myth to reality.Those who conducted the hundreds of expeditions that probed Africa and Australia in the nineteenth century adopted a mode of scientific investigation that had been developed by previous generations of seaborne explorers. They likened the two continents to oceans, empty spaces that could be made truly knowable only by mapping, measuring, observing, and preserving. They found, however, that their survival and success depended less on this system of universal knowledge than it did on the local knowledge possessed by native peoples.While explorers sought to advance the interests of Britain and its emigrant communities, Dane Kennedy discovers a more complex outcome: expeditions that failed ignominiously, explorers whose loyalties proved ambivalent or divided, and, above all, local states and peoples who diverted expeditions to serve their own purposes. The collisions, and occasional convergences, between British and indigenous values, interests, and modes of knowing the world are brought to the fore in this fresh and engaging study.

Brave and controversial, this account argues that Australians'collective obsession with the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) has distorted their perception of national history. Delving into the history of ANZAC and the mythologies surrounding it, this detailed record explores topics such as the formation of Australia's national holiday—ANZAC Day—and the way in which the spirit of ANZAC is taught in the nation's classrooms. Ultimately, this informative narrative claims that ANZAC has become a conservative political force in Australia and questions whether ANZAC'S renowned foreign battles were worth all of the bloodshed. Daring, intelligent, and thought-provoking, this is a must-read for those interested in Australian or military history.