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In his landmark book The Biggest Estate on Earth, historian Bill Gammage argues that before the arrival of white settlers, the whole Australian continent was a manicured cultural landscape, shaped and maintained by precise, deliberate and repeated fires. In Aboriginal hands, fire made the entire country 'beautiful and comfortable', and so Australia was one vast 'estate', a giant 'park', a series of 'farms without fences'. These words imply that Aboriginal rights to land are closely tied to universal fire regimes. Gammage's book has been well-received and celebrated. But it has also polarised debates on fire regimes, especially the extent to which fire really did shape every corner of the continent, and the related assertion that contemporary ecologies are the result of the cessation of fire since 1788.This paper integrates ethnographic history and archaeology with geography, soil science and ecology in order to set Gammage's model against a particular ecological zone - the dense River-flat Forests that once lined Dyarubbin, the Hawkesbury-Nepean River in New South Wales, Australia. Dyarubbin was occupied by Aboriginal people for perhaps 50,000 years, and from 1794 it became the site of the first major settler farming frontier. Paying attention to the local and the particular, this paper asks: was this fiercely contested country a tidy mosaic of open forests, water and grasslands created by cultural fire? Was Aboriginal burning here extensive or limited? What aspects of human and ecological history might be obscured by the universalising model in which cultural fire dominates above all other factors? Did the Aboriginal landscape in turn shape the settler one, and what were the consequences for land and people?

What was Governor Arthur Phillip's relationship with the Eora, and other Aboriginal people of the Sydney region? How do we interpret Philip in the light of his actions towards Aboriginal people? Looking at the colony's early years through the twin lenses of British and Eora perspective and experience banishes the notion that there can be only one 'right' story or way of interpreting Phillip's legacy.

The cover of James Dunk's Bedlam at Botany Bay features a detail from Conrad Martens' striking 1853 painting of Sydney Heads. Rather than the standard postcard view of the harbour sparkling with pr...

The Traces in a Lost Landscape: Aboriginal archaeological sites, Dyarubbin/Nepean River Project uses geospatial recording and analysis to recover, integrate, and map data from published and unpublished reports on Aboriginal archaeological sites on Dyarubbin/the Nepean River in New South Wales, Australia. This dataset consists of Australian Aboriginal archaeological locations of interest in the greater Nepean River area in New South Wales, Australia.

To date, environmental histories of rivers, floods, and settlers in early colonial Australia (1788–1820) have meshed with colonial historiography rather than challenging it. Missing from th...

Kate Fullager reviews the exhibition ‘America: Painting a Nation’, 8 November 2013 – 9 February 2014, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, NSW.

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. Conceived in the late 1960s, the Scheme is a quintessential 'hybrid landscape', aiming to rehabilitate 2,000 hectares of open-cut gravel quarries by creating huge artificial lakes and landforms. But it destroyed a rich palimpsest of earlier farming and Aboriginal landscapes, both of which had also transformed the environment. By focusing on this place over time, it is possible to track the succession of Aboriginal, settler, industrial and urban histories, to explore the shifting meanings of this environment, the different ways they knew and shaped this country, and the politics and strategic uses of different types of environmental knowledge.

The excavation of the Cumberland/Gloucester Streets Site in Sydney’s historic Rocks area in 1994 was marked by the successful application of an innovative, integrated approach to urban archaeology in Australia. This approach allowed fresh explorations of many aspects of Sydney’s social and cultural development, including the material world of the first generation of convict settlers. This paper examines that world within the wider context of standard and more recent interpretations of the convict colony, as well as drawing on and evaluating scholarship in the history of material life over the last 20-odd years. It offers some reflections on the idea of the worldview, the importance of local context, and the ways in which we approach the archaeology of settler societies.

This paper explores the origins of Sydney from the perspective of the convict and ex‐convict majority by examining the townscape of the early Rocks where they appropriated land and built houses from the earliest years of white settlement. Instead of the orderly outpost of empire presented by governors, artists and map‐makers, or the gaol town or ‘gulag’ portrayed in some historiography, the Sydney the Rocks represented was built and occupied largely according to the tastes, priorities and inclinations of the people, with relatively little official interference. Early Sydney emerged through a constant dialogue between people and government, one that encompassed signs and rituals of deference and obligation, pragmatic negotiations, everyday subversion and, more occasionally, outright defiance.

Re-exploring the history of Elizabeth Bay House is a way into recover something lost: the ongoing struggle over land and who had the right to occupy it in early New South Wales. This chapter traces the evolution of both impermanent and permanent construction there, comparing Aboriginal, vernacular and elite building. It demonstrates that buildings of all sorts played a crucial role in the politics of dispossession. By 1828, its non- Aboriginal population had grown to over 38,500 souls, but in terms of class and culture it was still a colony populated by convicts and ex-convicts and their children. All these ranks of people built different types of structures, but for genteel people, or those aspiring to gentility, building was of particular importance. While the legacy of the convicts was finally embraced, the history and traces of Aboriginal people's struggles to adapt and survive in Sydney after 1788 were erased. Keywords:Aborigines; Australia; elite building; Elizabeth Bay House; New South Wales; politics of dispossession; vernacular building

In 1819 a group of Aboriginal men from the Nepean River and the Blue Mountains came to Sydney, where they met some of the Frenchmen from the corvette Uranie. The French visitors were on a voyage of scientific discovery, and had planned a journey across the Blue Mountains. Most likely the Aboriginal men had agreed to act as their guides. Artist Alphonse Pellion sketched them at their camp on the edge of Sydney, and his drawings show that they were all wearing jackets or coats. Tara and Peroa, from the Nepean River, were not wearing trousers. Neither, probably, were the others - the engravings made from Pellion's sketches show them only from the waist up, and the Frenchmen noted with some shock that this was the usual manner of dress for the Aboriginal men in Sydney.

As a ‘genre of history’ in Australia environmental history is relatively new, emerging in the 1960s and 70s from encounters between history, geography and the natural sciences in the context of growing environmental concern and activism. Interdisciplinary in orientation, the field also exhibited an unusually high level of engagement with current environmental issues and organisations. In this era of national research priorities and debates about the role and purpose of university-based research, it therefore seemed fair to ask: ‘can environmental history save the world?’ In response, a panel of new and established researchers offer their perspectives on issues of relevance and utility within this diverse and dynamic genre. This article has been peer-reviewed.