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Popular understandings of the Great Barrier Reef’s early-settler history are anchored to the Endeavour’s crashing in 1770. Recently, however, James Bowen, Margarita Bowen, and Iain McCalman...

Scholarly attention to flood in northern Queensland has generally focused on the region’s potential to irrigate Australia’s drier regions or stimulate its northern development. These concerns emphasise infrastructure and rural issues and neglect the experiences of the northern cities. Established in 1864–65 on the Ross River plain, Townsville is located within Queensland’s drought-prone, dry tropics. Despite the damage which accompanies them, the city has come to rely upon extreme rain events brought by cyclones and monsoons for its urban water supply. Repetitive but unpredictable cycles of below-average rain followed by extreme wet weather have informed locally unique ways of processing, memorialising and rebuilding from these disasters.

Today’s campaigns to protect the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) have parallels with historical campaigns. With hindsight, we can more clearly see the way environmental discourses are socially constructed as well as their outcomes. This is potentially insightful for contemporary environmentalists. Beginning in 1967, the Save the Reef campaign had a thoughtful media strategy and sought to socially construct the GBR as a precious ecosystem that was at risk from exploitation. Histories of this campaign remember environmentalists as a weak, David-like contender in a fight against the powerful Goliath of the Queensland government and extractive industries. Using the historical archives as our primary data source, however, reveals that these memories are overstated and that environmentalists actually enjoyed widespread support. Moreover, we see that the GBR has no explicit ‘opponents’; even those who sought to exploit it came from a position of pragmatic conservationism, believing exploitation and conservation could c...

A great deal of scholarship has sought to explain the complexities and problems of Australia’s pearl-shell, beche-de-mer and trochus fisheries. Despite historically existing as distinct maritime enterprises, often with different bases, grounds and leaders, in histories of the Great Barrier Reef they are collated together and discussed as salient examples of settler Australia’s misuse of the Reef. Often overlooked, however, are the ways the fisheries were promoted to foster a perception of the Reef as a place of abundance. This chapter considers how known histories of resource issues became marginalised within the romanticisation of the Reef’s economic wealth. It does so by briefly addressing the pioneering period when ideas and rumours of the fisheries’ potential to generate wealth drew government interest and regulation. It then considers a turbulent period wherein government concern for the fisheries resulted in three inquiries between 1890 and 1920. Finally, it examines the period from World War I to the 1940s, when the idea of ‘abundance’ became particularly resilient, as writers recast the fisheries’ histories and praised them as concrete examples of the Reef’s potential abundance. By the 1950s, however, optimism about the future of the fishery had been sapped, and tourism replaced it as the Reef’s primary economic activity. Nonetheless, this chapter shows that optimism remained despite legacies of resource depletion, labour issues and market difficulties. It argues that belief in the fisheries’ abundance, expressed by fishermen, scientists, politicians and travel writers, embodied a confidence which was informed by a desire to ascribe a form of tangible value to the Reef.

This thesis examines the concepts of direct democracy, which is defined as direct rule of the people, removing the necessity for elected representative. A review of the literature on the concepts shows that direct democracy enjoys broad appeal with writers such as Benjamin Barber, John Stewart Mill, Thomas Cronin and James Fishkin. Yet, it has been thought that direct democracy is not practical where the population, exceeds a few thousand, or is spread over a vast region. Other concerns have been expressed in the area of the ability of the average citizen to understand and render a judgement on complex issues. Looking specifically at Canada's potential for overcoming the problems associated with direct democracy, two questions are considered. First, does the potential for direct democracy increase with a proportional increase in level of education of the electorate and the availability of the Internet communications technology? Second, what difference might direct democracy make to the sagging levels of conventional political participation in Canada? The thesis addresses voter apathy, it looks at the connections between education and politics, as well as the connections between communications technology and politics. After examining if the conditions necessary to direct democracy in Canada exist, this work focuses on what Cronin refers to as the tools of democracy. Recall, referenda and initiative are the tools considered. British Columbia experience with recall and initiative is also considered. The author concludes that the high level of education and the advent of Internet communication in Canada make it possible and plausible to consider the implementation of a system of governance that provides a greater degree of direct democracy. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 40-03, page: 0599. Thesis (M.A.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2000.