The Australian Historical Association
The site for and about historians working in or on Australia.
6-8 December 2019, Sydney This conference aims to produce a fresh and cosmopolitan history of environmental and Earth sciences, analysing the significance of geological time and multiple cosmologies for global modernity. One of the most fascinating elements in a conventional history of geology is its intricate connection to theology; to complex eighteenth and nineteenth-century doctrinal Read more …
This celebration of the inspirational careers of two of Australia’s most eminent historians will be held 30 June to 2 July. There are a number of ways you can be involved: Cocktail Party and Keynote Address by Tom Griffiths, ‘Global Dreaming: Australia and the World’, $30 or Conference (2-day) and Cocktail Party/Tom Griffiths address: $150. Read more …
Bernice Barry’s Georgiana Molloy: The Mind That Shines – a biography of one of Australia’s first internationally successful female botanists – was a best-seller in Western Australia and has been picked up by two major publishers. Bernice signed with Pan Macmillan in December and a new edition of the book will be released under their Read more …
Russell McGregor has been awarded the 2016 David Scott Mitchell Memorial Fellowship for a project entitled ‘Bush Naturalist: A Life of Alec Chisholm’, which will culminate in a book-length biography of this pioneer conservationist and popular natural-history writer. Cath Bishop has been awarded the 2016 Australian Religious History Fellowship for a project entitled ‘“She Has Read more …
Susan Marsden’s book, A Year-round Holiday: The Histories of West Lakes (Wakefield Press) considers more than 180 years of history of an area of so-called wasteland of degraded swamp and sand that was transformed in the 1970s into well-groomed waterways and homes. The title quotes the marketing slogan used to sell this development as a prestigious place to Read more …
In Wild Man from Borneo: A Cultural History of the Orangutan (University of Hawai’i Press) Robert Cribb, Helen Gilbert and Helen Tiffin offer the first comprehensive history of the human-orangutan encounter. Beginning with the scientific discovery of the red ape more than three hundred years ago, this work goes on to examine the ways in which Read more …
In Crisis of the Wasteful Nation (University of Chicago Press), Ian Tyrrell gives us a cohesive picture of Roosevelt’s engagement with the natural world along with a compelling portrait of how Americans used, wasted, and worried about natural resources in a time of burgeoning empire. Countering traditional narratives that cast conservation as a purely domestic Read more …
The International Review of Environmental History, published by ANU Press, takes an interdisciplinary and global approach to environmental history. It publishes on all thematic and geographical topics of environmental history, but especially encourages articles with perspectives focussed on or developed from the southern hemisphere and the ‘global south’. This includes but is not limited to Read more …
Ruth Morgan’s book Running Out? Water in Western Australia (UWA Publishing) uncovers the 200 year long fear of running out of water — a fear that has gripped the region’s inhabitants and loomed large on the state’s political agenda and shaped how urban and rural Western Australians learned to live with the effects of a Read more …
Emily O’Gorman (with co-editors James Beattie and Edward Melillo) has just published Eco-Cultural Networks and the British Empire: New Views on Environmental History (Bloomsbury Publishing) which explores how networks of human and non-human actors shaped environments, cultures and societies throughout the British Empire and beyond, and how local and regional conditions transformed these densely interconnected Read more …