I am currently working on four major research projects relating to the water and climate histories of Australia and the Indian Ocean:

Australindia: Environment, Empire, and the Future of British India and the Australian Colonies, 1857-1914

During the long nineteenth century, British India and the Australian colonies served as important laboratories for environmental ideas and practices that could be transferred across the Indian Ocean. This project analyses the trajectory of this environmental traffic to reassess the development of colonial understandings of the Australian environment, particularly its climates and waters, and the interventions and aspirations that these understandings produced. Examining colonial Australia in terms of these imperial webs of environmental connections will broaden perspectives on Australian history and illuminate the ways in which the Australian environment continues to bear the legacies of empire. This research is funded by the Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (2016, 18-19). This research is also funded by the 2016 Allan Martin Award of the Australian Historical Association, a KCL Australian Bicentennial Fellowship, and a Carl Friedrich von Siemens Research Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Rachel Carson Center, LMU, Munich. Some of this research has appeared in Environment and History, Pacific Historical Review, and Global Environment, and I am preparing a book manuscript.

Water and the Making of Urban Australia since 1900

With Andrea Gaynor, Margaret Cook, Lionel Frost, Jenny Gregory, Martin Shanahan and Peter Spearritt, I am working to produce new understandings of both the historical drivers of today’s urban water systems, and how these systems have impacted on human and ecological welfare. This will be achieved through the first integrated and comparative historical study of the provision, use and cultures of water in Australia’s five largest cities from 1900 to the present. Such historical knowledge is critical at a time when the water systems of Australia’s largest cities are under growing pressure from environmental change and population growth. Project findings will inform the development of policies and practices that produce sustainable, equitable urban water systems. This research is funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project (2018-20). Check out our Virtual Exhibition on the Rachel Carson Center’s Environment and Society portal, and our special issue ‘Ripple Effects’ in Australian Historical Studies. Check out our co-authored book with Cambridge University Press, Cities in a Sunburnt Country: Water and the Making of Urban Australia.

The Anthropocene in the Antipodes

Focusing particularly on Oceania or the Pacific Islands, as well as Australia and New Zealand, this project reviews the concept of the Anthropocene through the environmental histories and histories of science of the Southern Hemisphere. Bringing together the diverse ecological and human histories of this vast region highlights the strikingly different ways that the Global South and Global North have contributed to and experienced planetary change. Until the 1970s, the southern hemisphere remained largely absent from scientific considerations of the planetary impacts of human activity. Although the International Geophysical Year had been a boon for Antarctic exploration, the Pacific and Indian Oceans remained ‘embarrassingly unknown’ south of the equator nearly a decade later. This project has two parts: 1) the study of the processes of imperialism and capitalism in the Indo-Pacific from the eighteenth century; 2) an examination of the the role of Australian climatologists and meteorologists in advancing the state of knowledge about the causes and mechanisms of climatic change and variability in the Southern Hemisphere. Funded by the Moran Award of the Australian Academy of Science, and the Australian National University, this research has appeared in Disaster Prevention and Management, and in 2024, I published Climate Change and International History: Negotiating Science, Global Change and Environmental Justice, with Bloomsbury Academic.

Water Cultures of the Murray Darling Basin

With Sue Jackson, Lesley Head, Katie Holmes, Jess Urwin, Karen Twigg and Alex Dixon, I am drawing on the insights of environmental history and cultural geography to analyse changes in the ways that the waters of the Murray Darling Basin have been understood, valued and defined since the nineteenth century. Together, we seek to enhance our understandings of the formation and evolution of cultural attitudes, values, norms and practices associated with water in the area, and examine their ongoing influence on water sharing and contestation. This research is funded by the Australian Research Council Special Research Initiative (2021-24) and the Murray-Darling Basin Authority.