“Exploring how climate change has configured the international arena since the 1950s, this book reveals the ways that climate change emerged and evolved as an international problem, and how states, scientists and non-governmental organizations have engaged in diplomatic efforts to address it. Developing amidst the Cold War, decolonization and a growing transnational environmental consciousness, it asks how this wider historical context has shaped international responses to the greatest threat to humankind to date.

Thinking beyond the science of climate change to the way it is received and responded to, Ruth Morgan shows how climate science has been mobilised in the political sphere, paying particular attention to the North-South dynamics of climate diplomacy. The privileging of climate science and the mobilisation of climate scepticism are explored to consider how they have undermined efforts to remedy this planetary problem. Studying climate change and international history in tandem, this book explains the origins of the debates around this environmental emergency, the response of political leaders attempting to address the threat, and the barriers to creating an international regime to resolve the climate crisis.”

“For nearly 200 years the visions and aspirations of the people of Australia’s west have been characterised by an unquenchable thirst. Ruth Morgan uncovers the fear of running out of water — a fear that has long gripped the region’s inhabitants and loomed large on the state’s political agenda. It has shaped how urban and rural Western Australians learned to live with the effects of a variable climate on their water supply, lifestyle, and livelihood.
This is a story of hardship and persistence; of inclusion, exclusion and defiant profligacy in the face of growing scarcity, through a period of great development and social change. An engrossing environmental history that offers a new understanding of the past Running Out? questions this way of life as we approach an uncertain future in a drying climate.”

“As Australian cities face uncertain water futures, what insights can the history of Aboriginal and settler relationships with water yield? Residents have come to expect reliable, safe, and cheap water, but natural limits and the costs of maintaining and expanding water networks are at odds with forms and cultures of urban water use. Cities in a Sunburnt Country is the first comparative study of the provision, use, and social impact of water and water infrastructure in Australia’s five largest cities. Drawing on environmental, urban, and economic history, this co-authored book challenges widely held assumptions, both in Australia and around the world, about water management, consumption, and sustainability. From the ‘living water’ of Aboriginal cultures to the rise of networked water infrastructure, the book invites us to take a long view of how water has shaped our cities, and how urban water systems and cultures might weather a warming world.”

“The Routledge Handbook of Environmental History presents a cutting-edge overview of the dynamic and ever-expanding field of environmental history. It addresses recent transformations in the field and responses to shifting scholarly, political, and environmental landscapes. The handbook fully and critically engages with recent exciting changes, contextualizes them within longer-term shifts in the field, and charts potential new directions for study.”

“This book brings the history of the geosciences and world cosmologies together, exploring many traditions, including Chinese, Pacific, Islamic, South and Southeast Asian conceptions of the earth’s origin and makeup. Together the chapters ask: How have different ideas about the sacred, animate, and earthly changed modern environmental sciences? How have different world traditions understood human and geological origins? How does the inclusion of multiple cosmologies change the meaning of the Anthropocene and the global climate crisis? By carefully examining these questions, New Earth Histories sets an ambitious agenda for how we think about the earth.

The chapters consider debates about the age and structure of the earth, how humans and earth systems interact, and how empire has been conceived in multiple traditions. The methods the authors deploy are diverse—from cultural history and visual and material studies to ethnography, geography, and Indigenous studies—and the effect is to highlight how earth knowledge emerged from historically specific situations. New Earth Histories provides both a framework for studying science at a global scale and fascinating examples to educate as well as inspire future work. Essential reading for students and scholars of earth science history, environmental humanities, history of science and religion, and science and empire.”

“Migrant Ecologies: Environmental Histories of the Pacific World is the first volume explicitly dedicated to the environmental history of Earth’s largest ocean. Covering nearly one-third of the planet, the Pacific Ocean is remarkable for its diverse human and non-human inhabitants, their astounding long-distance migrations over time, and their profound influences on other parts of the world. This book creates an understanding of the past, present, and futures of the lands, seas, peoples, practices, microbes, animals, plants, and other natural forces that shape the Pacific. It effectively argues for the existence of an interconnected Pacific World environmental history, as well as for the Pacific Ocean as a necessary framework for understanding that history.”

“Featuring contributions from leading lawyers, historians and social scientists, this path-breaking volume explores encounters of laws, people, and places in Australia since 1788. Its chapters address three major themes: the development of Australian settler law in the shadow of the British Empire; the interaction between settler law and First Nations people; and the possibility of meaningful encounter between First laws and settler legal regimes in Australia. Several chapters explore the limited space provided by Australian settler law for respectful encounters, particularly in light of the High Court’s particular concerns about the fragility of Australian sovereignty. Tracing the development of a uniquely Australian law and the various contexts that shaped it, this volume is concerned with the complexity, plurality, and ambiguity of Australia’s legal history.”

“Does history repeat itself in meaningful ways, or is each problem unique? How can a knowledge of Australian history enhance our understanding of the present and prepare us for the future?

Lessons from History is written with the conviction that we must see the world, and confront its many challenges, with an understanding of what has gone before.”

“On our blue planet, oceans have long shaped human histories. Generations have crossed the seas, fished their depths, and navigated their currents, encountering new peoples and places on the waves and on the shores. In this roundtable discussion, edited by Ruth Morgan and Laura Rademaker, we reflect on just how oceans have shaped deep human pasts and how we can recover ocean histories from the deep.”

“Environmental degradation is the most serious challenge of the twenty-first century. To date, academic historians, among many others, have failed to fully confront the climate and biodiversity crises, often engaging in disavowal of the problems and our contribution to them in the course of our historical work. This article discusses mitigation efforts underway among other professional bodies, higher education institutions and academic disciplines, before addressing how we might embrace sustainability more meaningfully through our practices. We explain why a focus on decarbonisation is important, canvas the multiple benefits of reducing travel and consider what individuals and institutions can do to better respond to a crisis that is already with us. Our particular case study is Australia, though the implications of our findings - such as the effects of global heating and environmental destruction - are global.”

“The human/nature relationship is at the heart of one of the most urgent crises of our time: climate change. What does this mean for environmental historians, trained as we are to examine the culture/nature relationship, its changing temporal expressions, to challenge the binary which underpins the discipline of history itself? This article is framed as a conversation between three environmental historians as we respond to key questions about environmental history and the climate crisis. Together we ponder the skills we bring to understanding it, the stories we have found to move us forward and our thoughts about the interface between history, science and activism.”

“Looking for the Leeuwin Current as it skims the Australian coast draws attention to this littoral as a space for entangled ecologies, livelihoods and imaginaries. In the shallows of the East Indian Ocean and its Australian shoreline, global oceanic and atmospheric processes combine to produce what is a local phenomenon far removed from national and international political and scientific centers of action. The current’s peripheral existence beyond the endeavors of Cold War internationalism encouraged cooperation between fishers and marine scientists focused on the optimal harvesting of coastal resources. These relationships helped cast particular imaginaries of an otherwise opaque ocean current that connected a local fishery to wider international concerns about fish stocks and climate variability. What follows is a triptych of imaginaries - as a fluid frontier, a fisheries index, and a climate mechanism - that, studied together, reveal the eddies of the ‘material and mental worlds’ of the Leeuwin Current.”

“In British India and the Australian colonies, drought and famine, as well as other hazards, were challenges facing local and metropolitan meteorologists. In this article, I examine the colonial and environmental contexts that animated the studies of both Indian and Australian scientists and the meteorological futures they sought to realise. Colonial scientists in India and Australia were eager to develop means of seasonal weather prediction that could aid the advancement of Empire underway in their respective continents. As this article shows, meteorologists in both places understood that the climate knowledge emerging on each side of the east Indian Ocean could be mutually beneficial in related ways. Their vast continental scales, imperial bonds, geographic orientation and telegraphic connection made them worthy partners in colonial efforts to discern and predict weather patterns, while contributing to the wider field of meteorological science. The threat to colonial security and prosperity that drought and famine posed helped to thicken the bonds between these reaches of the empire, as their meteorologists sought to impose their territorial logic of the skies above.”

“Australia is a continent seemingly without a cryohistory. But take a closer look. Its cryohistory differs dramatically from that of the northern hemisphere—a contrast that long baffled Victorian geologists seeking evidence of glaciation in the Great South Land. Just as historians have sought to redress the image of a static Arctic through a new attention to its cryohistory, so too historians of Australia have sought to recover a continent that is anything but a “timeless land.” Its long geological history—its cryohistory—framed Aboriginal lifeways across the continent, which in turn, shaped colonial encounters in the aftermath of British invasion in 1788. Guiding this historical project have been the moral challenges of the settler nation’s legacy of Indigenous dispossession and displacement, and the unfolding planetary crisis of the Anthropocene and its implications for critically understanding deep time. This article examines the colonial hydrology of water scarcity in the goldfields of arid Western Australia in the late nineteenth century. It shows how access to freshwater became a flashpoint for relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples on an extractive frontier. At the turn of the twentieth century, water was the means by which to improve health, hygiene and cleanliness, without which the privileges of white civilisation could not be afforded. Although such conditions also developed elsewhere in settler Australia, the limited water availability on the eastern goldfields made the circumstances that emerged there especially dire. Accordingly, the material conditions of the arid inland—the product of Australia’s Pleistocene—came to bear on the nature of the encounters between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples from the mid-nineteenth century. The very absence of ice in Australia’s cryohistory left its mark on the peoples of the eastern goldfields. ”

“What does it entail to foreground water flourishing as a stance toward the Anthropocene? During an exercise at the Anthropocene Campus Melbourne, about twenty participants individually drew images of ‘water flourishing’ leading, with only one or two exceptions of Edenic representations, to a wall of images depicting no humans. That small experience reproduced a larger cultural and environmental management configuration: people-less water flourishing. If we face such constraints in imagining, representing, and enacting hydro-flourishing, we remain stuck in familiar loops either of: 1) elemental thinking that excludes the human; or 2) anthropocenic thinking that too often addresses the human primarily as destroyer. How do we imagine our being with water in different ways? How do we move away from pervasive narratives of water crisis without, at the same time, romancing water? Feminist, decolonial, and Indigenous approaches to water and its cultural politics ask us to consider the elemental not only in substance, but also in rights regimes and in the project of flourishing. In this paper, we present examples of water flourishing projects and impasses from three sites: Kathmandu, Nepal; Perth, Australia; and the Florida Everglades, United States. All show both the problems and the promise of co-centering the human and nonhuman in their interdependent relations when it comes to water flourishing.”

“Understanding empire’s duress at the planetary scale in the twenty-first century demands the close analysis of the environmental imaginaries that shaped natural worlds during the Age of Empire. These imaginaries flowered from particular cultures of climate concern, and informed imperialist ambitions for colonial improvement. The quantitative and qualitative measurement of colonial climates through observation, experience, and theory not only fostered the scientific networks of exchange, but also structured imperial narratives of environmental decline and anxiety that mobilised the unprecedented movement of sojourners and settlers, free and unfree, human and non-human, across the globe for empire’s ends.”

“This essay integrates the largely separate trajectories of climate and water histories, their distinct historiographies, and their different methods and expertise. Informed by the human‐nature insights of environmental history and historical geography, this paper identifies four intersections between histories of climate and water: first, conceptualizations of the climate and hydrological systems; second, adaptations to climate and hydrological variability and change; third, weather control; and finally, water over time. These particular intersections shed light on shared concerns for human relations to water and climate across different spatial and temporal scales; the development and function of networks of environmental knowledge; the formation and impact of environmental imaginaries; and the emergence of particular cultures of risk and resilience. The English‐language histories of climate and water to which I refer pertain largely to the study of the 19th and 20th centuries in relation to the spread of European and North American empires. Histories of water, I argue, offer more personal and localized insights into histories of climate and climate change.”

“This chapter examines key areas of research by historians of climate and climatology in the nineteenth-century context of empire and colonialism. This research ranges from the reconstruction of past climates, the study of medical climatology, and the social and political consequences of climate events, to understandings of climate change and climate modification, the practice of colonial climatology, and the emergence of a ‘global’ climate. Although these areas have tended to be studied separately, common themes emerge when they are brought together, including climate and environmental determinism; scientific cultures and practices; geographies of knowledge and risk; the application of science for economic development; and spatial and temporal ideas of scale.”

“We open this special issue ‘Bodies of Knowledge’ by invoking the recent history and deep past of the reef—a vast earthly body under siege. What Attenborough’s exploration of the reef highlighted was the gulf between knowing about the reef’s challenges and acting upon that knowledge. He wondered, ‘do we really care so little about the earth upon which we live that we don’t wish to protect one of its greatest wonders from the consequences of our behaviours?’ In bridging this gap, the historian Iain McCalman suggests that environmental history has a valuable affective role to play by making the past meaningful to the present and the future. A meaningful or ‘passionate history’, as McCalman shows in his own biography of the reef, is one that populates or embodies the past. We take to the reef ourselves to illuminate the historiographical and conceptual issues that animate the contributions to this special issue. What we know about environments, and how we know them, affects the ways we relate to and engage with them, and how we embody them, physically and culturally, over time.”

“This article traces the little-studied development of Australian interest in iceberg utilisation from the 1960s to the early 1990s. Fostered by Cold War global anxieties about water availability, iceberg utilisation offered a means to overcome hydrological limits to growth. Drawing on Patrick McCray’s characterisation of the ‘visioneer’, this article examines the arguments that Australian scientists raised in support of iceberg utilisation during the 1970s and 1980s. Focusing on Perth, Western Australia, as a prospective destination for harvested Antarctic icebergs, Australian visioneers appealed to settler narratives of heroic water engineering, and Antarctic exploration and exploitation. Although their scheme for iceberg utilisation was unrealised, its study reveals the particular circumstances that shaped the visioneers and their vision as well as the circumstances that hindered their achievement.”

“In this essay, I offer a potted genealogy of the ways in which environmental historians (and others) have articulated the historical relationship between humans and the hydrosphere. In doing so, I argue for the usefulness of the ‘hydro-social cycle’ as a multi-scalar means to conceptualise this dynamic and co-evolving relationship over time. This concept of a hydro-social cycle is a valuable companion to the study of the Anthropocene, not least because these two frameworks both emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century to articulate the extent to which humans have shaped planetary processes. For the purposes of brevity, I have limited my discussion to the historical scholarship of urban sanitary infrastructure. This focus on the hydro-social cycle in the city not only reflects my own research to date, but also highlights the significance of phenomena such as path dependence and technological lock-in to the exponential hydrospheric changes that the IGBP graphs so vividly illustrate. In the discussion that follows, I show how the hydro-social cycle offers a means to reconcile earlier efforts to conceptualise and historicise human-nature relations with the political ecology of urban spaces. I then turn to the historical study of hydraulic infrastructure, and its role in the mediation of power between different social groups. This dynamic persists in accounts of how particular water cultures developed in tandem with urban sanitary infrastructure from the mid-nineteenth century in both metropolitan and colonial contexts. Finally, I reflect on the ways in which the historical study of the hydro-social cycle can contribute to addressing the contemporary environmental crisis. In light of the planetary changes that the Anthropocene concept suggests, the hydro-social cycle offers analytical insights into the particular socioeconomic, technological, environmental and cultural configurations that have re-shaped the hydrosphere.”

“Recent historical research into Australian climate histories encourages a closer examination of the effects of, and responses to, the 1914 drought in the young nation’s wheat regions. This chapter focuses on Western Australia, where the 1914 drought contributed to one of the driest years on the state’s record, and lingers as a meteorological and cultural marker of the severely dry conditions faced in the state’s agricultural areas. From as early as 1915, the drought was framed as both an aberration and opportunity, as a defining experience of character and belonging, and as a proxy for predicting the weather. Important to this framing process was the contemporary reportage of local newspapers, which provide insight into how the 1914 drought was perceived and subsequently portrayed. To bolster their assessments, these reports frequently deployed the meteorological records kept by individuals and the state. Close listening to oral history interviews with wheatbelt farmers and their families reveals the extent to which these reports aligned with personal experiences of drought and climate variability in the region. Drawing on these oral histories, meteorological records, and newspaper accounts, this chapter examines the ways in which Indigenous and non-Indigenous Western Australians experienced and have remembered this drought, and how these memories shaped personal and state responses to subsequent periods of water scarcity. ”

“Studying rural history and environmental history in Australian Historical Studies reveals a shared effort to challenge the colonial narrative of the settlement of rural Australia that continues to hold sway in popular representations of the national past. Rather than finding distinct spheres of urban and rural Australia, it reveals instead the processes by which these areas have been mutually constitutive, whether through cultural representations, economic exchanges, or the application of science and technology. Rather than confirming the dichotomy of nature and culture of the city and the bush, it highlights instead the wider cultural and ecological implications of settler Australians’ diverse engagements with an ancient and Aboriginal land. By transcending disciplinary and spatial boundaries, rural and environmental historians reveal the complexities of colonisation and the networks of exchange that have shaped Australians and their environments since 1788. In their hands, history becomes an important form of knowledge for making sense of rural and environmental change in the twenty-first century.”

“In the past decade, Perth and San Diego have both added desalination technology to their suite of water resources. In both contexts, the “independence” that desalination purportedly offers is a shorthand for diversification and drought-proofing in places where future water supplies appear uncertain. Yet the rhetoric of independence may be little more than an illusion, at best, simplifying, or at worst, misrepresenting, the complexity of water management in the face of climate change, climate variability, and population growth. Focusing on desalination, this article examines the different paths that Perth and San Diego have taken toward “independent” water supplies. It explores the cultural and political resonance of independence in these Western contexts, and argues that the invocation of independence is more a rhetorical strategy for political gain than a realistic approach to urban water management.”

“Before effective drainage and flood protection systems were built in the early twentieth century, areas of inner Melbourne close to the Yarra River were prone to flooding. An overabundance of water and a need to limit its impact on lives, livelihoods, and the built environment drove changes in the engineered structure of a rapidly growing city. Through a case study of a working-class district, we consider how private citizens, drawing on stocks of social capital, responded to major floods in 1863 and 1891. In addition to the process of “top-down” governing, as revealed in public documents, less visible “bottom-up” pressure from local communities played an important role in influencing improvements in water-related infrastructure, such as flood mitigation works. By the turn of the twentieth century, this local pressure increasingly manifested in a centralist approach to water management, whereby metropolitan-wide public authorities took greater charge of local environmental problems.”

“This article presents an overview of the management of fresh water in the British Empire from the 1860s to the 1940s. We argue that imperial water management shaped and responded to the imperatives of diverse ecologies and topographies, contrasting political and economic agendas and, not least, different colonial societies, technologies and lay expertise. Building on existing studies, we consider the broader ecological and social effects of water management on irrigated agriculture and cities as well as water supply and drainage, with a particular focus on India and Australasia. Although imperial ideologies of improvement impelled settlement, drove resource extraction and transformed environments, we argue that at times they also diminished the availability, quality and distribution of water. Engineering projects also benefited some groups but not others. We show that normative Anglo assumptions of productive lands and watered environments were often ill-matched with colonial ecologies and water availability, in some cases prompting anxieties about the quality and quantity of water. While these anxieties encouraged further hydrological interventions, we show that they often had unexpected and undesired consequences. We introduce the concept of ‘hydro-resilience’ to demonstrate how interventions in water management diminished the quality and quantity of water in ways that impacted unevenly on peoples and ecologies across the British Empire.”

“Transportation aside, historians have placed little emphasis on attempts to populate and stimulate the Western Australian colony during the nineteenth century after its near collapse in the 1830s. Drawing on promotional literature and travel accounts of Western Australia, this chapter examines the enduring emphasis on the salubrious climate conditions of the colony prior to 1901. The advertisement of a ‘health climate’ was a common theme of this particular genre of writing, representative of the prevailing environmental anxieties associated with imperial mobility and migration. For Western Australia, its salubrious climate was one of the few attractions of this apparently inconsequential possession of empire. This chapter explores how officials and visitors frequently promoted the colonial climate in concert with the Swan River’s proximity to India, Britain’s jewel in the crown, from colonisation to Federation. The repetition of this rhetorical pairing, I contend, reveals Western Australian efforts to exploit the environmental anxieties of health and race in British India for its own benefit. In doing so, I widen the historical gaze of colonial Western Australia beyond the other Australasian colonies to consider its place in the wider web of empire and the expansion of the Angloworld. (90).”

“WHEN HE VISITED Perth in 2012, Arizona water specialist Robert Glennon remarked: ‘I expected a dry city on the driest continent would be at the cutting edge of water conservation and instead I’m hearing stories about groundwater wells in everyone’s backyard and everyone has a lush lawn.’ Had he known the state’s water history, he might not have been so surprised.”

“The comparison of CSIRO and Turner’s novel situates these imaginings of the future, one scientific, the other literary, in terms of the rise of anthropogenic climate change in the late 1980s as an issue of Western political concern. The purpose of the comparison is not to undermine the credibility of climate science by suggesting it is a form of speculative literature or science fiction. Rather, pairing these texts allows for the examination of two representations of the enhanced greenhouse effect in terms of the emerging fears and anxieties about an uncertain future in the late 1980s. Both the historical context of these scenarios and their nature and substance demand an examination that considers their relation to the notion of the ‘risk society’, which was emerging in Germany at this time, and the development of a popular ‘climate as catastrophe’ discourse in Australia and elsewhere in the 1980s. The comparison of these imaginings of Australia’s greenhouse future offers important insights into the ways in which possible futures are constructed and depicted, and their implications for political action. This article considers these implications from the perspective of environmental history and argues for the role of the creative arts and humanities in helping restore people to mainstream narratives of anthropogenic climate change. ”

“As histories of dryland salinity in the Western Australian wheat belt suggest, the allure of economic development has long led the state’s policymakers to reject scientific advice advocating caution in favor of agricultural expansion. This pattern of policymaking continued during the 1950s and 1960s as successive Western Australian governments promoted the state’s wheat belt for closer settlement. Although the program of land release stalled amid the droughts and economic pressures of the 1970s, the development imperative reignited agricultural expansion in 1980 around the Western Australian town of Ravensthorpe. The very areas earmarked for land release had been the focus of scientific concerns about the impact of increasing climate variability. Their research, I contend, was a late twentieth twentieth-century expression of what James Beattie calls “environmental anxiety,” those “concerns generated when environments do not conform to European preconceptions about their natural productivity or when colonization set in motion a series of unintended environmental consequences” that threaten agricultural development. This chapter shows that despite these climate anxieties, the combination of dogged developmentalism with declining investment in public water infrastructure and weakening terms of trade, put many wheat-belt farmers at a risk of drier conditions and meager financial returns in the future.”

“When Captain James Stirling set forth his aspirations to establish a British colony at Swan River in 1826, he proposed the name ‘Hesperia’ – a land looking west to the setting sun – to describe the west coast of New Holland. Such a name reflected his designs for the colony, which he conceived as a strategic outpost of the British Empire in the Indian Ocean that would ‘command India, the Malay Islands, and all the Settlements in New Holland’. The reality fell far short of Stirling’s imperial ambitions, and as the contributions to this volume demonstrate, the Indian Ocean became a source not only of hope, but also fear.”

“In the wake of a decade of crippling droughts, cyclones, floods and fires, and warnings that as a result of anthropogenic climate change such events will be more frequent and intense in the future, historical research into Australian weather and climate is growing. The focus of these studies ranges from the quotidian to the extreme and from the lay to the scientific, offering insights into the experience, measurement, interpretation and prediction of weather and climates since British colonisation. In doing so, they engage with familiar themes of Australian environmental history, such as adaptation, local knowledge, expertise, Western science, sustainability and economic development, as well as demonstrating emerging interests in anxiety, risk and resilience. Here I consider this recent historical research on Australia’s climate and its variability, as well as the implications of anthropogenic climate change for the ways in which we undertake writing history.”

“In the context of the global water crisis, we seek an understanding of the histories of water management, their fashioning, and their legacy today. We juxtapose temporally diverse narratives to explore the premodern imaginings that have shaped our inheritance of hydrological thought. Rather than conceptualize their historical influence as a linear progression of ideas, from the primitive and magical giving way to modern religions and then to rational and empiricist sciences, we suggest a fluidity of hydrological thought whereby the sacred and the profane eddy and flow together over time. This article attempts to navigate these currents through an examination of how Western religious and scientific, spiritual and instrumentalist, worlds of water have together guided hydrological imaginings and interventions for more than two thousand years. It specifically analyzes the deployment of these imaginings to frame efforts to control water and waterscapes, as well as bodies and societies since antiquity. The interactions of these worlds of water have produced, we contend, a vast reservoir of influence upon water management in the twenty-first century.”

“Examining the history of the use and misuse of groundwater in Perth can help to break from this frustrating cycle and shine a torch through what author Michael Pollan calls ‘this fog of presentness’. In doing so, histories of groundwater can help make visible the resources and challenges that have been invisible or ignored for too long.”

“Long regarded for its reliable winter rainfall, the Southwest region of Western Australia was beset by unexpected dry conditions in the early 1970s whose persistence was baffling. The gradual growth of scientific interest in the region’s rainfall, as this article contends, was strongly influenced by political, social, and economic concerns about the challenges posed by drought and climate change. The experience of rainfall decline coincided with international scientific and political interest in the global climate and the perception that it was deviating from its “normal” state. Indeed, this extended “dry” provided an Australian link to international concerns regarding anthropogenic global warming. This article argues that the historical, political, and economic importance of the Southwest’s agricultural industries has led policy makers and researchers to perceive the region’s changing climatic conditions as pathological and in need of diagnosis.”

“In late 2010, ‘drought-breaking’ rains in southeastern Australia led the Victorian government to relax its restrictions on suburban water use. But are such ad hoc approaches to water management sustainable in the long-term? In this article, the responses of Western Australian water managers to predictions of a drier future for the southwest of WA in the late 1980s are presented as a ‘pragmatic precedents’ to guide decision-makers in the twenty-first century. This article considers the way historical analyses affect water management, challenging policymakers to not only look forward, but also back to the lessons of the past in order to devise a sustained and measured response to water challenges. Although a lack of certainty about the implications of anthropogenic climate change has been blamed for delays in policymakers’ adoption of adaptation and mitigation strategies, this article shows that environmental decision-making under uncertain conditions is possible if a ‘long view backward’ is valued and taken into account.”

“In this paper we provide a template for transitioning from tutorial to larger-class teaching environments in the discipline of history. We commence by recognising a number of recent trends in tertiary education in Australian universities that have made this transition to larger-class sizes an imperative for many academics: increased student enrolments in the absence of a concomitant rise in teaching staff levels, greater emphasis on staff’s research and service, and governmental and institutional pressures to maximize resource efficiency. All this, of course, taking place in an environment where staff are required to engage with discipline-specific pedagogies in teaching and learning to ensure that their departments, faculties and institutions successfully meet and maintain standards of quality in the delivery of higher education. The main challenge historians face here, we argue, is to ensure that the ‘higher order thinking skills’ associated with the discipline are developed in a learning environment often deemed incompatible with doing so. Dealing with this issue requires a particular approach to curriculum design, one that systematically unpacks the signature skills of historical thinking/writing/reading and engages with the pedagogy of large-class teaching environments. What follows is an account of our foray into unfamiliar territory, which, we hope, can act as a guide to academics moving in a similar direction.”

“The historic problem of ensuring sustainable water resources for Australians, particularly in the southern capital cities, has been an important issue of political and economic concern during the first decade of the twenty-first century.1 Perth residents have been subject to government attempts to limit their water use since at least the 1920s and their responses to these conservation policies warrant further examination in order to inform the management of water demand in the future. In this article, I examine how Perth households responded to a range of official water conservation measures in the 1970s, a decade characterised by regular episodes of water scarcity. It therefore serves as an historical case study of responses to water scarcity in an Australian capital city.”

“Most of Australia’s capital cities and towns have been on water restrictions since at least 2007. As metropolitan and regional water supplies continue to dwindle in the southern regions of the continent, water managers will impose tighter conditions on the use of limited resources. It is thus important to examine human attachments to their outdoor spaces to better understand how residents will potentially respond to such policies. For policies designed to reduce the domestic consumption of limited resources to succeed, Australians must perceive them as equitable in both their design and outcome. An historical perspective on contemporary sustainability issues such as water scarcity is useful to explain how present-day values and behaviours towards resource use have been formulated, shaped and renegotiated by those experiences of preceding generations. As outdoor water use is an important focus of current water efficiency measures, a more nuanced understanding of the meanings historically invested in certain gardens can provide insights into how residents can react to disruptions in their watering routines. Using 1970s Perth, Western Australia as a case study through which to analyse such reactions, I argue that the water efficiency measures enacted by the then Metropolitan Water Board overlooked the variety of socio-cultural meanings attached to suburban gardens and as a consequence, affected households unequally.”

“In this journal’s first guest-edited section, Antonello and Morgan bring together seven articles from emerging and established scholars that together speak to the theme of ‘Bodies of Knowledge’. Embodying environmental history reflects a growing scholarship that attends to more-than-human bodies, both static and mobile, and the bodies of knowledge that draw them into the human world. Looking more closely at these inter-related bodies encourages us to repopulate planetary and global histories—that is, to embody these histories with specific matter and biota that reside in and move between particular places. An embodied environmental history is fundamentally a relational history that narrates the material and cultural connections between human and more-than-human worlds that foster more meaningful cultural embodiments of place.”

“The contributions in this volume explore the way that Australasian environments have been envisioned, worked, and changed in the past, and how ideas about places inform the present and future of the continent. It looks at some typical visions of Australia—the bush, the Great Barrier Reef —but also at mines, shorelines, sediments, and wheatfields, and beyond these to the historical networks of human and non-human actors that shaped these places and the ideas around them. It argues for an environmental history that is uniquely Australian, but which can enrich and expand the field of environmental history across the globe.”

“In late July 2013, the city of Manchester hosted the 24th International Congress of History of Science, Technology and Medicine, in which nearly two thousand delegates participated in discussions regarding the theme ‘Knowledge at Work’. Among them were twenty members of the International Commission on the History of Meteorology (ICHM), who shared their research in a day-long symposium on the theme of ‘Gaining It / Losing It / Regaining It (?): Knowledge production in climate science – status anxiety and authority across disciplines’. The articles that feature in this volume are a selection of the exciting range of work presented there by scholars from Australia, the Americas and Europe, on topics ranging from the geo-engineering of colonial northern African environments to the histories of sunlight and health.”

“This volume recognises the renewed local and global interest in the Indian Ocean and its histories, and seeks to stimulate further work on the connections between the western third of Australia and this arena. ... Reorienting Western Australia and its histories westward might recast Western Australians as part of a ‘littoral society’ of the Indian Ocean, denoting a coastal people, ‘amphibious, moving easily between land and sea’, and surely fitting for a state of sandgropers.”