ORCID Profile
0000-0002-2842-4441
Current Organisation
Australian National University
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Research Topics
In Research Link Australia (RLA), "Research Topics" refer to ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes. These topics are either sourced from ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes listed in researchers' related grants or generated by a large language model (LLM) based on their publications.
Top 5 Research Topics
ANZSRC Field of Research (FoR)
Australian History (excl. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander History) | Historical Studies | Economic History | Social and Cultural Geography | Human Geography
ANZSRC Socio-Economic Objective (SEO)
Understanding Australia's Past | Climate Change Adaptation Measures | Understanding Asia's Past | Rural Water Policy |
Related Links
Publications
Oceanic Histories: A Roundtable
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 26-09-2022
Premodern Streams of Thought in Twenty-First-Century Water Management
Publisher: Duke University Press
Date: 05-2013
Abstract: 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 erse 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.
Histories for an uncertain future: Environmental history and climate change
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 09-2013
Gender, environment and history: New methods and approaches in environmental history
Publisher: ANU Press
Date: 10-06-2021
Historicising sulfur mining, lime extraction and geotourism in Indonesia and Australia
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 12-2021
Drought, Mud, Filth, and Flood: Water Crises in Australian Cities, 1880s–2010s.
Publisher: Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Munich, Germany
Date: 2019
DOI: 10.5282/RCC/8383
Special Issue on Indigenous knowledge for water-related climate adaptation
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 21-10-2021
The Allure of Climate and Water Independence: Desalination Projects in Perth and San Diego
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 13-02-2020
Abstract: 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 ersification 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.
Dry Continent Dreaming: Australian Visions of Using Antarctic Icebergs for Water Supplies
Publisher: ANU Press
Date: 04-05-2018
On the home front Australians and the 1914 drought
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 28-07-2017
From history of science to history of knowledge? Themes and perspectives in colonial Australasia
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 22-04-2021
DOI: 10.1111/HIC3.12654
Abstract: This overview article presents some of the main approaches to histories of colonial science in Australasia as well as suggesting future areas of research. Given the plurality of knowledge systems in the colonial period, we argue that a framework defined by history of knowledge, rather than history of science, better reflects the realities of colonial Australasia and opens up opportunities for fresh and innovative scholarship. A ‘history of knowledge systems’ approach, we contend, has the potential to free the study of non‐Western knowledge systems from normative approaches that define other systems only in relation to Western science. A history of knowledge approach, we believe, enables scholars to explore the complex ways in which knowledge‐making in colonial Australasia arose from both Indigenous and non‐Indigenous traditions, perspectives and practices.
Engineering Edens on this ‘Rivered earth’? A review article on water management and hydro-resilience in the British Empire, 1860s–1940s
Publisher: White Horse Press
Date: 02-2017
DOI: 10.3197/096734017X14809635325593
Abstract: 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 erse 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.
Dry horizons: The responses of Western Australian water managers to the enhanced greenhouse effect in the late 1980s
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 2011
Southern skies: Australian atmospheric research and global climate change
Publisher: Emerald
Date: 15-12-2020
Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of Australian climate scientists in advancing the state of knowledge about the causes and mechanisms of climatic change and variability in the Southern Hemisphere during the 1970 and 1980s. The paper uses the methods and insights of environmental history and the history of science to analyse archival and published data pertaining to research on atmospheric pollution, the Southern Oscillation and the regional impacts of climate change. Australia's geopolitical position, political interests and environmental sensitivities encouraged Australian scientists and policymakers to take a leading role in the Southern Hemisphere in the study of global environmental change. This article builds on critiques of the ways in which planetary and global knowledge and governance disguise the local and situated scientific and material processes that construct, sustain and configure them.
Doing environmental history in urgent times
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-04-2020
Natural Worlds: Cultures of Climate Concern in the Age of Empires
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Date: 2019
AHS Classics: Rural History and Environmental History
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 20-06-2017
Diagnosing the dry: Historical case notes from Southwest Western Australia, 1945-2007
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Date: 2011
DOI: 10.1086/661266
Abstract: 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.
Climate, weather, and water in history
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 19-11-2018
DOI: 10.1002/WCC.561
Abstract: 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 article is categorized under: Climate, History, Society, Culture World Historical Perspectives
Water Flourishing in the Anthropocene
Publisher: University of Technology, Sydney (UTS)
Date: 12-11-2019
Abstract: What does it entail to foreground water flourishing as a stance toward the Anthropocene? During an exercise at the Anthropocene C us Melbourne, about twenty participants in idually 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 ex les 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.
Sustainable Academia: The Responsibilities of Academic Historians in a Climate-Impacted World
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Date: 11-2022
DOI: 10.3197/096734022X16552219786645
Abstract: 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 bio ersity 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 in iduals 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.
Health, Hearth and Empire: Climate, Race and Reproduction in British India and Western Australia
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Date: 05-2021
Placing Gender: Gender and Environmental History
Publisher: White Horse Press
Date: 05-2021
Making and Unmaking Bodies: Embodying Knowledge and Place in Environmental History
Publisher: ANU Press
Date: 04-05-2018
Prophecy and Prediction: Forecasting Drought and Famine in British India and the Australian Colonies
Publisher: White Horse Press
Date: 03-2020
Abstract: 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.
Fluid terrains
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-04-2021
Climate and empire in the nineteenth century
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2018
Overcoming Abundance: Social Capital and Managing Floods in Inner Melbourne during the Nineteenth Century
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 14-02-2017
Abstract: 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.
Related Organisations
Related Funding Activities
Water And The Making Of Urban Australia Since 1900
Start Date: 2018
End Date: 2020
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityAn Environmental History Of Australia, India And Empire
Start Date: 2016
End Date: 2018
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivitySpecial Research Initiatives - Grant ID: SR200200322
Start Date: 05-2021
End Date: 05-2025
Amount: $281,446.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityDiscovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE160101125
Start Date: 2016
End Date: 09-2023
Amount: $365,158.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityDiscovery Projects - Grant ID: DP180100807
Start Date: 04-2018
End Date: 04-2024
Amount: $379,748.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded Activity