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Book Review
| Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific: An Environmental History. By Don Garden. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2005. Nature and Human Societies Series, edited by Mark R. Stoll. xvii + 398 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliographic essay, index. $85.00.
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| Don Garden had an awkward brief, given just one volume to deal with Oceania, New Zealand, and Australia in the Nature and Human Societies series. Garden manages to answer the challenge by showcasing a good variety of environmental histories, particularly in sections written as "text boxes," which list sources at the start. Teachers of Pacific or Australasian environmental history will find a plethora of bibliographies for further reading—and an extended bibliographical essay. There are also fifty pages of documents, a fourteen-page time line and a forty-page A -Z section that defines key concepts. |
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The book's opening chapters are on a grand scale: "The Wide Brown Land" and "The Broad Blue Ocean"—but are they history? Rather they seem like encyclopedia entries on "prehistory." The excellent photographs, many of them taken by Garden himself, break up the barrage of information—but they have not always been felicitously placed by the designers. For example, a picture of "Uluru or Ayres (sic) Rock" in central Australia appears above the story of the demarcation of the Wallace Line (between Bali and Lombok!) (p. 7), and the section on the Murray-Darling Basin is illustrated by a photograph of Margaret River (2,000 miles away in western Australia) (p. 114). These reflect the vicissitudes of an author and a publisher separated not just by many miles but major time zone differences and different local knowledge. |
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