| Book Review | Environmental History, 8.4

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 8.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Forests of Ash: An Environmental History. By Tom Griffiths. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 272 pp. Illustrations, photographs, maps, bibliography, index. Cloth $55.00, paper $18.95.
Tom Griffiths, of the Australian National University, made his name with Hunters and Collectors (Cambridge, 1996), an exercise in cultural history. He presents Forests of Ash as "an environmental history," but there are at least three approaches to this fine book.	1
Firstly, it is a social history of human involvement in the forested areas of Victoria, Australia, lying north and east of Melbourne. Griffiths devotes one chapter to an attempted Aboriginal settlement there. His other chapters detail the uses and meanings that the area has had for Europeans: They "improved" its agricultural potential by destroying half the forest, mined there for gold from the 1850s, set up mills to exploit the timber resource, then reserved some of the forest as a water catchment area. (Upper Yarra Dam, in 1957, tripled Melbourne's water supply.) Increasingly, the area also attracted naturalists, bush walkers, and other tourists. Its features (waterfalls, tall trees, lyrebirds) came to symbolize Victorian identity; even its industrial heritage gained cultural significance.	. . .

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