|
|
|
Book Review
| A Change in the Weather: Climate and Culture in Australia. Edited by Tim Sherratt, Tom Griffiths, and Libby Robin. Canberra: National Museum of Australia Press, 2005. 216 pp. Illustrations, photos, maps, tables, notes, index. Australian $49.95.
|
| With debates about climate change, the general public has become more aware that weather and climate have histories. Is the Earth warming, and what will that mean for coastal cities? Is the ozone layer thinning and how many excess skin cancer deaths will we have before it recovers? Are current patterns of temperature, climate, and storm intensity going to stay the same, get better, or worsen? This volume by a group of Australian archeologists, paleontologists, historians, climate scientists, and a radio producer offers a view of weather, climate, and global warming from the southern hemisphere. |
1
|
|
The sixteen essays address past, present, and future, with topics from paleoclimatology going back millennia, to the history of Aboriginal ideas about the climate of Australia, settlement patterns before the colonial era to the psychology of climate change in the present, and planning for future threats to human health. With so many disciplines represented, there is something for everyone interested in questions of climate change and culture. A piece by Richard Grove (the only author who is not based in Australia) explores the El Niño southern oscillation and its importance in producing the drought that soured the first European settlers on the Australian climate in 1788. Janis Sheldrick explores the repeated attempts by George Woodroffe Goyder, surveyor general of south Australia from 1861–1894, and his successors to track and predict the rainfall in Australia, to define and map a "line of reliable rainfall," and their unwillingness to consider that the climate of Australia might follow different patterns than those familiar in Europe. M. A. Smith explores climate through archeological evidence; Bill Bunbury of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation collects narratives of the catastrophic Cyclone Tracy, which destroyed the city of Darwin on the north coast of Australia in 1974 (contributing to a national legend that the city is doomed, first destroyed in fighting with Aboriginal tribes, bombed by the Japanese in 1942, and repeatedly battered by tropical storms); and Tom Sherratt and Neville Nicholls tie the chapters together with overviews on climate, history, and human expectations. |
2
|
|
A collaboration between scientists and humanists, and an edited volume of essays, A Change in the Weather is designed for a general reader, and as an Australian contribution to the literature offers a counterpoint to works such as James Rodger Fleming, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change, (Oxford, 1998), James Rodger Fleming, Meteorology in America, 1800–1870, (Johns Hopkins, 1990), and Vladimir Jankovic, Reading the Skies: A Cultural History of English Weather, 1650–1820, (Chicago, 2000), which explores similar themes of history and climate in the United States and Europe. These volumes broaden the earlier more technical histories by Smithsonian curator William Edgar Knowles Middleton, whose books on the history of weather measurements include Invention of the Meteorological Instruments (Johns Hopkins, 1969). |
3
|
|
This volume was able to draw on the expertise of many national organizations, including the National Museum of Australia, which published the book, and the quality of color photographs, maps, and other illustrations shows the eye of a curator. An extensive index and notes will make the work useful to scholars, but their small font and selectivity makes them unobtrusive to the general reader. This book will appeal to environmental historians, climatologists, and anyone interested in the intersection of climate and culture. |
4
|
|
Carla C. Keirns, MD, PhD, University of Pennsylvania, completed a doctoral dissertation on the history of asthma in the United States circa 1800–2000. |
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|