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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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Garden writes well but even he can't really make a synthetic necklace out of such ill-assorted beads of data. Biotic descriptions dominate the opening chapters—and efforts to make them "human scale"—are sometimes bizarre. Hawaii's Big Island is on a "hot spot," summarized as: "volcanic action [that] continues to reshape the island and enthrall tourists" (p. 30). Information here is tangled between vulcanology and tourist-speak. |
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Garden is at his strongest in chapters 3 and 4, the European environmental history of Australia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, respectively. Here he can use his own voice as he works with material he knows and teaches. Because of the excellent environmental historiography of New Zealand and places like the Solomon Islands (where Judith Bennett is a notable historian), chapter 5, on New Zealand and the Pacific in the European era, is also strong. |
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Chapter 6, "Contemporary Concerns," and chapter 7, "Case Studies," tail away again—no over-arching synthesis can conclude a book on this scale, assembled in this way. Good fine-grained history has been defeated by the need to be general. The documents and other supporting material (some 40 percent of the book) add to the feel of a long tail. |
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The book throws up a central puzzle for teachers of environmental history everywhere—what questions do we address or omit? Garden declares that "the environmental historian need not become deeply embroiled in the debates over the exact timing and sequence of human arrival and spread in Oceania" (p. 37), and then goes on to recount the safest, least nuanced view of a fascinating and complex literature. Surely one of the greatest responsibilities of environmental historians is the original synthesis of complex ideas about people and place, emerging from anthropology, archaeology, ecology, and other sciences? This is exactly where an environmental history of Australia, New Zealand, and Oceania could offer something different for the rest of the world. |
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Libby Robin is a fellow at the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies at Australian National University and the author of Defending the Little Desert: The Rise of Ecological Consciousness in Australia (Melbourne, 1998) and The Flight of the Emu: A Centenary History of Ornithology in Australia (Melbourne, 2001). |
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