Book Review

This is a scholarly work with popular and scholarly ends and a unique approach. A curator at the Australian National Gallery and a lecturer in environmental law at the Australian National University, Bonyhady combined his interests to mix acute analysis of art with studies of legal maneuvers, policies, and laws. Writing against the common belief that the Australian settlers hated their new environment, he shows that from the first some took delight in their land and sought to protect it, that "the environmental aesthetic is as deeply embedded in the culture as is resistance to putting environmental ideals into practice" (p. 11). He aims to establish a lineage for Australian environmentalism, but also to attack the comfortable view that pins environmental destruction on ignorant and insensitive people with no regard for the land or knowledge of its limits. They knew much, Bonyhady says, enjoyed and appreciated the land, but still destroyed it. He makes this case in twelve chapters that run from destruction of the birds on Norfolk Island in the days of the First Fleet to the recent ecological restoration of Tower Hill, surveying the culture but focusing on particular episodes and incidents, for "it was largely through the detail of what Australians depicted, said, and did that one could see how they occupied the land, both imaginatively and physically" (p. 2).	1
There is more detail than Americans might want on things like Captain Bligh's town planning, but this is a minor problem. Bonyhady's mixture of law and art is interesting, stimulating, and suggestive, and his placement of Australian environmental history in the larger context of European expansion provides cases we might well study. For example, the complex aesthetic interchange between Britain and Australia and the use of art prescribe for the new land as well as describe it; this has its counterpart in America (see the historical literature on the iconography of "the West"). His comparisons between the United States and Australia are illuminating (the chapter on "big trees" is particularly interesting). His treatment of class issues and his distinctly Australian division between nature and culture ought to unsettle our own notions. The episodic treatment may confuse some, and others will object to his ignoring the gestalt shift that came with ecology—the change from thinking about things in nature to seeing it as systems—but this is a solid addition to a developing tradition of Australian environmental history with much of interest and value to American environmental historians.	2
Thomas R. Dunlap is professor of history at Texas A&M University.

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