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Book Review
| Ecological Pioneers: A Social History of Australian Ecological Thought and Action. By Martin Mulligan and Stuart Hill. Cambridge University Press. 2001. vii + 338 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, index, Cloth $75.00, paper $28.00.
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| The Ecological Pioneers of the title are some forty individuals who the authors believe are important to a growing understanding of the Australian environment. They span the period from James Cook's first Pacific voyage, which charted the east coast of Australia in 1770, to the present. They include artists, poets, scientists, environmentalists, philosophers, a cartoonist, and two groups of indigenous people. "Ecological" is not an apposite adjective for many of the individuals, few of whom are ecologists and only some of whom have an ecological frame of reference. However, the authors do show a thread of environmental consciousness and thought in their lives. The Social History of the sub-title sits oddly with this "Great Men" historiography as the authors make few connections between the individual lives and their social context, let alone analyze any influence they may have had on the course of events or public policy. The theme could have made a valuable environmental history. However, rather than seek a historical understanding of the lives of the individuals in their times, the authors seek inspiring messages from them in order to support their final chapter of exhortations about how to see and value the natural and human world. It all gives the book a latter-day "Lives of the Saints" feel. |
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Apart from interviews conducted by the authors with some of the individuals, no use appears to have been made of primary sources. This leaves the accounts of most individuals as "potted biographies" based only on other people's research. In some cases, the secondary sources were ill-chosen. This was startlingly so in Chapter 2, when an account of Cook's and Bank's encounter with Australia was taken from an unreliable polemic (William Lines, Taming the Great South Land, Allen and Unwin, 1991) rather than from their own diaries or from the extensive academic literature. It would be tiresome to catalog the inadequacies of this book any further. It is surprising that the usual high standards of Cambridge University Press lapsed so far that not even the bibliography is complete with all the in-text references (those on p. 143 are missing, for example). |
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Life is too short to drink bad wine—or read books such as this. Fortunately for Australian environmental history, there are many well-written alternatives based on thorough research in primary sources. For example, the reader is amply repaid by Tim Bonyhady's Colonial Earth (Melbourne University Press, 2000), the collections of essays edited by Stephen Dovers (Australian Environmental History: Essays and Cases, Oxford University Press, 1994 and Environmental History and Policy: Still Settling Australia, Oxford University Press, 2000), or by Tom Griffith's Forests of Ash: an Environmental History (Cambridge University Press, 2001). |
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Reviewed by John Dargavel, a visiting fellow jointly in the School of Resources, Environment and Society and in the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies at the Australian National University in Canberra. He is president of the Australian Forest History Society. |
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