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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.
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| 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. |
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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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These chapters are a revision of part of Griffiths's Secrets of the Forest (Allen & Unwin, 1992), with many of the paragraphs simply divided into more appetizing bites, but half the original work is thrown out in preference for new material and a new emphasis. While the first book grew from a report to Victoria's Historic Places Branch, Forests of Ash appears in association with Museum Victoria, resulting in a slicker, wider-ranging presentation, including "spotlights" on the forest by specialists with biological (rather than historical) knowledge. These do not always integrate well with Griffiths's text, but they underline that this is, secondly, a consciously environmental history of a particular ecosystem, dealing with interrelationships of climate, fauna and flora, and of how human activity affects and is affected by that ecosystem. |
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As an entirely new chapter explains, these Victorian forests are not the dry "bush" typical of Australia, nor the less extensive rain forest or "jungle." Rather, they are a blend of the two in which the tallest trees are Eucalyptus regnans. Australians call these mountain ash, but they are unrelated to the rowan and mountain ash of Europe and North America, and as mighty as redwoods. |
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Griffiths follows Stephen Pyne in stressing the role of periodic fire in Australian forest, and so the title also refers to ash left when the forests have burned, the necessary nursery for a further generation of trees. The central event in Griffiths's history is Black Friday, 1939, when 1.4 million hectares of Victoria burned, analyzed as "a cultural exaggeration of a natural rhythm" (p. 189). Humans, by lighting fires, extended fire's usual range and frequency (and then they deepened the imbalance by salvaging burnt trees). As so often with environmental history, the causes of a "natural" catastrophe are found to have a human component. |
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Forests of Ash is a good story well written. The subject is made even more approachable through maps and over sixty photographs, many of them stunning. This is definitely not just a text for scholars. But the book can be regarded, thirdly, as a case study, a springboard from which to leap into discussion of environmental history itself. Griffiths does this in the epilogue, where the argument that this discipline "uniquely bridges planetary and deeply local perspectives" (p. 194) justifies both concentration on one geographic area and his global extrapolations. Finally, his source notes are, effectively, a bibliography of Australian environmental history. This is a valuable gateway into Australian material, which provides an excellent counterpoint (and sometimes a corrective) to many studies made elsewhere. |
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Paul Star lives in Dunedin, New Zealand, and has history degrees from Cambridge and Otago universities. His doctoral thesis examined the changing attitudes of European settlers to the New Zealand environment; he has published on this and on forest history themes. |
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