Geography

The photograph arrives while I am reading Dave Witty’s What the Trees See. A tree’s branch close-up, outer brown-red bark peeled back to smooth and brilliant green. A friend, spotting it on Quandamooka Country in Minjerribah, North Stradbroke Island, has been understandably stopped in her tracks. Framed intimately like this, its shape and textures suggest warm musculature: lean in, you will be held. This beautiful creature.

Australian universities have long taught early modern (c.1500–1750) English/British and European history, but with Alexandra Walsham’s recent appointment as the first female to occupy a Cambridge history chair, there are now (with Oxford’s Lyndal Roper) two Melbourne-trained early modernist Oxbridge professors ...

This bold book, with its lucid prose and vivid illustrations, will be discussed for years to come. It is not original in the narrow sense of the word, but it takes an important idea to new heights because of the author’s persistence and skill. Bill Gammage, an oldish and experienced historian of rural background ...

Novelist Janette Turner Hospital’s recent essay in praise of New York’s Central Park remarked on its visibility from outer space. No doubt Adelaide’s Park Lands, an integral part of the 1837 vision of founding surveyor Colonel William Light’s plan for the city, can also be seen from outer space.

This year is the 175th anniversary of European settlement in South Australia. The University of Adelaide presented a series of public lectures collectively called Turning Points in South Australian History. Bill Gammage gave the first and showed by an accretion of primary sources that, prior to white settlement in 1836, Aborigines kept a tidy landscape thanks to the controlled use of fire. First Adelaidians exclaimed that the landscape was close to an English garden. Henry Reynolds gave the second lecture, and made much of the political and social timing of the settlement, after the abolition of slavery in London and just before the Treaty of Waitangi in New Zealand. The idea of terra nullius was in its preliminary colonial tatters.

On 18 January 1773, less than twenty-four hours after first entering Antarctic waters and concerned by the ice gathering around the Resolution, Commander James Cook surveyed the waters. A few hours later he wrote in his journal: ‘From the mast head I could see nothing to the Southward but Ice, in the Whole extent from East to WSW without the least appearance of any partition.’

A few years ago, I heard Michael Cathcart speak on ‘the myth of the inland sea’. It was one of the funniest takes on Australian history I have heard. He related how his initially confident search for statements of belief in an inland sea by early Australian colonists petered out in the face of lack of evidence. Certainly, the explorer Charles Sturt believed in an inland sea and in his divine mission to discover it, but by 1845 he knew better. Finding little other evidence of the inland sea as the impetus for exploration, Cathcart decided it must be a creation of historians from Ernest Giles in 1889 to Derek Parker in 2007, with the idea recycled uncritically from book to book. Cathcart intended his research to be an academic thesis in history. How hard it must have been to be his academic supervisor. Each session must have ended in laughter and a mounting sense of desperation. How could an increasing lack of evidence be turned to good thesis account?

Antarctic exploration began with Captain James Cook’s circumnavigation of the continent (1772–75) and continued intermittently until the first two decades of the twentieth century. Douglas Mawson’s three expeditions coincided with what has been called the ‘heroic era of Antarctic exploration’, beginning with Robert Falcon Scott’s British National Antarctic Expedition (1901–4) and ending with Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (1914–17). Four out of the twenty expeditions undertaken in this period stand out: those of Roald Amundsen, Mawson, Shackleton and Scott. However, the present-day polar adventurer Ranulph Fiennes has argued that Mawson did not achieve the fame of the other three, even in Australia, because he survived his explorations and died in old age.

The concluding volume to Raymond Howgego’s epic Encyclopedia of Exploration completes a remarkable undertaking by a small publisher. Hordern House, best known as one of Australia’s leading antiquarian booksellers, has a record of producing high-quality publications, and Howgego’s Encyclopedia – now totalling more than 3,500 pages – is by any standards a great reference work. Volume 1 (published in 2003) covers the whole of human history up to 1800CE; Volume 2 (2004), 1800–50; and Volumes 3 and 4 (subtitled The Oceans, Islands and Polar Regions and Continental Exploration, respectively), 1850–1940.