54. Field Notes 4: History Beyond Humans - Environmental Histories

Environmental history in Australia has moved from the margins to something close to the centre of the discipline — but the path there was longer and less obvious than it might appear. Jarrod Hore and Nancy Cushing map that path from different vantage points. Hore came of age as a scholar inside the field; Cushing arrived at it gradually, via urban history, historical geography, and a childhood in Nova Scotia that made her attentive to the materialities of place.They trace the field’s prehistory through Keith Hancock and the historical geographers, and its institutional emergence through the Green Stream at the 2016 AHA conference in Ballarat, which gave environmental historians in Australia a genuine community for the first time. The conversation turns on the field’s core contribution: refusing the false separation of humans from the environments they inhabit, and refusing equally the separation between the humanities and the sciences.VoicesJarrod Hore is a Scientia Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Languages at the University of New South Wales. His research covers landscape photography, geology, and commodity histories in settler colonies. His first book is Visions of Nature (2022).Nancy Cushing is an Associate Professor at the University of Newcastle, where she recently marked thirty years. She is a past Coral Thomas Fellow at the State Library of New South Wales and has published widely on human-animal relations in Australia.CreditsRecorded and edited by Lachlan D’Acourt. Executive producers: Michelle Arrow and Kate Fullagar. Executive producer, Impact Studios: Sarah Gilbert. History Lab is made by UTS Impact Studios and the Australian Centre for Public History. Field Notes is made in collaboration with the Australian Historical Association.Further ReadingKatie Holmes, Andrea Gaynor and Ruth Morgan, “Doing Environmental History in Urgent Times,” History Australia (2020)Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth (2011)Keith Hancock, Discovering Monaro (1977)Tom Griffiths, "Discovering Hancock: the journey to Monaro" (1999)