Reviews

Ecologists estimate that as much as 87% of the world’s wetlands have been lost in the past 300 years, with half of these lost since 1900. Fear of disease, desire for development and an unrelenting thirst for water to support intensive agriculture has sucked the life out of culturally and ecologically-rich watery places around the world. To understand the complex histories, ecologies and cultures of wetlands in our own dry continent, we need thoughtful enquiry and attentive scholarship that bridges traditional disciplinary divides. Enter environmental historian Emily O’Gorman, and her latest book, Wetland in a Dry Land: More-Than-Human Histories of Australia’s Murray–Darling Basin.

The field of ‘more-than-human’ scholarship has emerged from transdisciplinary dialogue across the sciences and humanities. It pays attention to the multiplicity of voices and actors operating in the world, from a position that rejects human exceptionalism and the hyper-separation of nature and culture. Through this lens, this book illuminates the diverse modes of understanding and relating to wetlands in a way that helps readers to make sense of the often-contradictory beliefs and actions that exist in the history of wetlands in the Murray–Darling Basin. A simple starting question like ‘do ducks eat rice?’ takes us through multiple decades of scientific inquiry, unlikely relationships between recreational hunters and rice-farmers, details of post-war settlement schemes and nuances of conservation politics. Most importantly though, it affirms that when you create wetlands in a dry land, our nomadic birds will flock to them, regardless of their ‘naturalness’.

Breaking from the classic chronological narrative of history, Wetlands in a Dry Land takes the reader on a journey through seven chapters framed around processes that draw attention to the networks of relationships in wetlands: Weaving, Leaking, Infecting, Crossing, Enclosing, Migrating, and Rippling. Each of these chapters is located in one of three main regions of the Basin: the Coorong; Fivebough and Tuckerbil Swamps and the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area; and the Macquarie Marshes. This thematic structure, grounded in place, allows complex multi-species stories to shine through and invites the reader to ponder the relationship between the past and present, the local and the global, repeatedly throughout the book.

One recurring narrative is how much evolving colonial relationships with wetlands in the Basin were dramatically shaped by war. Racial ideologies and fear of disease were behind the demise of many watery places, while the expansion of irrigated rice growing during World War 2 to provide international food aid and post-war development initiatives and settlement schemes set the scene for the unrealistic water demands and contemporary water politics found in the Basin today.

The Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance (established 1971) was enabled through the international unification and re-branding of ‘wetlands’ (from bogs, swamps, marshes and billabongs, for example), combined with an international focus on migratory bird conservation. In 1973, the Cobourg Peninsular Wildlife Reserve and Sanctuary in the Northern Territory became the world’s first Ramsar-listed wetland. By tracing conservation histories and debates about naming, belonging and management (including a fabulous case study on long-nosed fur seals’ increase in population since the cessation of sealing and their impact on wildlife and fisheries in the Coorong), O’Gorman contributes to important contemporary discussions about the increasingly problematic use of historical baselines as targets in environmental management.

Throughout this book, histories of conservation initiatives and development are read through a political ecology lens to tease out their unintended consequences on human and non-human communities alike. These include various iterations of excluding First Nations people from their Country. O’Gorman’s examples historically situate the complex relationships of power embedded in the privatisation of protected areas and the consequences of the increasing neoliberalisation of nature conservation and water politics today.

Wetlands in a Dry Land is one of multiple books to be released about the Murray Darling Basin in recent years. What sets this text apart is O’Gorman’s impeccably detailed and considered research, her capacity to weave together contemporary place-based research with archival gems, the deep sensitivity and specificity through which she approaches First Nations’ culture and knowledge, and her capacity to articulate the more-than-human lives that shape these watery worlds. O’Gorman’s ongoing collaborative projects in the Basin, including a focus on Wailwan women’s knowledge, is testament to her ethical research practice, and demonstrates the practical interventions that such environmental humanities scholarship can make.

Wetlands have changed in the past and will continue to change in the future. The stories in this book offer a model through which to carefully approach history of science and environment that allows space for the more-than-human as well as the deeply political to arise. I predict that this book will become core reading for many students of the environmental humanities and conservation sciences alike and can attest to its aptness in the classroom. It is both unique and situated, and highly relevant for global experiences of environmental change and management in the world’s precious and vulnerable places.

Lilian M. Pearce

La Trobe University

This latest book in the ‘Foods and Nations’ series, which applies a historical and geographical lens to food, builds on the work of prominent Australian historians to evaluate the foodways of Australia over a timeline of 65 000 years. It is chronologically organised as a social history and skilfully structured as an overview rather than an analysis of current scholarship. Van Reyk’s sources include newspapers, exploration accounts, early cookery books and women’s magazines. The book is beautifully illustrated and engaging with breakout sections to profile select topics.

Detailed explanations of the Commonwealth of Australia in the first chapters indicates that the readership for this book is international, although for those unaware of aspects of this era of Australia’s history, there is much to learn. What was most enjoyable to read about was the re-evaluation of previously accepted knowledge about Indigenous Australians, on a range of issues, including land use, food sovereignty and food security. Environmental responsibility, social justice, gender equity, racial prejudice and land sovereignty also feature. Van Reyk asserts that Indigenous Australians developed deliberate strategies in resource management of the land and he includes examples such as controlled burn-offs, and planned harvests and storage of food. True to the Land is particularly enlightening in its intertwining of the history of Indigenous Australians with settlers and migrants. Throughout the book, van Reyk reminds us that Indigenous Australians ‘were actively involved in agriculture and aquaculture’ through technologies such as ‘sophisticated strategies for turning fire, a significant environmental hazard, into a powerful tool for resource management’.

The first chapter describes the geology, topography, climate and waterways of the land itself. Indigenous Australian’s traditional culture, land management and food practices, which developed over millennia, are discussed in the second chapter, including a short section on Torres Strait Islander foodways. First Nations peoples rightly maintain a significant presence throughout the rest of the book, which takes us on a journey through the adaptation of British tastes, squatters, the Gold Rush, impacts of the White Australia Policy, the World Wars, and the increasing globalisation of taste in post war period.

In chapter three, covering the period from 1788 to 1850, the author writes of the rudimentary consumption practices of British colonists, and their use of native flora and fauna. Land exploration during this period resulted in the discovery of gold, causing the population to increase between 1851 and 1899 in the regions associated with the goldfields.

During the years starting with Federation and continuing to 1945, Van Reyk writes of the prospering of the nation, and the beginning of the publication of cookery books for home cooks. Outback stock routes and farming, and the role of camel-trains and paddle-steamers in transporting food to and from inland areas adds interest to the text. The exploitation of Indigenous and immigrant workers is described, along with Australian drinking culture, the colonial rum and temperance movements, the gradual acceptance of wine, and the school milk program.

In chapters six, seven and eight, van Reyk examines the period between 1946 and 1979, covering European post-war migrants and Asian influence on Australian foodways. He writes about the rise of modern Australian cuisine in the 1980s and 1990s, along with food consumption trends, the beginning of Australian gastronomy, rising affluence, and the celebrity chef.

The final chapter, Millennium Reckonings sums up where the various aspects of foodways in Australia are at the time of publication. Van Reyk calls for application of sustainable and regenerative farming practices, including native crops, with the active involvement of and benefits for Indigenous communities. The author additionally brings us up to date with food trends, animal cruelty, the practice of overfishing, the influence of social media, the bush tucker industry, the obesity epidemic, food related allergies, and the move to plant-based foods.

This book makes an extremely important contribution to the field of Australian food history, and will appeal to readers who know nothing about Australian foodways, as well as those who think they know it all. The book is easy to read without overuse of theory and jargon and is expertly structured and well-researched. There are some small but obvious errors, such as in dates given, however this minor criticism does not detract from the enjoyment of reading it. I highly recommend True to the Land to both the general public and researchers of food history and cultural and social histories.

Susie Chant

University of South Australia

Over the past two decades, studies of reproductive technologies and assisted reproduction have become an increasingly important focus of research in feminist science, technology and society studies, as well as histories of medicine. Foundational work by prominent scholars in this field—such as Sarah Franklin, Susan Squier, Catherine Waldby, among others—has addressed the complex cultural networks in which reproductive technologies have emerged, which extend across the technological, regulatory, economic, and social sectors.

IVF and Assisted Reproduction: a Global History is both an invaluable contribution to this field of research, and a ground-breaking attempt to trace its development and impact in transnational contexts. The book is authored by a powerhouse team consisting of three generations of Australian feminist scholars: Vera Mackie, leading feminist scholar in gender and sexuality studies, as well as Asian history; Sarah Ferber, feminist historian of early modern gender and sexuality, as well as contemporary bioethics; and Nicola Marks, whose expertise is in contemporary feminist STS.

Where traditional histories of medicine have often constructed linear histories of medical progress, focused on individual breakthroughs and successful experiments, this book attends to the wider social conditions and cultural contexts in which assisted reproduction and reproductive technologies have developed. Tracing the global history of assisted reproduction from the early decades of the twentieth century to the present, the seven chapters of this book compellingly demonstrate the ways in which assisted reproduction must be understood as an intersectional cultural phenomenon that brings together the fields of human reproduction, medicine and transnational politics.

The first chapter provides a historical overview of the developments leading to the emergence of contemporary IVF technologies. While the first successful IVF births are dated to 1978, the authors note the significance of a longer history that dates back to the 1930s. They show how contemporary assisted reproductive technologies have emerged from a specific set of funding criteria, cultural narratives about reproduction, and changing discourses around human rights, in addition to the development of the specific medical technologies that enable IVF procedures.

The second chapter focuses on clinical and scientific research that enabled the first IVF births. This chapter again draws important attention to developments in the first half of the twentieth century. In keeping with its inter-disciplinary approach to the subject, the authors foreground the importance not only of the early-twentieth century history of medicine, but also the cultural and literary history in which what they call ‘the IVF imaginary’ took shape.

In the third chapter, the authors consider the foundations of global assisted reproduction. This chapter traces the history of fertility drugs, the emergence of IVF as a recognised area of medical expertise, and media responses to these emerging technologies. The question of whether new technologies and procedures required regulation, and what form that regulation would take, is the subject of the fourth chapter. The authors claim that the politics guiding and shaping new the regulatory frameworks of assisted reproduction emerged within an ‘unstable constellation of action, inaction and reaction’.

The status of surrogates, and the emergence of a new international market in fertility treatments, is the focus of chapter five. This chapter reinforces the importance of the global perspectives the authors bring to their research, examining the complexities of assisted reproduction across national borders. Chapter six examines the boundaries and limits of fertility treatments, including experiences of infertility, access to assisted reproduction by single people, those in same-sex relationships, or those who are older, as well as male infertility. Consideration of transgender and non-binary people’s access to assisted reproduction would have been a useful inclusion here. The final chapter turns to consider possible future directions in assisted reproductive technologies. This chapter examines emergent and more recent technologies and their implications, including CRISPR as well as the ethics of gene editing in vitro.

In IVF and Assisted Reproduction: a Global History, Ferber, Marks and Mackie provide a global and historical perspective on the development and cultural significance of assisted reproduction. They convincingly demonstrate the significance of national contexts to the development of IVF technologies, access to those technologies, and recognition of their significance in histories that have tended to prioritise Western perspectives.

While the book is clearly a landmark text in its field, refreshingly, the authors are quick to acknowledge the extent to which their own approach and research builds on the work of feminist STS scholars before them. This scholarly generosity is further evidenced in the extensive lists of references included at the end of each chapter, which helpfully guide readers towards specialist studies of each of the areas of consideration so capably examined in this book.

Elizabeth Stephens

University of Queensland

This revised and expanded edition of Feather and Brush is a welcome addition to the bibliography of Australian ornithology. The book is in two parts, the first being an expository history of the development of bird illustration and art, and the second a catalogue of the works of contemporary and recently deceased artists. It is a product of deep scholarship and familiarity with the subject. It references our pre-European history and then takes the reader chronologically from the earliest European explorers to the modern day. It makes the reader aware of the rich history of the many artists and illustrators, whose work is very worthy of greater recognition. It underlines their critical role in making the unfamiliar, familiar.

The choice of material comes from many sources. From the journals and logs of the early explorers from northern hemisphere countries that encountered our unique fauna for the first time. Some of the artists were simply given pencils and paper to record what they saw whilst others were employed to illustrate accurately specimens for the scientific record. It is quite amazing to think of the sheer number of specimens that were processed under what would have been trying circumstances. One thinks of Sydney Parkinson who not only prepared the skins of specimens for later study but also made detailed sketches of recently acquired specimens to ensure the colour of beaks and legs could be accurately rendered when the specimens were taken to England.

Homage is made in both parts to the giants of illustration like Gould and later, the Cayleys and Slater and Pizzey, who developed the field guides we now have come to look to when out watching birds. There are also many lesser-known artists and illustrators, some of whose work has been lost or more tellingly sent overseas when its value was not recognised locally.

One sadness is the realisation that these artists and illustrators witnessed the decline or extinction of species like the white gallinule on Lord Howe Island. Other species also suffered because they were easy to add to the settler’s pot or used in the fashions of the time.

We are taken through the timeline where the purpose of illustration was initially to document what existed in Australia. Many of the illustrations were not taken from life and poses are stylised and there is no reference to the flora of our land. With time there was a shift to depict the birds in their natural surrounds and to study them in life not death. This was a phenomenon that was noted in other countries with Alexander Wilson and John James Audubon leading the way in America. John and Elizabeth Gould established this in Australia and their knowledge of our unique flora and fauna undergirded their work when they returned to England to complete their folios.

Later there was a shift to the production of more accessible volumes. J. A. Leach’s Australian Bird Book (1911) was perhaps the first, and this was followed by various field guides in the latter half of the twentieth century. These guides are now household names—Caley, Slater, Pizzey, Davies and Cotton to name just some. Posters were produced to educate and encourage a greater love and protection of birds. At the same time artists started to produce work in the fine art tradition in a variety of media to cater for a market for those wanting to display works featuring our avian fauna in their homes, offices or public buildings. Associated with changes in the process of making illustrations from etchings, lithographs or photographic techniques, often combined with hand colouring, requiring many people to complete the process, there was a new group of artists emerging who wanted their art to convey a message. They used their art to make us aware of the changes they were seeing around them, the loss of species or the damage being done to the environment. At the same time, they wanted their viewers to share their wonder and amazement in the natural world and its inhabitants. A wide variety of techniques are on display—from ultra-realism to looser impressionistic paintings that record the essence of the bird, studied usually in the wild.

The artists included are diverse. Established artists like Robert Ulmann, Lars Knudsen, William T. Cooper and Peter Salter are honoured with individual monographs. The last chapter covers more contemporary and living artists. Each artist’s story is told—how they came to work with birds, their way of working, usually from life with the aid of sketchbooks, photographs, occasionally specimens and also their memory. Some of the messaging is quite dark, reminding us of past practices. Other messages show the behaviour or the joy we can see when we closely observe birds in their element.

The book is beautifully illustrated, well referenced and indexed. It is not a book for the coffee table but a valuable reference and an inspiring read. I congratulate the author for bringing us this revised and expanded version of her original work.

Trevor Hodson

Geelong Field Naturalists Club and Birregurra Landcare

This book redresses the shameful political treatment of one of South Australia’s most accomplished explorers, engineer Benjamin Herschel Babbage (1815–78). In February 1858, Babbage headed north from Adelaide into Outback South Australia with the official task of mapping the country in the vicinity of Lake Torrens, and importantly to discover a way through to the more northern parts of the colony. This was prior to the trans-Australian crossings of explorers Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills (1860–61) and John McDouall Stuart (1861–62). The author, Rod Tucker, has a personal connection to the Babbage story, being the great-great-grandson of George Stephen Nason, who was employed as a teamster on the 1858 expedition. In the book’s title, the reference to Hermit Hill concerns a prominent landform on the southern edge of Lake Eyre South, while Lake Torrens is one of the large salt lakes with its southern end lying not far north of Port Augusta.

The book is written in an entertaining and accessible style, but contains the references and footnotes of a scholarly work. It is well illustrated with the sketches made at the time by Babbage himself and by the expedition’s general assistant and botanist, David Herrgott. This was the age before photography in Australia, so the sketches provide an important insight into how the landscape was viewed by the explorers. The maps in the book are particularly important for readers, most of who will not be familiar with this arid part of South Australia. Even today, the Lake Gairdner to Lake Torrens region is regarded as being mostly remote. The book contains appendices of an edited version of George Nason’s diary, a list of people connected to the expedition, an inventory of the equipment and stores taken, and a useful guide to the early South Australian Commissioners of Crown Lands, Surveyors General, Presidents of the Philosophical Society and Governors of South Australia. The material presented is well referenced, and the frequent inclusion of quotes enables the readers to hear the voices of those whose actions are being discussed.

The readership of On Hermit Hill will chiefly consist of academic historians, geographers and university students, although lay readers with an interest in the Outback will also find it compelling reading. A major strength of the work is its rich description of the colonial environment during the 1850s, in the decades after the initial wave of British settlement, which had commenced in 1836. In this period, the majority of South Australian colonists still lived along the coast, with the more arid lands to the north remaining a complete mystery. In 1840, explorer Edward John Eyre had suggested that Lake Torrens was like an enormous horseshoe located in the desert to the north of Spencer Gulf. As a large expanse of saltpan, Eyre believed it could not be crossed, thereby providing an impediment to further exploration and to plans for eventual land development. During the late 1850s there was growing speculation among colonists that perhaps there were breaks in this mythically long salty lake. In part, this view was based on colonists realising that there was Aboriginal knowledge of tracks that penetrated the region from the north.

This book provides only a fleeting account of the First Nations people in northern South Australia, but in fairness to the author the available historical records contain only a little information about the Aboriginal men who at various stages acted as guides to the Babbage expedition party. Their Aboriginal names were not always recorded, and in the case of Billy, Pompey and Jemmy, their European names were ones that had been given to many Aboriginal men on the Australian colonial frontier. The Aboriginal people who lived in the Lake Torrens to Lake Gairdner area were probably speakers of languages such as Nukunu and Kuyani. The clue to the possible Kuyani identity of at least some of the Babbage guides is their recorded reluctance to travel past certain places. For instance, Pompey did not wish to travel with the explorers into country northwest of Blanchewater, which is north of the Flinders Ranges. Similarly, Oombatta and his family resisted going further north of Weeringilbunna near Stuart Creek.

The author has sought to describe the full range of obstacles, including the physical, social, emotional and political, that Babbage as an explorer encountered during his 1858 expedition and which contributed to unfair criticism of him in the Adelaide newspapers of the day. As the author states, no other Australian explorer was ever as heavily scrutinised in the media while his work was still ongoing. The author also aimed to give Babbage full credit for the successes that others tried so hard to deny him. With these objectives, the book is successful. It provides a detailed description of the interactions, many of them unpleasant, that Babbage had with various South Australian colonial administrators, politicians, other explorers and fellow expeditioners. This work is a valuable contribution to Australian history.

Philip A. Clarke

South Australia Museum

These welcome contributions to the history of visualisation arise from the research project Heritage in the Limelight: the Magic Lantern in Australia and the World, which ran from 2016 to 2018. Jolly and deCourcy are both scholars of photography, Jolly a practicing artist as well, and deCourcy a historian of early Australian photography.

Magic lanterns have received sustained scholarly attention over recent decade. Capable of projecting large-format images from glass slides, these instruments were once consigned to the catch-all category of pre-cinema technology but there is now a thriving literature dedicated to uncovering their importance. Yet this technology of display existed within a complex of other media formats and social practices. A strength of both books is that they avoid, differently, an overly narrow focus on a single technological form.

The edited volume derives from a conference organised by the research project and its content reflects the wide range of perspectives presented there, including contributions from visual artists, museum curators, historians, anthropologists and magic lantern scholars. The potential readership for this book is correspondingly wide. It covers a broad sweep of the lantern’s history, with Deidre Feeney ascribing the relevance of the long history of the lantern to current artistic practice, and Evelien Jonckheere and Kurt Vanhoutte providing an account of the understudied ‘métempsycose’ or ghost shows, which helped take the magic lantern from a small-scale practice to a truly public medium in the late nineteenth century.

Many contributions are focussed on the uses to which ‘lanternism’ was put. At the turn of the twentieth century, the lantern was a key resource for social reformers such as suffragists and missionaries, as described by Jane Lydon and Nicolas Peterson respectively. Scientific communication, too, was an important use for projected images both in the conventional form of British Association for the Advancement of Science meetings, presented by Jennifer Tucker, and the less conventional lectures of the enigmatic Clement Wragge, as detailed by Shaun Higgins. One of the more intriguing contributions is Ursula Frederick’s account of Lawrence Hargraves’s advocacy for the idea of a sixteenth-century Spanish settlement in Sydney, based on a close study of his lantern slide collection at the National Library of Australia; one of the most powerful is Vanessa Agnew and Kader Konuk’s account of Armin Wegner’s lantern show on the Armenian genocide.

The focus on the magic lantern in ‘Australia and the world’ is a welcome reminder of the sometimes-forgotten connectedness of antipodean society—or at least its urban centres—with the rest of the world in the maritime age and the book makes it clear that lantern practices circulated around the world in various ways. The social reformers mentioned above purposefully acted within global networks. There were also internationally touring lantern performances by particular individuals, such as art historian Sydney Dickinson and medical lecturer Anna Mary Longshore Potts, described by Jane Clark and Joe Kember respectively. Collected volumes are inevitably disparate in their focus, especially when taking a deliberately interdisciplinary perspective, but this work clearly succeeds in its goal of revealing the international aspects of lanternism, and Australia’s position within that network, neatly complementing earlier treatments of the magic lantern in Australia.

For their monograph, de Courcy and Jolly have taken a similar approach of internationalism to the life and career of James Newland, one of the early practitioners of magic lantern projection in Australia, but also a global figure in these nineteenth-century media practices. Indeed, the book is organised geographically as well as chronologically, tracing Newland’s career form North to South America, then across the Pacific Ocean to Australia before going onto India and finally Britain.

The authors have chosen biography as a genre to explore these global relationships. This approach allows the authors to escape the confines of either national histories or medium-specific histories. Rather, they convincingly show how the nineteenth-century trade in visual practices and products was global as well as the interplay between the different media forms like magic lantern projection, daguerreotype, photography, transparency painting and even more obscure formats like the oxy-hydrogen microscope and the vertical orrery.

The drawback to this choice is that Newland hardly embodies all of these possibilities in his own person. Of course, deCourcy and Jolly go to some pains to fill in the broader context for Newland’s individual career, however, this is, at times, a slightly uneasy arrangement. Unwilling to be a microhistory yet not quite a collective biography, the structure is more confining than is desirable. The clearest example of this is found in the chapter ‘The Pacific’, which is devoted to a discussion of colonial image-making of Polynesian identities such as Pōmare. Newland himself produced an image of this Tahitian Queen but as there is little source material on the reception of Newlands’ work the authors engage in an important and illuminating discussion of how similar images made by others operated within the colonial mindset of European artists and audiences. As a result, Newland makes only cameo appearances in a chapter of a book ostensibly dedicated to his biography.

This minor quibble aside, the book is excellently presented. The writing is lively and the documentation of source material impressive. As befits a work like this, it is beautifully illustrated. The structure, if awkward at times in how it deals with its subject matter, is nonetheless clear for the reader. While both the title and price of this book suggest it is more narrowly focussed in its readership than the edited collection, it will certainly be of interest to a wide range of scholars.

These two scholarly works range across the magic lanterns, daguerreotypes and other visual media forms that shaped a screen culture already mature by the time film arrived in Australia and are thereby significant for understanding the later development of media practice. However, even more importantly, these technologies were a major way in which nineteenth-century audiences understood themselves. These books are valuable additions to the literature on visualisation in the long nineteenth century, and, in particular, to this history in Australia.

Martin Bush

The University of Melbourne