Changing Ideas about the Environment in Australia: Learning from Stockholm

Abstract

This paper explores Australia's responses to questions about ‘the environment', particularly in the period from the 1960s–80s, showing how they were informed in varying amounts by international science, by the emerging aesthetics of the idea of the environment and by social movements, including one later known as environmentalism. The rise of ‘integrated science', particularly Big Science and international collaborations in science, modelling and the information technology revolution all shaped the interdisciplinary expertise that frames the environment still. It is, however, very rare to find an individual like Max Day, whose biography enables a re-examination of the way thinking about the environment shaped strategic national thinking, public science and popular concerns including national parks management across the second half of the twentieth century.