The environmental history of Australia

Abstract

The origins of environmental history are commonly traced to the United States in the 1970s as it emerged as a self-conscious sub-discipline of history there. In Australia, the new field dovetailed with approaches in geography studying the impact of British colonization on the land and environment. Forest history was a strength of early Australian environmental history, along with pastoral expansion and biological invasion. Aboriginal people hunted and modified the landscape with fire. The British settlement brought simultaneous agricultural and industrial revolutions, something that only New Zealand shared. Australian ecosystems evolved to adapt to infrequent hot lightning fires before people arrived. As climatic changes dried the landscape, the number and ferocity of fires increased, and gradually eucalypts replaced the rainforest species that had clad the land in Gondwanan times. Aboriginal people recultivated the land by fire through cool burns.