Australian Nature, European Culture: Anglo Settlers in Australia

Abstract

story of whites and the natural environment of Australia is the tale of a European culture in a non-European land. Recent studiesGeoffrey Bolton's Spoils and Spoilers: Australians Make their Environment, 1788-1980, (1981), Derek Whitelock's Conquest to Conservation: History of Human Impact on the South Australian Environment (1985), and William J. Lines's Taming the Great South Land: A History of the Conquest of in Australia (1991)-concentrate, as their titles and subtitles indicate, on one overwhelming fact of that history: the changes Europeans made in Australia.1 For Bolton the settlers made all: the built environment by construction, the natural one by destruction. Whitelock concentrates on human destruction and the more recent rescue of South Australia's natural environment. Lines is the bluntest. The British Empire and Australia's tethers to the post-Enlightened industrial world-human constructions all-not nature, created modem Australia.2 This study takes another perspective. Nature does not dictate, but physical nature does, at any given time, set limits on what is humanly possible. Humans may think what they want; they cannot always do what they want, and not all they do turns out