Contested forestries, contested educations: a centenary reflection

Abstract

Summary The first 50 years of Australian forestry education was, like the present, a period of conflict and change in forestry, and of fierce contests about how education should be conducted. Colonial practice, British plantation culture, classic European forestry, imperial practice and American pragmatism created different types of forestry, or ‘forestries’. They resulted in contests about how forestry should be organised, who should lead it and how foresters should be educated. The contests were played out in the histories of the Victorian School of Forestry, the Australian Forestry School and the University of Melbourne. They are illustrated in the life of Alfred Oscar Piatt Lawrence (1904–1986), one of the six foresters who graduated from both the Victorian School of Forestry and the Australian Forestry School. He had a distinguished career and became Commissioner in 1949 and Chief Commissioner of the Victorian Forests Commission (1956–1968) during a period of convergence of forestry and forestry education. The single model of forestry ended in the contests of the last quarter of a century. Reflections on the future consider the biodiversity rift, the contrast between ‘the forest of care’ and ‘the wood of neglect’, globalisation and localism, general education and specialisation.