Telling Environmental Histories: Intersections of Memory, Narrative and Environment

338 Pages·2017·5.91 MB·English

by  Katie Holmes,Heather Goodall (eds.)

Palgrave Studies in
World Environmental History
TELLING ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORIES
Intersections of Memory, Narrative
and Environment
Edited by Katie Holmes and Heather Goodall
Palgrave Studies in World Environmental History
Series Editors
Vinita Damodaran
Department of History
University of Sussex
Brighton, UK
Rohan D’Souza
Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies
Kyoto University
Kyoto, Japan
Sujit Sivasundaram
University of Cambridge
Cambridge, UK
James John Beattie
Faculty of Science
Victoria University of Wellington
Wellington, New Zealand
The widespread perception of a global environmental crisis has stimulated
the burgeoning interest in environmental studies and has encouraged
a range of scholars, including historians, to place the environment at the
heart of their analytical and conceptual explorations. An understanding of
the history of human interactions with all parts of the cultivated and non-
cultivated surface of the earth and with living organisms and other physi-
cal phenomena is increasingly seen as an essential aspect both of historical
scholarship and in adjacent fields, such as the history of science, anthro-
pology, geography and sociology. Environmental history can be of con-
siderable assistance in efforts to comprehend the traumatic environmental
difficulties facing us today, while making us reconsider the bounds of pos-
sibility open to humans over time and space in their interaction with dif-
ferent environments. This series explores these interactions in studies that
together touch on all parts of the globe and all manner of environments
including the built environment. Books in the series come from a wide
range of fields of scholarship, from the sciences, social sciences and human-
ities. The series particularly encourages interdisciplinary projects that
emphasize historical engagement with science and other fields of study.
Editorial Board
Prof. Mark Elvin, Australian National University, Australia
Prof. Heather Goodall, University of Technology Sydney, Australia
Prof. Edward Melillo, Amherst College, USA
Prof. Alan Mikhail, Yale University, USA
Prof. José Augusto Pádua, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Dr. Kate Showers, University of Sussex, UK
Prof. Graeme Wynn, University of British Columbia, Canada
Prof. Robert Peckham, Univerisy of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
More information about this series at
http://www.springer.com/series/14570
Katie Holmes · Heather Goodall
Editors
Telling Environmental
Histories
Intersections of Memory, Narrative
and Environment
Editors
Katie Holmes Heather Goodall
Department of Archaeology School of Communications
and History University of Technology Sydney
La Trobe University Broadway, NSW, Australia
Bundoora, VIC, Australia
Palgrave Studies in World Environmental History
ISBN 978-3-319-63771-6 ISBN 978-3-319-63772-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-63772-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017948278
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.
Cover credit: @ Heather Goodall
Maps: Sharon Harrup Deign
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature
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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
A
cknowledgements
Intellectual work rarely occurs in isolation. This book is the product
of generous conversations and collaborations that have been happen-
ing over a number of years and on a number of continents. The idea
for this book began with a panel on oral and environmental history at
the European Society for Environmental History conference at Versailles,
France, in July 2015. La Trobe University generously funded a small
three-day workshop later that year which brought together a number of
the contributors for the collection. Tom Griffiths led a wonderful field
trip that began the workshop, and Grace Karskens and Alistair Thomson
attended as ‘critical friends’, pushing us to clarify our thoughts and
sharpen our ideas. The International Oral History Association confer-
ence in Bangalore, India, in July 2016 and then the US Oral History
Association conference at Long Beach, California in October that year
gave a number of us further opportunities to draw collaborators together
to share and test the ideas which we explore in the chapters gathered
here. We thank all those involved so far and hope you find this collec-
tion a stimulating opening for further conversations. Thanks to Indira
Chowdhury and Mahesh Rangarajan for their insightful comments on
drafts. Special thanks to Jessica Horton for her careful work on endnotes
and references and Sharon Harrup for her wonderful maps!
Katie Holmes
Heather Goodall
v
c
ontents
1 Introduction: Telling Environmental Histories 1
Katie Holmes and Heather Goodall
Part I Rivers
2 Rivers, Memory and Migrancy: Everyday Place-Making
in Changing Environments 31
Heather Goodall
3 “Dancing to the Billabong’s Tune”: Oral History
in the Environmental Histories of Murray–Darling
Basin Rivers 51
Jodi Frawley
4 River of Many Voices: Oral and Environmental Histories
of the Severn 81
Marianna Dudley
vii
viii CONTENTS
Part II De/Industrialisation
5 Industrial Remains: Community Narratives of Mashapaug
Pond in Providence, Rhode Island 109
Anne M. Valk
6 Building a Safe Space for Unsafe Memories:
The Remember Bhopal Museum 133
Rama Lakshmi and Shalini Sharma
7 Stories of Life, Work and Nature Before and After
the Clean-up of North-East England’s River Tyne,
1940–2015 153
Leona Skelton
8 The Deindustrialisation of Our Senses: Residual
and Dominant Soundscapes in Montreal’s Point
Saint-Charles District 179
Piyusha Chatterjee and Steven High
Part III Living with Environmental Change
9 “Another Weed Will Come Along”: Attitudes to Weeds,
Land and Community in the Victorian Mallee 213
Karen Twigg
10 Famine and Elephants: Remembering Place-Making
Along Travancore’s Forest Fringe 241
Meera Anna Oommen
11 Hearing the Legacy in the Forecast: Living with
Stories of the Australian Climate 267
Deb Anderson
CONTENTS ix
12 “It’s the Devil You Know”: Environmental Stories
from the Victorian Mallee 295
Katie Holmes
Index 319
e c
ditors And ontributors
About the Editors
Katie Holmes is the Director of the Centre for the Study of the Inland,
La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. Her work in oral and envi-
ronmental history seeks to understand the experience of Australian set-
tlement, and integrates gender history, cultural history and literary
studies. She is the author of Spaces in Her Day: Australian Women’s
Diaries of the 1920s and 1930s (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1995) and
Between the Leaves: Stories of Australian Women, Writing and Gardens
(Crawley: UWA Publishing, 2011) and co-author with Susan K. Martin
and Kylie Mirmohamadi of Reading the Garden: The Settlement of
Australia (Carlton: Melbourne University Publishing, 2008), as well as
numerous edited collections. In 2010 she held the Keith Cameron Chair
in Australian Studies at University College Dublin.
Heather Goodall has published on Indigenous histories and environ-
mental history in Australia and on colonialism and decolonisation in
the twentieth century in the eastern Indian Ocean. She is the author
of Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales,
1770–1972 (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1996) and the forthcom-
ing Beyond Borders: Indonesian Independence in the Eyes of the Region
xi