Stephen Dovers (Ed). 2000. Environmental History and Policy: Still Settling Australia. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. 306 pp. ISBN 0-19-550749-5 RRP: A$39.95 NZ$49.95

Reviewed by John Dargavel, Visiting Fellow, Department of Forestry and Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, The Australian National University, Canberra.

It is the sub-title, 'Still settling Australia', that so catches the imagination. Are we really still settling Australia? What does it mean? Surely the land is fully occupied by now? Haven't we passed colonialism? Are 'we' only the settlers, new arrivals, migrants like myself, colonists? What is it that we have to do to have finished settling, to belong? Peter Read argues passionately in Belonging, that 'we the settlers' have to be reconciled with 'we the Aborigines' who were so devastatingly unsettled—and vice versa—before we can be 'we the people'.1 To be reconciled, we have to both understand and act. So too with the environment. As Dovers puts it, ecology has come to unsettle the Australian mind as much as technical and market changes have come to physically and psychologically unsettle the old settler certainties of rural Australia. Clearly, we have to be reconciled with our environment—and it to us—if we are to belong enduringly; we have to understand and we have to act.

This spirit pervades both environmental history generally and this collection of thirteen Australian essays. Problems are a-pressing and the 'lessons of environmental history' are to be studied as soldiers once studied past battles. Stephen Dovers, in his introductory chapter, certainly feels that 'environmental history can indeed inform contemporary policy' and this proposition is variously explored in the subsequent chapters. Dovers seems almost to equate 'policy' with 'action' and he feels that better policies may be devised if past policy failures are displayed. To me this is overly optimistic. 'Policies' are not just created ab initio in the great, grey isolated bureaucracies, well meaning and amenable to the gentle persuasion of this book though they may be. Hard economic interests and social forces pummel the body politic to produce, implement or conveniently ignore even the most enlightened policies.

The essays are grouped. In the first group are overviews by the ever engaging and assertive Eric Rolls and Joe Powell, the latter writing on the happily phrased 'geographical imagination' of ordering Australia's waters to settler purposes. Powell too is lary about the 'search for policy' and warns that we should not 'expect the past to serve the present too directly. In the next group are three essays on scientific understandings: a fine chapter by David Lindenmayer on forest history, a chapter on soil conservation and catchment management—which oddly introduces Russian and some American material to make a comparative study— and a chapter on using oral history sources to learn of environmental changes in river systems. The third group explores community involvement in environmental problems and their management through education, preparing community histories and in museums.

These groups have many engaging chapters, but it is the last group on 'history, law and policy', containing four chapters by Tim Bonyhady, John Bradsen, John Holmes and Michael Quinn, that address Dovers' proposition most directly. Quinn writes on the Western Division of New South Wales, He traces how public policy and administration reacted to fears in the 1890s that the pastoral industry there might collapse due to overgrazing, the plague of rabbits, the invasion of woody weeds, drought, sand drifts and other factors. A lengthy Royal Commission led to legislation in 1901 and reform in the administration of pastoral leases. But it was not enough and inquiries in the 1930s and 1980s heard similar stories of continuing environmental degradation. Yet Quinn always sees that the 'capacity for imagination and will to change' must be recognised if change is to be achieved.

Holmes, in a masterly paper, also examines the pastoral lease system, brought sharply to national attention in 1996 by the High Court's decision in the Wik case. It found that Indigenous and pastoral rights might co-exist over large areas, at least prospectively. The rancorous 'debate' which followed revealed just how unsettled the settlers felt about their arrogation of all the rights to all the land. Holmes notes that the notion of a 'bundle of property rights' is very much part of the contemporary discourse of resource economists, and we might usefully add that the legal notion of 'property' is of a social relationship rather than of a physical thing.2 Holmes traces the nature of the property rights provided in different States during six phases from 1847 to the present. He brings out the essential co-existence of multiple uses, users and values in natural resources, and he stresses the need for the capacity to redesign leasehold tenures to deal with their complexity, a capacity he contrasts with the recent push to enhance leaseholders rights against those of the environment or the public.

Bonyhady exhumes the use of the legal concept of 'public trust' as a duty of government from two cases that came before the Australian courts in the nineteenth century. One concerned the sale of part of Melbourne's Albert Park in 1875, the other a proposed coal mine on the shores of Sydney Harbour in the 1890s. But its Australian use was forgotten so that 'public trust' became thought of as an American concept. However, the exhumation was successful and public trust 'belatedly re-merged' in Australian courts late in the 1990s. It may well prove a tool to protect the environment from headstrong governments.

Bradsen is most explicit in addressing Dover's question. Of course we have failed to learn the lessons of history in respect of soil conservation. Soil erosion, salting, weed invasions and all the miseries of land degradation have long been known, but Bradsen makes Dovers, question more pointed. Who should have learned, what? And is their failure rightly open to criticism? His focus is on law, and in much of the chapter on the common law. He starts by reviewing how well the miseries were known in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. He then draws a comparison between US and Australian systems, at least as they applied to much of the pastoral zones. The US let land owners do as they liked but hoped to influence them through education. Bradsen claims that the Australian practice of leasing public lands subject to conditions, was not only unique but expressed a notion of the obligation of landholders to act in the public interest. Yet land degradation continued in spite of state soil conservation programmes from the 1930s and more particularly from the 1950s. As Bradsen sees it, 'effective conservation of land requires obligations, which require law or shame'. Perhaps the common law could provide it? Generally, the answer seems to be 'no', but an emerging 'duty of care' concept may have some potential to do so.

Bradsen's is a most thought-provoking chapter in a rich collection which will engage everyone interested in Australia's environmental history.

1 Peter Read 2000. Belonging. Cambridge University Press.

2 Macpherson, C.B. 1983. 'The meaning or property', in C.B. Macpherson (ed.). Property: mainstream and critical positions. University of Toronto Press.

Published: {Publication Date} http://www.jcu.edu.au/aff/history/reviews/dovers.htm