Taming the great south land : a history of the conquest of nature in Australia /

Lines's very appealing book is one of the most important yet written on the interaction between European settlers and the natural environment in the southwest Pacific. Building on the tradition of such scholars as A. Grenfell Price (on whose work Lines oddly fails to comment) and developing the powerful insights of historians like Alfred W. Crosby (whose Ecological Imperialism, CH, Apr'87, has become a landmark study) Lines develops a devastating yet quite fair case against those who committed "dark deeds in a sunny land." He discusses the Enlightenment and the notion of progress in relation to the exploitation of nature, roams easily across complex matters of land settlement, gold rushes, and the timber industry, and examines the impact on the aboriginal population of the changes brought by European settlement. There is more here than simply another depressing examination of rapine and pillage at the hands of uncomprehending settlers, since the book also deals with contemporary history, when the delicacy of the environment was (or is presumed to be) mroe clearly understood. At times Lines makes little effort to understand ignorance and is a bit simplistic. The last chapter is hurried, but the book remains important to any student of environmental history, business history, and of Pacific, Australian, or imperial history broadly. R. W. Winks; Yale University