Cirrus@Austlit

'APRIL IS MY favourite time of year in Melbourne. The weather is comparatively stable and the days warm, richly complementing the autumn colours. In 2020 there was even more time to enjoy them than usual, and the late summer rains seemed to have deepened the autumn hues. Or perhaps the unfolding pandemic sharpened my vision. The skies were clear, absent of planes and the usual April smog, and the sounds of nature were no longer buried by the constant cacophony of industrialised cities. As I took the opportunity to breathe and look up, the rapid unravelling of the world as I knew it created its own kind of vertigo.' (Introduction)

'The human/nature relationship is at the heart of one of the most urgent crises of our time: climate change. What does this mean for environmental historians, trained as we are to examine the culture/nature relationship, its changing temporal expressions, to challenge the binary which underpins the discipline of history itself? This article is framed as a conversation between three environmental historians as we respond to key questions about environmental history and the climate crisis. Together we ponder the skills we bring to understanding it, the stories we have found to move us forward and our thoughts about the interface between history, science and activism.' (Publication abstract)

'Mallee Country tells the powerful history of mallee lands and people across southern Australia from Deep Time to the present. Carefully shaped and managed by Aboriginal people for over 50,000 years, mallee country was dramatically transformed by settlers, first with sheep and rabbits, then by flattening and burning the mallee to make way for wheat. Government backed settlement schemes devastated lives and country, but some farmers learnt how to survive the droughts, dust storms, mice, locusts and salinity – as well as the vagaries of international markets – to become some of Australia’s most resilient agriculturalists. In mallee country, innovation and tenacity have been neighbours to hardship and failure.

'Mallee Country is a story of how land and people shape each other. It is the story of how a landscape once derided by settlers as a ‘howling wilderness’ covered in ‘dismal scrub’ became home to citizens who delighted in mallee fauna and flora, and fought to conserve it for future generations. And it is the story of the dreams, sweat and sorrows of people who face an uncertain future of depopulation and climate change with creativity and hope.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

Exhuming Passions is a collection of essays by leading Australian and Irish scholars about how the past is remembered and contested in these two countries that are often singled out because of their bitterly disputed remembrance.

Each chapter addresses a different topical issue such as how war is commemorated - particularly the changing national myths surrounding Anzac Day and the Easter Rising; government apologies for harms done by previous generations - to the Stolen Generations and state apologies for institutional and religious child sexual abuse.

The book also discusses how the past is constructed in film and literature - Irish and Australian historical fiction, the changing cinematic representations of Irish religions, how the colonial past is represented in Australian cinema, as well as the changing urban culture of Canberra and Dublin. [From the publisher's website]