Telling Environmental Histories

Katie Holmes is Director of the Centre for the Study of the Inland, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. Her work in oral and environmental history seeks to understand the experience of Australian settlement, 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 (1995) and Between the Leaves: Stories of Australian women, writing and gardens (2011) and co-author of Reading the Garden: the settlement of Australia (2008), as well as numerous edited collections. Heather Goodall is Professor Emerita of History at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. She has published on Indigenous histories and environmental history in Australia and on colonialism and decolonisation in the 20th century in the eastern Indian Ocean. She has worked in collaborative projects with Indigenous people, published as Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics, (1996), and the co-authored Rivers and Resilience: Aboriginal People on Sydney’s Georges River, (with Allison Cadzow, 2009); Isabel Flick: the many lives of an extraordinary Aboriginal woman, (with Isabel Flick, 2005); and Making Change Happen (with Kevin Cook, 2013).

“This exciting collection has much to offer both oral historians and environmental historians who seek bold and innovative ways to listen to people in place, and to places over time.” (Ruth A. Morgan, Oral History Australia Journal, Vol. 41, 2019)

• 1. 1. Introduction: Telling Environmental Histories; Katie Holmes and Heather Goodall.- Part I: Rivers.- 2. Memory, mobility & the more-than-human world: oral history and environmental history.; Heather Goodall.-3. Talking Fish: Oral History in the Environmental Histories of Murray-Darling Basin Rivers; Jodi Frawley.- 4.  River of Many Voices: Oral and Environmental Histories of the Severn; Marianna Dudley.- Part II: De/Industrialisation.- 5. Industrial Remains: Community Narratives of Mashapaug Pond in Providence, Rhode Island; Anne Valk.- 6. Building a safe space for unsafe memories: The Remember Bhopal Museum; Rama Lakshmi & Shalini Sharma.- 7. Stories of Life, Work and Nature before and after the Clean-Up of North-East England’s River Tyne, 1940-2015; Leona Skelton.- 8. The Deindustrialization of our Senses: Residual and Dominant Soundscapes in Montreal’s Point Saint-Charles District; Piyusha Chatterjee & Steven High.- Part III: Living with Environmental Change.- 9. ‘Another weed will come along’: attitudes to weeds, land and community in the Victorian Mallee.; Karen Twigg.- 10. Famine and elephants: remembering place-making along Travancore's forest fringe.; Meera Anna Oommen.-11. Hearing the Legacy in the Forecast: Living with stories of Australian Climate; Deb Anderson.- 12. ‘The devil you know’: environmental stories from the Victorian Mallee; Katie Holmes.