Abstract
A sustaining theme of this collection is the relationship between climate, colonizers, colonized places, and science. This chapter begins with the position that settlers preconceived colonial spaces, and that, even when confronted with the material reality of colonial environments, in the face of potentially acute cognitive dissonance, these preconceptions continued to shape settler behavior and assumptions. When faced with new and unfamiliar surroundings, the responses of individual settlers, colonial administrators, and the scientific fraternity were conditioned by the nature of the places they had come from, by socioeconomic expedience and scientific fashion, and by preconceptions about how environmental factors like soil, rainfall, sunshine, vegetation, and external factors like technology and land practice would interact to shape a place.1
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Notes
For example, early portrayals of the prairies of Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma, east of the Rocky Mountains, as the “Great American Desert” were conditioned by pre-nineteenth-century western European experience of treeless country as unproductive and unsuitable for agriculture. See, D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 2, Continental America, 1800–1867 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 75–77. This point is also illustrated in nineteenth-century Australian natural history journals, as well as in the publications of colonial acclimatization societies. Acclimatization societies and zoological and botanical gardens across the British Empire swapped flora and fauna in the interest of improving prosperity and productivity, beautifying colonial environments, and recreating the landscapes of home.
See Christopher Lever, They Dined on Eland: The Story of the Acclimatisation Societies (London: Quiller Press, 1992).
Gary D. Libecap and Zeynep Kocabiyik Hansen, “‘Rain Follows the Plow’ and Dryfarming Doctrine: The Climate Information Problem and Homestead Failure in the Upper Great Plains, 1890–1925,” Journal of Economic History 62, no. 1 (2002): 87–88.
For example, Martin Rudwick, “Geological Travel and Theoretical Innovation: The Role of ‘Liminal’ Experience,” Social Studies of Science 26, Historic paper (1996 [1978]): 143–59;
George Seddon, “Thinking Like a Geologist: The Culture of Geology,” Mawson Lecture, Australian Journal of Earth Sciences 43 (1996): 487–95;
Jan Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 5.
Ian Tyrrell, “The ‘Nature’ of Environmental History: New Views from the Pacific,” Prologue, in Nature et progrès: interactions, exclusions, mutations, vol. 12, ed. Pierre Lagayette, Collection Frontières (Paris: Presses Paris Sorbonne, 2006), 11–31.
Deborah Epstein Popper and Frank J. Popper, “The Great Plains: From Dust to Dust: A Daring Proposal for Dealing with an Inevitable Disaster,” Planning magazine 53 (1987): 12–18.
David J. Wishart, “Settling the Great Plains, 1850–1930: Prospects and Problems,” in North America: The Historical Geography of a Changing Continent, ed. Thomas F. McIlwraith and Edward K. Muller, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc., 2001), 237–61: (quote, 237–38).
Wishart, “Land Laws and Settlement,” in The Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, ed. Wishart (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2011), http://plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp.ea.024.
Michael Williams, “Delimiting the Spread of Settlement: An Examination of Evidence in South Australia,” Economic Geography 42 (1966): 336–55.
Tim Sherratt, Tom Griffiths, and Libby Robin, eds., A Change in the Weather: Climate and Culture in Australia (Canberra: National Museum of Australia Press, 2005);
Kirsty Douglas, Under Such Sunny Skies: Understanding Weather in Colonial Australia, 1860–1901, Metarch Papers 17 (Melbourne: Commonwealth Bureau of Meteorology, 2007).
Tyrrell, “‘Nature’ of Environmental History,” 13; Douglas, Under Such Sunny Skies. For contemporary examples see the agrarian reformer, Walter Scott Campbell, “Forestry in New South Wales,” Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science 7 (1898): 958–61;
Robert L. J. Ellery, “On the Relation between Forest Lands and Climate in Victoria,” Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria 16 (1880): 1–6.
Donald Worster, Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 7.
Douglas, Under Such Sunny Skies; Tyrrell, “‘Nature’ of Environmental History,” 15; Sherratt et al., A Change in the Weather; Sherratt, Inigo Jones: The Weather Prophet, Metarch Papers 16 (Melbourne: Commonwealth Bureau of Meteorology, 2007).
Libby Robin and Tom Griffiths, “Environmental History in Australasia,” Environment and History 10 (2004): 439.
Meinig, On the Margins of the Good Earth: The South Australian Wheat Frontier 1869–1884 (Monograph Series, No. 2, Association of American Geographers, 1962);
Michael Williams, The Making of the South Australian Landscape: A Study in the Historical Geography of Australia (London and New York: Academic Press, 1974); Ferrill, “The Marginal Lands,” 68–88. See also Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 speech, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History and Other Essays (New York: Henry Holt, 1921);
Jonathan Raban, Bad Land: An American Romance (Michigan: Pantheon Books, 1996);
Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950);
Worster, An Unsettled Country: Changing Landscapes of the American West (Albuquerque: New Mexico University Press, 1994).
Meinig, On the Margins, 55–56; Janis Sheldrick, “1855–1856: George Goyder’s Long Ride to Mapping Reliable Rainfall,” The Globe 65 (2010): 28–40.
Meinig, On the Margins, 70; Hans Mincham, The Story of the Flinders Ranges (Melbourne: Rigby, 1964), 239.
Alexander Von Humboldt, Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe, vol. 1, trans. E. Otté (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1852), 333.
J. W. Gregory, The Dead Heart of Australia (London: John Murray, 1906), 342.
Josiah Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies, or the Journal of a Santa Fé Trader …, vol. 2 (New York: Henry G. Langly, 1844), 202–3.
Samuel Aughey, Sketches of the Physical Geography and Geology of Nebraska (Daily Republican Book and Job Office, Omaha, Nebraska, 1880), 41–45.
Stephen Harriman Long et al., James’ Account of S. H. Long’s Expedition, 1819–1820, vol. 2, in Early Western Travels: 1748–1846, ed. Rueben Gold Thwaites (Cleveland, Ohio: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1905); Meinig, The Shaping of America, vol. 2, 76.
Edward John Eyre, Journals of Expeditions of Discovery into Central Australia, …, 2 vols. and maps (London: T. & W. Boone, 1845), vol. 1, 64;
Charles Sturt, The Central Australian Expedition, 1844–1846: The Journals of Charles Sturt, ed. Richard C. Davis, 3rd Series, no. 10 (London: The Hakluyt Society, 2002), 218;
Sturt, Narrative of an Expedition into Central Australia, Performed under the Authority of Her Majesty’s Government …, 2 vols. and map (London: T & W Boone, 1849. Facsimile reprint, Adelaide: Libraries Board of South Australia, 1965).
Douglas, “Pictures of Time Beneath: Science, Landscape, Heritage and the Uses of the Deep Past” (Ph.D. diss.: Australian National University, 2004), ANU Digital Theses Collection, http://hdl.handle.net/1885/7498, 215–16;
Hans Mincham, “Since Matthew Flinders,” in The Flinders Ranges, A Portrait, ed. Eduard Domin (Adelaide: Little Hills Press, 1986), 20–39 (quote, 20); Meinig, On the Margins, 22.
John McDouall Stuart, Explorations in Australia: The Journals of John McDouall Stuart …, 2nd ed. (London: Saunders, Otley and Co., 1865), x.
C. D. Wilber, The Great Valleys and Prairies of Nebraska and the Northwest, 3rd ed. (Daily Republican Print, Omaha, Nebraska, 1881), 137.
Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods: Californian-Australian Environmental Reform, 1860–1930 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 89;
Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 133.
Ralph Tate, “The Natural History of the Country Round the Head of the Great Australian Bight,” Transactions of the Philosophical Society of South Australia 2 (1879): 117–18.
Tyrrell, True Gardens, 89–92; J. M. Powell, An Historical Geography of Modern Australia: The Restive Fringe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 36–38.
W. Gill, “Deforestation in South Australia: Its Causes and Probable Results,” Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science 5 (1893): 530–31.
Walter Scott Campbell, “Forestry in New South Wales,” Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science 7 (1898): 958–61 (first quote, 958), (second quote, 960).
For a detailed analysis of the tension between forestry and agriculture in New Zealand, see James Beattie, “Environmental Anxiety in New Zealand, 1840–1941: Climate change, soil erosion, sand drift, flooding and forest conservation,” Environment and History 9, no. 4 (2003): 379–92.
Robert Marc Friedman, Appropriating the Weather: Vilhelm Bjerknes and the Construction of a Modern Meteorology (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989), xii.
Charles R. Kutzleb, “Can Forests Bring Rain to the Plains?” Forest History 15, no.3 (1971): 14–21.
R. L. J. Ellery, “Notes on the Rainfall Map Recently Issued by the Government of Victoria,” Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria 20 (1884): 120.
F. B. Ragless, “Seventy Years Ago: The Journal of Frederick Brandis Ragless” (Unpublished MS: Margaret E Ragless private collection, 1936), 5.
Ragless, “Seventy Years Ago,” 4; Margaret E Ragless, Dust Storms in China Teacups: Ragless Family Heritage to Australia (Adelaide: Investigator Press, 1988), 92.
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© 2014 James Beattie, Emily O’Gorman, and Matthew Henry
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Douglas, K. (2014). “For the sake of a little grass”: A Comparative History of Settler Science and Environmental Limits in South Australia and the Great Plains. In: Beattie, J., O’Gorman, E., Henry, M. (eds) Climate, Science, and Colonization. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137333933_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137333933_6
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