Taming the great south land Book

Certainly this work is a labor of love for the author, but it is also a promise unfulfilled. Dating from 1991, Taming the Great South Land has the feel of a period piece. Some period pieces stand up better than others. Lines is impressive in his comprehension of environmental history through the span of Australian history. His work also is a good corrective against the uncritical exploitation so common to Australia in late twentieth century. What he lacks is focus. He presents us with an ideological package that detracts from the environmental focus. A general black-armband rhetoric in the early chapters slides into a general social-justice rhetoric in the latter ones. A lesson of global environmental history is that all systems and all ideologies destroy their resource bases and become estranged from nature. This is what we need to understand and address. Environmental history that loses its focus on the human interface with environment, and instead cultivates social animus, falls short.