Reviews for Man and landscape in Australia, towards an ecological vision

The average rating for Man and landscape in Australia, towards an ecological vision based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-12-06 00:00:00 Marion Williams I've now read several books on Aboriginal land management in Australia, and Hallam's stands out for combining breadth and concision. Compared to The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia, it is clear, comprehensible and remarkably wide-ranging. Gammage never considers the spiritual side of Aboriginal land management, nor is he particularly good on the archaeological evidence. Hallam is strong on both, as well as drawing effectively on early European accounts of the landscape as Gammage does. If there was one weakness to the book, it was that Hallam is not a vivid nature writer. This is a difficult problem to overcome in a scientific history, because scientific detail inevitably makes the description less vivid'unless, perhaps you're a professional scientist who can visualise it easily. Perhaps, though, it is unfair to expect a twentieth-century author to describe eighteenth-century Australia vividly. One terribly sad fact of our history is that it is simultaneously so short and so long. We are keenly aware of how much has been lost in the last 200 years, because there was so much to lose and it was lost so recently. Especially around Perth and the other major cities, few eighteenth-century landscapes remain. Even outside the cities, industrial agriculture, introduced species and the disruption of Aboriginal land management means that eighteenth-century landscapes are still comparatively rare. The average German or Chinese has not witnessed such stark transformations. Their nations have had intensive cereal agriculture and urban life for thousands of years, and the links to the old ways are far more tenuous than in Australia, where the scars of colonisation are visible everywhere. This was a fine study, and clearly pathbreaking in its time. It is great to see it reissued. Hopefully it finds a new and even more receptive readership today.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-06-03 00:00:00 Benjamin Schwartz Still trying to read the things I was supposed to read in school and didn't. Sir Philip Sidney spent most of his life being groomed to be the perfect courtier for Elizabeth I; but because she took offense at some youthful comments, and because she had many problems with his family, she spent years never preferring him. Eventually he despaired of ever being a credit to his country or his family, and he spent four years writing "trifles"--the defense of poesie, the first sonnet sequence in English (Astrophil and Stella) and a prose work--Arcadia--which for the next 250 years would be the most popular prose work in English. He was finally called to fight the Spanish in the Netherlands, was wounded in a skirmish, and died an excruciating three weeks later at the age of 32. By poesie he meant roughly what we would call fiction, not necessarily verse, and his defense of it as preferable to philosophy and history is very spirited. And it certainly suits my prejudices. His writing is always clear and forceful--how's this for the importance of wide reading and study?--"This purifing of wit, this enritching of memory, enabling of judgment, and enlarging of conceyt, which commonly we call learning, under what name soever it com forth, or to what immediate end soever it be directed, the final end is to lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate soules, made worse by theyr clayey lodgings, can be capable of."