Taming the Great South Land: A History of the Conquest of Nature in Australia

by William J. Lines, David Suzuki (Foreword)

Taming the Great South Land is the first full-length landscape history of an entire continent occupied by one nation. It is also, in William Lines's telling, a brutal and controversial story. Examining the ways European society rapidly, radically transformed Australia's physical and human landscapes, the author writes candidly of repeated environmental devastation—from the early slaughter of seals and whales to the destructive spread of sheep, through gold rushes and land settlement to British nuclear tests and the modern mining and timber industries.

Lines shows how Enlightenment ideas of progress, economic growth, and development were reconstructed on Australian soil, and how the promise of the conquest of nature became a mockery in fact, resulting in the mass dislocation and destruction of indigenous populations.

This shocking narrative, thoroughly researched and accessibly written, combines environmental, social, and political history to hard-hitting effect.

Genres: History, Australia

337 pages, Hardcover

First published November 25, 1991

Reviews

[Brian Griffith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lines gives a scathing exposure of Australia's dark side, detailing the vast cruelty to native people and animals, with enormous destruction of the environment. All of it is true and needs to be said. I learned a lot. But Lines has a tendency to view all development in the past several centuries as harmful to the planet, which leaves little room for attention to any developments that have been helpful.

[Thomas Isern · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent summary of history of Australian settlement, highlighting attitudes toward conservation and the original peoples.