This collection explores the intersections of oral history and environmental history. Oral history offers environmental historians the opportunity to understand the ways people's perceptions, experiences and beliefs about environments change over time. In turn, the insights of environmental history challenge oral historians to think more critically about the ways an active, more-than-human world shapes experiences and people. The integration of these approaches enables us to more fully and critically understand the ways cultural and individual memory and experience shapes human interactions with the more-than-human world, just as it enables us to identify the ways human memory, identity and experience is moulded by the landscapes and environments in which people live and labour. It includes contributions from Australia, India, the UK, Canada and the USA.

This book restores water, both fresh and salt, to its central position in human endeavour, ecology and environment. Water access and the environmental and social problems of development are major issues of concern in this century. Drawing on water's many formations in debating human relationship with a major source of life and a major factor in contemporary politics, this book covers oceans and rivers to lagoons, billabongs and estuaries in Asia, Oceania and the West Pacific. In an interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary analysis of the water problem, the contributors address the physical descriptors of water and water flow, and they interrogate the politicised administrations of water in closely corresponding regions. Water, Sovereignty and Borders in Asia and Oceania identifies new discursive possibilities for thinking about water in theory and in practice. It presents those discourses that seem most useful in addressing the multiple crises the region is facing and thus should be of interest to scholars of Asian Studies, Geography, Environmental and Cultural Studies.

Fresh water, salt water, and brackish water in Asia, Oceania, and the West Pacific are at the focus of this book. From oceans and rivers to lagoons, billabongs and estuaries, it draws on water's many formations in debating human relationships as a major source of life and a major factor in contemporary politics. Water access and the environmental and social problems of development are some of the major issues of concern in this century. This book brings multidisciplinary perspectives - from the angle of social sciences, cultural theory, policy-making, environmental studies and physical sciences - to research and decision-making processes. It is organized around the themes of fresh and salt, and borders and sovereignty. By situating water as both an object of thematic enquiry and as a lens of description and analysis in pursuing these themes, the contributors address the physical descriptors of water and water flow, interrogating the politicized administrations of water in closely corresponding regions. Water, Sovereignty and Borders in Asia and Oceania identifies new discursive possibilities for thinking about water in theory and in practice. It presents those discourses that seem most useful in addressing the multiple crises that the region is facing and thus will be of interest to scholars of Asian studies, geography, the environment and cultural studies.

Beyond Borders: Indians, Australians and the Indonesian Revolution, 1939 to 1950 rediscovers an intense internationalism - and charts its loss - in the Indonesian Revolution. Momentous far beyond Indonesia itself, and not just for elites, generals, or diplomats, the Indonesian anti-colonial struggle from 1945 to 1949 also became a powerful symbol of hope at the most grassroots levels in India and Australia. As the news flashed across crumbling colonial borders by cable, radio, and photograph, ordinary men and women became caught up in in the struggle. Whether seamen, soldiers, journalists, activists, and merchants, Indonesian independence inspired all of them to challenge colonialism and racism. And the outcomes were made into myths in each country through films, memoirs, and civic commemorations. But as heroes were remembered, or invented, this 1940s internationalism was buried behind the hardening borders of new nations and hostile Cold War blocs, only to reemerge as the basis for the globalisation of later years.

This collection explores the intersections of oral history and environmental history. Oral history offers environmental historians the opportunity to understand the ways people's perceptions, experiences and beliefs about environments change over time. In turn, the insights of environmental history challenge oral historians to think more critically about the ways an active, more-than-human world shapes experiences and people. The integration of these approaches enables us to more fully and critically understand the ways cultural and individual memory and experience shapes human interactions with the more-than-human world, just as it enables us to identify the ways human memory, identity and experience is moulded by the landscapes and environments in which people live and labour. It includes contributions from Australia, India, the UK, Canada and the USA.

Invasion to Embassy challenges the conventional view of Aboriginal politics to present a bold new account of Aboriginal responses to invasion and dispossession in New South Wales. At the core of these responses has been land: as a concrete goal, but also as a rallying cry, a call for justice and a focal point for identity. This rich story is told through the words and memories of many of the key activists who were involved in the struggles on the lands and in the towns of New South Wales. By exploring interactions between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people over land, this book enables us to understand our history through the reality of the conflicts, tensions, negotiations and cooperation which make up our experience of colonialism. Invasion to Embassy is unique in presenting NSW Aboriginal history as a history of activism, rather than a saga of passivity and victimisation. In telling this engrossing story, Heather Goodall reveals much about white Australians - not only as oppressors, but as allies and as newcomers who must in turn sort out their relations to the land.

Tracing the history of Aboriginal people along Sydney's Georges River from the early periods of British and Irish settlements to the present, this study offers a dramatically new approach to Aboriginal history in an urban Australian setting. It investigates the role of traditional communities in this densely settled suburban area, showing how the continued presence of Aboriginal traditional owners is largely--and wrongly--dismissed or ignored. Telling the stories of real people who lived along the river, the research demonstrates that traditional owners took up active roles in sustaining rich cultural identity among Aboriginal communities and argues that these complex groups have continually regenerated their relationships and identity, thereby building on their traditions while engaging in a new present.

The emerging environmental justice movement has created greater awareness among scholars that communities from all over the world suffer from similar environmental inequalities. This volume takes up the challenge of linking the focussed campaigns and insights from African American campaigns for environmental justice with the perspectives of this global group of environmentally marginalized groups. The editorial team has drawn on Washington's work, on Paul Rosier's study of Native American environmentalism, and on Heather Goodall's work with Indigenous Australians to seek out wider perspectives on the relationships between memories of injustice and demands for environmental justice in the global arena. This collection contributes to environmental historiography by providing 'bottom up' environmental histories in a field which so far has mostly emphasized a 'top down' perspective, in which the voices of those most heavily burdened by environmental degradation are often ignored. The essays here serve as a modest step in filling this lacuna in environmental history by providing the viewpoints of peoples and of indigenous communities which traditionally have been neglected while linking them to a global context of environmental activism and education. Scholars of environmental justice, as much as the activists in their respective struggle, face challenges in working comparatively to locate the differences between local struggles as well as to celebrate their common ground. In this sense, the chapters in this book represent the opening up of spaces for future conversations rather than any simple ending to the discussion. The contributions, however, reflect growing awareness of that common ground and a rising need to employ linked experiences and strategies in combating environmental injustice on a global scale, in part by mimicking the technology and tools employed by global corporations that endanger the environmental integrity of a diverse set of homelands and ecologies.