Drawing from military geography's spatial roots, its embrace of dynamic systems, and integration of human and biophysical environments, this book helps in understanding the value of analyzing patterns, processes and systems, and cross-scale and multi-disciplinary ways of acting in a complex world, while making the case for a resurgence of strategic and military geography in Australia. Here, leading experts demonstrate that geography retains its relevance in clarifying the scale and dynamics of defense activities in assessments of the international, regional, national, and site impacts of changes in physical, cyber and human geographies. The cases presented show Australia contributing to a growing strategic and military geography.

Blood on the Thistle is an examination of the life and times of a remarkable Scottish family, the Cranstons of Haddington, East Lothian. It focuses on a period from about 1880, when the young, hard-working parents, Alec and Lizzie Cranston, arrived in Haddington, through to 1920, when the family they had produced, torn apart by the Great War, broke up as its surviving members pursued separate lives around the globe. Of seven sons who served in the First World War, four died and two more were horrifically wounded; only one, the youngest, returned home physically unscathed. This book explores the effects of this extreme sacrifi ce on the sons themselves as well as the loved ones they left behind, particularly their mother, Lizzie, who mourned them for the rest of her days. This is the tale of how a once proud and aspirational Scottish family was devastated by war, and how the effects continued to ripple through time and generations. Until, a century later, the threads of this remarkable family are finally drawn together again, in a book that is at once a superb documentary account and a moving tribute to a generation.