Environmental history in Western Australia before 1980

Abstract

Amateur and professional historians both contributed to the evolution of environmental history in Western Australia. While due recognition must be made of the influence of international and eastern Australian scholarship, the historical geographers in particular, it remains the case that much of the impetus for recognising the importance of environmental factors in the Western Australian past came from historians working locally. This should not be surprising in a society of recent European origin which until the 1960s depended on wool and wheat as major staples. Researchers tracing historical change over the relatively brief period of settlement since 1829 could not help observing rapid transformations of landscape and ecology during that period. It was maybe also relevant that even the residents of the capital city, Perth, lived with Kings Park as what was considered an icon of natural bush, although in reality one that had undergone considerable modification