An Historical Geography of Modern Australia: The Restive Fringe by J.M. Powell (Second Hand Book)

Description SECOND HAND BOOK In this major new study J.M. Powell presents the first authoritative and comprehensive historical geography of Australia during the second century of white occupation. In this period immigrant Australians have continued to experience many difficulties in responding to various, often conflicting pressures – generated both by events elsewhere and by the intricate matrix of constraints and rewards that the immediate physical environment uniquely provides. The ‘restiveness’ of the sub-title has been particularly strong in the most densely settled coastal fringes of the great island-continent, where the reconciliation of economic costs with profound environmental tensions has been protracted and stressful. The young Australian nation is itself located on the highly vulnerable fringe of global affairs – frequently disorientated by changes in the political and economic strategies of the major powers, and aggressively manipulated by transnational corporations. One of the stronger traditional concerns of ‘New World’ historical geography has been the portrayal of expansions and contractions at the edge of settlement, principally in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and its practitioners have attempted to clarify the associated changes in land use and the environmental impacts in specific regions. This book represents a departure from that tradition insofar as it is equally concerned with re-orientations within existing settlement zones, and takes the story of a young community’s environmental, social and economic transactions into the present day. Thus it offers a geographical narrative on several critical national issues. Dr Powell argues that the Australian experience is inexplicable without some probing of the creative energies expressed in a restive engagement with the evolving social milieu and an unusually demanding physical environment. That engagement has evoked some paradoxical imagery: of envied pioneers in a comparatively peaceful and beautiful land which is arguably the last of Europe’s great settlement frontiers, and of an increasingly uncertain First World society in a profoundly Third World setting. Specifications: Condition: Good. Minor scuffs to dustjacket Publisher: Cambridge University Press Year: 1988 Format: Paperback Pages: 400 ISBN: 0521256194