From the eve of the Eureka insurrection to the beginnings of depression, this work charts the creation of a civilization, but it is also as much about the symbolism of place, the politics of streetscapes, the social economy of house-plots, their gardens, the everyday artifacts that make a home, in a sense of duration - time - that gives an ephemeral existence a history. It is about the ideas that permeate a culture; thoughts half conceived, or formed but not acknowledged; it is about the history assumed and consumed, about avarice and endeavour, kindness and cruelty; about the claimed gods and those rejected, and is therefore about a spiritual domain and the nature of rationality: as much about the metaphysics, then, as of the non-too-solid earth under the feet and above the heads of those who lived on a 19th Century goldfield.

A collection of essays on mining and economic development in California from the Gold Rush through the end of the 19th century. This is the second in a series of four volumes comemmorating the state's sesquicentennial.

Scars in the Landscape is a register of massacres and killings of Aboriginal people during 1803OCo1859. Deliberately challenging the ideology that the colonisation of Western Victoria was peaceful, the register reveal that violence was widespread. Through searching contemporary archival material, utilising Aboriginal oral history and local histories, and by studying place names in the region, Ian Clark presents a detailed, meticulously research study of massacres on one Australian region."

The river red gum has the most widespread natural distribution of Eucalyptus in Australia, forming extensive forests and woodlands in south-eastern Australia and providing the structural and functional elements of important floodplain and wetland ecosystems. Along ephemeral creeks in the arid Centre it exists as narrow corridors, providing vital refugia for biodiversity. The tree has played a central role in the tension between economy, society and environment and has been the subject of enquiries over its conservation, use and management. Despite this, we know remarkably little about the ecology and life history of the river red gum: its longevity; how deep its roots go; what proportion of its seedlings survive to adulthood; and the diversity of organisms associated with it. More recently we have begun to move from a culture of exploitation of river red gum forests and woodlands to one of conservation and sustainable use. In Flooded Forest and Desert Creek, the author traces this shift through the rise of a collective environmental consciousness, in part articulated through the depiction of river red gums and inland floodplains in art, literature and the media.

This volume provides an important new synthesis of archaeological work carried out in Australia on the post-contact period. It draws on dozens of case studies from a wide geographical and temporal span to explore the daily life of Australians in settings such as convict stations, goldfields, whalers' camps, farms, pastoral estates and urban neighbourhoods. The different conditions experienced by various groups of people are described in detail, including rich and poor, convicts and their superiors, Aboriginal people, women, children, and migrant groups. The social themes of gender, class, ethnicity, status and identity inform every chapter, demonstrating that these are vital parts of human experience, and cannot be separated from archaeologies of industry, urbanization and culture contact. The book engages with a wide range of contemporary discussions and debates within Australian history and the international discipline of historical archaeology. The colonization of Australia was part of the international expansion of European hegemony in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The material discussed here is thus fundamentally part of the global processes of colonization and the creation of settler societies, the industrial revolution, the development of mass consumer culture, and the emergence of national identities. Drawing out these themes and integrating them with the analysis of archaeological materials highlights the vital relevance of archaeology in modern society.

The entire Australian continent was once covered with networks of Indigenous placenames. These names often evoke important information about features of the environment and their place in Indigenous systems of knowledge. On the other hand, placenames assigned by European settlers and officials are largely arbitrary, except for occasional descriptive labels such as 'river, lake, mountain'. They typically commemorate people, or unrelated places in the Northern hemisphere. In areas where Indigenous societies remain relatively intact, thousands of Indigenous placenames are used, but have no official recognition. Little is known about principles of forming and bestowing Indigenous placenames. Still less is known about any variation in principles of placename bestowal found in different Indigenous groups. While many Indigenous placenames have been taken into the official placename system, they are often given to different features from those to which they originally applied. In the process, they have been cut off from any understanding of their original meanings. Attempts are now being made to ensure that additions of Indigenous placenames to the system of official placenames more accurately reflect the traditions they come from. The eighteen chapters in this book range across all of these issues. The contributors (linguistics, historians and anthropologists) bring a wide range of different experiences, both academic and practical, to their contributions. The book promises to be a standard reference work on Indigenous placenames in Australia for many years to come.