Pastoral Australia tells the story of the expansion of Australia's pastoral industry, how it drove European settlement and involved Aboriginal people in the new settler society. The rural life that once saw Australia 'ride on the sheep's back' is no longer what defines us, yet it is largely our history as a pastoral nation that has endured in heritage places and which is embedded in our self-image as Australians. The challenges of sustaining a pastoral industry in Australia make a compelling story of their own. Developing livestock breeds able to prosper in the Australian environment was an ongoing challenge, as was getting wool and meat to market. Many stock routes, wool stores, abattoirs, wharf facilities, railways, roads, and river and ocean transport systems that were developed to link the pastoral interior with the urban and market infrastructure still survive. Windmills, fences, homesteads, shearing sheds, bores, stock yards, travelling stock routes, bush roads and railheads all changed the look of the country. These features of our landscape form an important part of our heritage. They are symbols of a pastoral Australia, and of the foundations of our national identity, which will endure long into the future.

In any settler and/or postcolonial society, heritage is a complex and contested topic that involves indigenous, imperial and other migrant components. In Australia, this situation is compounded by the unique characteristics of the country's natural environment, the considerable diversity of its migrant intake and the demographic and technological imbalances between its indigenous and settler populations. This volume brings together internationally recognized academics and emerging scholars, whose expertise extends through the areas of tourism, planning, heritage management, environmental studies and state and local government. Through a representative set of case studies from across the country's states and capital cities, the contributors demonstrate the range and diversity of heritage issues currently confronting Australia, and consider possible ways of resolving these.

65,000 years ago, modern humans arrived in Australia, having navigated more than 100 km of sea crossing from southeast Asia. Since then, the large continental islands of Australia and New Guinea, together with smaller islands in between, have been connected by land bridges and severed again as sea levels fell and rose. Along with these fluctuations came changes in the terrestrial and marine environments of both land masses. The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Indigenous Australia and New Guinea reviews and assembles the latest findings and ideas on the archaeology of the Australia-New Guinea region, the world's largest island-continent. In 42 new chapters written by 77 contributors, it presents and explores the archaeological evidence to weave stories of colonisation; megafaunal extinctions; Indigenous architecture; long-distance interactions, sometimes across the seas; eel-based aquaculture and the development of techniques for the mass-trapping of fish; occupation of the High Country, deserts, tropical swamplands and other, diverse land and waterscapes; and rock art and symbolic behaviour. Together with established researchers, a new generation of archaeologists present in this Handbook one, authoritative text where Australia-New Guinea archaeology now lies and where it is heading, promising to shape future directions for years to come.

Australia has a fascinating history of visions. As the antipode to Europe, the continent provided a radically different and uniquely fertile ground for envisioning places, spaces and societies. Australia as the Antipodal Utopia evaluates this complex intellectual history by mapping out how Western visions of Australia evolved from antiquity to the modern period. It argues that because of its antipodal relationship with Europe, Australia is imagined as a particular form of utopia – but since one person’s utopia is, more often than not, another’s dystopia, Australia’s utopian quality is both complex and highly ambiguous. Drawing on the rich field of utopian studies, Australia as the Antipodal Utopia provides an original and insightful study of Australia’s place in the Western imagination.

Featuring contributions from leading lawyers, historians and social scientists, this path-breaking volume explores encounters of laws, people, and places in Australia since 1788. Its chapters address three major themes: the development of Australian settler law in the shadow of the British Empire; the interaction between settler law and First Nations people; and the possibility of meaningful encounter between First laws and settler legal regimes in Australia. Several chapters explore the limited space provided by Australian settler law for respectful encounters, particularly in light of the High Court's particular concerns about the fragility of Australian sovereignty. Tracing the development of a uniquely Australian law and the various contexts that shaped it, this volume is concerned with the complexity, plurality, and ambiguity of Australia's legal history.

'Travelling Home' provides a detailed analysis of the contribution that the mid twentieth-century 'Walkabout' magazine made to Australia’s cultural history. Spanning five central decades of the twentieth century (1934-1974), 'Walkabout' was integral to Australia’s sense of itself as a nation. By advocating travel—both vicarious and actual—'Walkabout' encouraged settler Australians to broaden their image of the nation and its place in the Pacific region. In this way, 'Walkabout' explicitly aimed to make its readers feel at home in their country, as well as including a diverse picture of Aboriginal and Pacific cultures. Given its wide availability and distribution, together with its accessible and entertaining content, 'Walkabout' changed how Australia was perceived, and the magazine is recalled with nostalgic fondness by most if not all of its former readers. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship, 'Travelling Home' engages with key questions in literary, cultural, and Australian studies about national identity and modernity. The book’s diverse topics demonstrate how 'Walkabout' canvassed subtle and shifting fields of representation; as a result, this analysis produces complex and nuanced readings of Australian literary and cultural history.

Northern Australia: The Arenas of Life and Ecosystems on Half a Continent provides a geographical study of the interplay of environmental challenge and human endeavor in the vast arena of Northern Australia. This book is organized into three parts. Part A presents the contextual setting for Parts B and C. It includes a historical geographer's perspective on the ecological impact of 200 years of European settlement; a description of the use of satellite imagery; and discussion of some of the interactions among natural subsystems as they impinge on human activities (especially in the extensive rangelands). Part B discusses some of the human ecosystems which extend over a very large geographical territory. In these ecosystems the human population is small in terms of absolute number and relative to the population of other living things. These include the tropical marine ecosystems and their growing utilization for mariculture; and rangeland ecosytems dominated by cattle and the overlapping semi-arid grasslands. Part C discusses intensive ecosystems, where the human population is dominant in number.