PhD Scholar

Constructing nature in rural Australia: Environmental history of the Bogan-Macquarie region, 1901 to present.

E-mail: Cameron.Muir@anu.edu.au

My thesis is an environmental history of the Bogan-Macquarie sub-region of the Darling Riverine Plains, or roughly Dubbo to Bourke, from 1901 to the present. It combines material, cultural and political approaches to environmental history and examines local and universal knowledge systems in their wider cultural and historical context.

In 1901 the destructive impact that farming practices were having in the far west of New South Wales was officially acknowledged by a Royal Commission; since then, natural resource use in the Western Division has remained regulated under a different administrative and title arrangement to that of the rest of the state. The Bogan-Macquarie region falls across this administrative line. Selecting this area for study allows for a local environmental history that can compare diverse ecologies, perspectives and natural resource use along uncontrolled and controlled river systems, and across leasehold and freehold title frameworks. The thesis will seek a balance between local histories and the wider forces that intersect them, between contextual difference and holistic synthesis.