On 90 years of Australian Geographer, and beyond

This issue of Australian Geographer marks the journal's 90th anniversary. It comes at a time of great change, reflection, and possibility—for geography, and for the earth.

Over the past nine decades, ideas and methods in geography have evolved considerably. The very first issue of Australian Geographer, published in August 1928, might be considered an antiquity of the prevailing colonial imaginary. In their inaugural editorial, Stead and Taylor (1928, 3–4) positioned the journal, and the newly formed Geographical Society of New South Wales, as an essential platform for ‘nation-planning’:

In a relatively new land like Australia, there is … a very large amount of purely descriptive work to be done before the more scientific correlations can be deduced—and here is an enormous field for valuable work … Our studies in Geography are all the more necessary, because Australia, a nation almost wholly British in origin, is settling a land which in no respect resembles the homeland; and, indeed, for the most part, has an environment not paralleled in any part of Europe.

In an age before television, jet aircraft or widespread sealed roads, many of the articles in that first issue simply described parts of Australia and its near-Pacific neighbours unfamiliar to the outside world: ‘Physiographic notes on some of the British Solomon Islands’ and ‘The wonderland of North-West Australia’. In ‘The area between Coalcliff and Clifton, NSW’, theory and processes of landscape evolution were considered, while shorter commentaries opined on ‘Some aspects of the aboriginal [sic] problem in Australia’, and ‘The world's food supply: is it likely to prove inadequate?’

Since then, geographers have confronted and critiqued the discipline's colonial origins. Nevertheless, as Libby Porter argues in her Thinking Space essay in this issue, colonial thinking still resonates throughout much of the research conducted by geographers (and others) in Australia. Her call is to urban geographers, especially, to acknowledge and think through the ramifications of Indigenous Country for scholarship on our cities. Ninety years on, the task of decolonisng academic geography in Australia continues.

Geography has also become more internally diverse in the last nine decades. Geographical research covers a multitude of specialisms, and at the same time is more outward looking in its connections to allied fields and collaborators. Geographers continue to work on familiar themes such as land use, natural resource management, and population, but are now equally likely to connect with critical theory, computing, or geochemistry. In this anniversary issue are research papers across the spectrum of the discipline, providing a sense of its mature diversity. Gordon Waitt examines domestic water use among Burmese refugees and migrants in Australia, offering a provocation to rethink water scarcity and mains provision through a cultural lens. From physical geography, Stephen Gale and colleagues analyse rock stratigraphy and late Quaternary environmental conditions in the Botany Basin, challenging accepted assumptions and terminology. Rosabella Borsellino and colleagues discuss the latest developments in trace-tracking using GPS-enabled smartphone apps, and their potential application to a range of geographic research fields.

Meanwhile, the world at large has grown more unstable, haunted by the spectre of catastrophic climate change, while grappling with unparalleled mobilities, new social media and artificial intelligence technologies, and economic and geopolitical uncertainty. Geographers have much to contribute to human knowledge on such intertwined issues. At the same time, the higher education sector in Australia now compels academics to account for the impact of their research in increasingly instrumentalist fashion (Crabtree 2017). How will geographers respond to the unfolding task of making sense of rapid, complex change, while also demonstrating to government and other funding bodies the tangible impact of their research? With such sentiment, Carol Farbotko's Thinking Space essay issues a call to arms for geographers of all stripes to contribute to an urgent national debate about climate change and security, lest the issue be dominated by a narrower range of voices.

In this regard, we also have much to learn from those in the discipline with extensive experience in policy, public debate and science communication, as well as from other geographers of influence before them. A distinctive contribution to this 90th anniversary edition comes from Bruce Thom, former Vice Chancellor of the University of New England, and Emeritus Professor in the very same Department of Geography (Sydney) from which the first issue of Australian Geographer emanated in 1928. In this piece, Thom reflects on a career filled with high-level influence on policy (as a founding member of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, Founding Chair of the Australian Coastal Society, and Chair of the National State of Environment Committee), as well as the legacies of three historical ‘sentinels’ in the discipline whose often controversial work sought to shape decision making regarding the environment, resource use and planning.

Thom's account, urgent and yet also tinged with pathos, laments the pressures on younger academics to publish, win grants and be cited (or perish). As he argues, ‘Retreating into the narrow world of metrics on citations and grant funds as a measure of “success” should not simply be the world we aspire to.’ Instead, Thom urges readers to learn from the mistakes and achievements of past geographers: dive into policy dialogues; agree to advisory roles; take risks in speaking out; and contribute to important debates in public, even if pathways to impact are not obvious or transparent. Geographers must move beyond gathering facts and developing theories, acting as sentinels ‘responsibly raising the alarm to governments and others about their work’. The task to ‘prove’ impact in a narrow, measurable sense will be difficult, but there is real strength in geography, in its connections to the earth, to people, and to Country. Ninety years on from Australian Geographer's first issue, the discipline does not readily adhere to a single, unified ‘core’. This diversity is a strength, as is the discipline's aspiration towards critical relevance. Both bode well for engaged scholarship in uncertain times.