Guest editorial: Historical geographies down under

This special issue appears as Australian Geographer celebrates its 90th year of publication. The sub-disciplinary field of historical geography is an apt focus, forming a bridge between the discipline’s rich and varied past, and its burgeoning future. The twelve contributions to this special issue not only demonstrate the vitality of Australian historical geography but also underline its significance and value for geographical thinking and our understanding of contemporary society and space.

Investigations ‘of the lines of influence and connection which bind … together’ the disciplines of history and geography (Ogborn 1999, 97) are not new; nevertheless, the development of historical geography, as a defined sub-discipline of geography in the anglophone world, has been attributed to the fairly recent work of Henry Clifford Darby. Between the 1930s and 1960s, Darby led British scholars in the establishment of ‘a new historical geography, distinct from history but sharing with it a broad borderland without clear boundaries’ (Coppock 2002, xv). In Darby’s view, historical geography was one of the two ‘pillars’ of geography (the other being geomorphology) as ‘[a]ll geography is historical geography, either actual or potential’ (1953, 6). Darby’s version of historical geography, which focused on cartography and its use in the investigation of landscape change, gradually spread to other areas of the English-speaking world, such as Australia and New Zealand. In the USA, meanwhile, Carl Sauer, of the Berkeley School, was developing a distinct brand of North American historical geography that drew from the German Landschaft tradition and thus took on a much more ‘cultural’ approach to investigations of geographies of the past (Heffernan 2009, 333).

The quantitative revolution of the 1950s and 1960s left little room for investigating ‘the history behind geography’ (per Darby 1953, 6). However, under the guidance of Darby and Sauer, the number of scholars engaging with historical geography in the West proliferated (including Andrew Clark, Fred Kniffen, Alan Baker, Robin Butlin and Donald Meinig), such that in 1975 the British–Canadian Symposium on Historical Geography (later the International Conference of Historical Geographers) was born, as was the Journal of Historical Geography (Baker 2016; Schein 2001). By the 1980s, following the development of humanistic geography, calls were made to ‘bring history back in’ to the study of human geography (Driver 1988, 497). Since then, geographers such as Jeanne Kay, Mona Domosh, Karen Morin, Lawrence Berg, Gillian Rose, Miles Ogborn and Felix Driver have utilised poststructural, feminist and postcolonial perspectives to draw particular attention to issues of power in the practice of historical geography and in the practices of geography in the past. This includes methodological concerns about using the archives, the links between colonialism, empire building and the history of geography, and the andro- and ethno-centric nature of the historical geography tradition.

With increasing engagements with larger debates in the social sciences, the past 20–30 years have been termed the ‘phase of eclecticism’ as definitions and approaches to historical geography continue to be varied, contested and nuanced (Clayton 2000, 338; Heffernan 1997; Morin and Berg 1999; Schein 2001). Recent research in the sub-discipline has focused on a plethora of topics including environmental histories (often intersecting with political histories of Europe’s settler colonies), questions of empire (such as representations of people, places and landscapes in imperial projects and the ‘rediscovery’ of geography’s imperial past), social and cultural histories that seek ‘to understand the social or cultural construction of spaces, knowledges and powers’ (Ogborn 1999, 103), and memory and heritage, that is, ‘the shaping of particular sites and specific spaces through individual and collective memories’ (Ogborn 1999, 104).

In a 1970 review of Australian historical geography, Michael Williams argued that the nation’s size and political framework produced significant disciplinary challenges (Williams 1970). Australian historical geographies can generally be classified under four key themes, we suggest, with work since Williams’ review reflecting both an increasing spatial reach and greater acknowledgement of diverse experiences and cultures. A major interest has been environmental change, including the impacts of British colonisation on the landscape (Jeans 1978; Powell 1991; 1996). Second, geographers have drawn on historical data to examine regional development and rural livelihoods (Jeans 1967; Yarwood, Tonts, and Jones 2010) and, third, the historical processes through which Australian cities and suburbs have been constituted (Aplin 1982; Teather 1990). More recently, feminist, labour and postcolonial research has driven an increasing interest in gender, work and race (Fincher 1997; Kamp 2013; McKewon 2003; Skilton 2017). Powerful mythologies defining Australia as a rural nation forged by white male settlers are thus resisted through acknowledgement of Indigenous and migrant histories and the defining role of gender, race and class in the making of the nation and specific sites therein.

This special issue engages with and further contributes to these interests of historical geographies in Australia and globally. We identify six themes across the contributions, with many articles speaking to multiple themes. Two themes build on key topics in Australian historical geographies: environmental change (Gibson and Warren; Griggs; Legg) and rural transformation (Darian-Smith and Nichols; Davies and Oliver; Woods). Two further themes extend feminist and postcolonial work, addressing historical geographies of Chinese communities (Anderson; Kamp; Woods) and gender, sexuality and space (Brickell, Gorman-Murray, and de Jong; Kamp; McKinnon). Fifth, the contributions elicit historical geographies of housing and home (Dufty-Jones; Kamp). Finally, the special issue also highlights important work in heritage studies, a field at the intersection of history and historical geography (Darian-Smith and Nichols; Gibson and Warren; Waterton).

By drawing connections between geographies of the past and their relations with the present, historical geographers in Australia and beyond keenly argue the ‘presentist’ characteristics of historical geography research and thus advocate its relevance and utility (see Clayton 2000; Schein 2001). Morin and Berg (1999, 313), for example, have argued that ‘geographies of the past are concerned with the present, even if they do not explicitly narrate a contemporary situation. Histories are almost always “presentist”; they narrate the past in order to provide some understanding of the present.’ Moreover, in making connections between the past and present, historical geographers not only reinstate the sub-discipline as central to the study of geography more broadly (as it was considered to be between the 1930s and 1960s—see Clayton 2000) but also provide important contributions to the wider social sciences and humanities (Schein 2001). We hope this special issue helps advance the relevance of historical geography research for addressing contemporary social and spatial issues in Australia and beyond.