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This paper explores the nexus of historical geography and heritage studies, using the case study of the Sovereign Hill outdoor museum in Ballarat, Australia. It reports on the application of more-thanrepresentational thinking to spaces of heritage, and advances the argument that Sovereign Hill can be usefully understood as a semiotic landscape animated by the making, knowing and recreation of the past, replete with both designed and incidental affective resonances and emotional affordances. The research upon which the paper is based aimed to capture the essences of encounters, engagements and moments of emergent meaning within a site that speaks to both an historic and newly made heritage. Key to this exploration were the energies, realities and responses of actual bodies as they moved around and interpreted the various ways in which Sovereign Hill presents the past to its visiting audiences. Methodologically, the paper draws from a series of qualitative visitor interviews gathered in 2014. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the newspaper press was the leading public forum in the protracted debate over the supposed climatological effects of forests. Journalists acted as key intermediaries in the dispute between parliament, science and the public. The press was also a powerful pressure group in its own right. Newspaper reports contextualised the forest influence issue by linking it to three interrelated concerns: the cause of climate variability and change, the environmental impact of humans, and the need for forest conservation. This paper examines the role of the Australasian press in the debate along with the changing nature of the arguments and some aspects of its historical geography. Results are summarised from a systematic longitudinal survey that analysed over 1400 articles relevant to the forest influence debate published in 141 Australian and New Zealand newspapers between the years 1827 and 1956. The study concludes that the press was instrumental in politicising all sides of the debate and later in perpetuating it in popular culture long after both governments and institutional science had dismissed the idea that humans could alter climates by manipulating forests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Small resource-dependent towns are particularly vulnerable to economic decline as they often have limited internal capacity to develop alternative economic functions. This paper presents the story of the development, decline and adaptation of a small resource-dependent town. Recognising that the processes informing the development trajectories of resource communities are diverse, temporally embedded and multi-scalar, this paper argues that the everyday activities of the residents inform the life of resource towns, and, moreover, lives within these places. The paper presents the story of Wundowie--Western Australia's first iron ore town. This is interwoven with the story of the Kowalski family--a migrant family whose history, typical of many of the town's original residents, made the town. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusess topics within the issue including historical geographies in Australia; environmental change, and rural transformation.

This paper argues that the historical geographies of Toronto's Church and Wellesley Street district and Sydney's Oxford Street gay villages are important in understanding the contemporary transformations currently ongoing in both locations. LGBT and queer communities as well as mainstream interests argue that these gay villages are in some form of "decline" for various social, political, and economic reasons. Given their similar histories and geographies, our analysis considers how these historical geographies have both enabled and constrained how the respective gay villages respond to these challenges while opening up particular possibilities for alternative (and relational) geographies. While there are a number of ways to consider these historical geographies, we focus on three factors for analysis--post World War II planning policies, the emergence of "city of neighborhoods" discourses, and the positioning of gay villages within neoliberal processes of commodification and consumerism. We conclude that these distinctive historical geographies offer a cogent set of understandings by providing suggestive explanations for how Toronto's and Sydney's gendered and sexual landscapes are being reorganized in distinctive ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers in formation on the historical and cultural relationships between Australia and other Pacific islands. Topics include relationship between image of the Mediterranean Sea and association with Australian cultural history, relationships and links between, Australian artists and the Mediterranean islands and geophysical boundedness.

This article takes the subject of the rise of racial discourse in the 19th century as a focus for extending critical race theory (CRT) in Cultural and Historical Geography. It pursues a critique beyond the familiar claim of race's legitimatory function to elicit the fundamentally unstable and crisis-ridden origins of innatist thought. Crucially, this requires a situated account - one that emphasizes the singular challenge that Australian colonial encounters aroused in Enlightenment notions of human unity and development. Far from confirming European views of 'savage' others, it argues that nature/native encounters on that continent precipitated a crisis in existing ideas - all the more contentious to today - of what it meant to be human. And, in emphasizing the palpably material sense in which Australia problematized European classificatory schema, the article opens one pathway from representational to 'more than representational' accounts in Cultural Geography. It also offers a potentially transformative understanding of the violence of humanism, in relation to both human and nonhuman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports on the importance of environmental issues and the comparative immaturity of historical geography in Australia. Recognition of competing claims grounded in aesthetic, scientific and vernacular conceptualizations; Tension between academic calling and requirements of global and national citizenship; Premium on core interests in resource appraisal and environmental management.

The article focuses on the contribution and achievements of professor Joseph Michael Powell in the field of geography in Australia. It states that Powell, who is a past president of the Institute of Australian Geographers, has written several books, and his articles have been published in several academic journals. His works emphasized the historical geography and focused on the understanding of the role of geography and geographers in Australian life. His several works on geographer Griffith Taylor represent his interest in the relationship between geography, identity and nationhood, as well as the relevance of debates on environmental limits to national development.

The article offers the views of several authors in response to David J. Ward's doubts related to the reconstructions of grasstree fire history in south-western vegetation propounded by N.J. Enright, B.B. Lamont and B.P. Miller. It is extremely difficult to explain the number of resprouter species present in the Australian landscape. The authors in the article presented various reasons and conclusions to validate the restructuring of the fire history.

The article presents the author's views related to the paper "Anomalies in grasstree fire history reconstructions for south-western Australian vegetation," by N.J. Enright, B.B. Lamont and B.P. Miller. The author in the article does not agree with several conclusions provided by the authors in the paper. Several suggestions related to the paper are presented. Several doubts related to the paper are discussed including the relevance of the application of the fire frequency.