Wastewand to world heritage : preserving Australia's wilderness
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Wastewand to world heritage : preserving Australia's wilderness
Melbourne University Press, 1992
Available at 1 libraries
Note
Bibliography: p. 252-278
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Once, wilderness was seen as waste or worthless land. Today, Australians are coming to value their threatened natural heritage, and are forcing government to play an active role in protecting it. Demands for wilderness preservation are not new. National parks were established widely at the turn of the century, and the bushwalking movement of the 1930s helped teach a generation to appreciate the "wild places". But not until the 1960s, when the modern conservation movement emerged, did the wider community find its voice. Celebrated controversies raged: Lake Pedder, the Franklin Dam, the Daintree rainforest, Kakadu. This work provides a history of wilderness preservation in Australia. It traces the shift in responsibility for wilderness preservation from local authorities to state governments, and from these to federal government and international bodies. It scrutinises the performance of state governments and describes how successive Commonwealth governments have responded to calls to use their well-defined powers to create a national system of preservation. It tells the story of a long campaign which is changing the face of Australia.
Table of Contents
- The challenge of wilderness
- The value of the wilderness resource
- Romantic visions and national monuments - the wilderness concept in 19th-century Australia
- Bushwalkers, national parks and the vision splendid
- The politics of preservation - from Little Desert to Franklin
- From concern to obligation - international agreements and the powers of the Commonwealth
- Regimes of control - The World Heritage Convention in Australia
- The geography of hope - a National Wilderness Preservation System
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