True Gardens of the Gods: Californian-Australian Environmental Reform, 1860–1930

by Ian Tyrrell

One of the most critical environmental challenges facing both Californians and Australians in the 1860s involved the aftermath of the gold rushes. Settlers on both continents faced the disruptive impacts of mining, grazing, and agriculture; in response to these challenges, environmental reformers attempted to remake the natural environment into an idealized garden landscape. As this cutting-edge history shows, an important result of this nineteenth-century effort to "renovate" nature was a far-reaching exchange of ideas between the United States―especially in California―and Australia. Ian Tyrrell demonstrates how Californians and Australians shared plants, insects, personnel, technology, and dreams, creating a system of environmental exchange that transcended national and natural boundaries. True Gardens of the Gods traces a new nineteenth-century environmental sensibility that emerged from the collision of European expansion with these frontier environments.

Tyrrell traces historical ideas and personalities, provides in-depth discussions of introduced plants species (such as the eucalyptus and Monterey Pine), looks at a number of scientific programs of the time, and measures the impact of race, class, and gender on environmental policy. The book represents a new trend toward studying American history from a transnational perspective, focusing especially on a comparison of American history with the history of similar settler societies. Through the use of original research and an innovative methodology, this book offers a new look at the history of environmentalism on a regional and global scale.

Genres: Environment

327 pages, Hardcover

First published February 13, 1999

About the author

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Ian Tyrrell retired as Scientia Professor of History at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia in July 2012 and is now an Emeritus Professor of History. Born in Brisbane, Queensland, he was educated at the University of Queensland and Duke University, where he was a Fulbright Scholar and James B. Duke Fellow. His teaching and research interests include American history, environmental history, and historiography.

He was a pioneer in the approach to transnational history as a research program for reconceptualizing United States history through his essay “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History” in the American Historical Review in 1991; and in Woman’s World/Woman’s Empire: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective (University of North Carolina Press, 1991), which dealt with the issues of gender and empire in that leading nineteenth-century women’s international organization.