Forests of Ash: An Environmental History

by Tom Griffiths

This beautifully-written book tells the story of Australia's giant eucalypt, the Mountain Ash, which grows in the region north and east of Melbourne. Visited seasonally by indigenous people and later a site of mining and sawmilling for settlers, as well as contested ground for conservationists, the life cycles and fire cycles of the forests span millennia. Tom Griffiths tells the environmental, ecological and social history of a unique Australian forest, and in doing so, tells the story of the continent as a whole.

Genres: History

Hardcover

First published December 18, 2001

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Tom Griffiths is a professor of history in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University–Canberra. He is the author of Forests of Ash: An Environmental History, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia, and Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica.

Reviews

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's a lot more you could go into in the history of Victoria's Central Highlands tall forests, particularly the politics of vested interests behind the last few decades of battles over logging, an increasingly desperate politics since the 2009 Black Saturday fires. But this book was written well before that, and the conservationists vs loggers battles were not yet so intense in the Central Highlands when it was written, as I recall. What it does cover, it does so beautifully.

Despite having read a fair bit about these forests before, I didn't understand the subtleties of their ecology described in the section on David Lindenmayer's work. Nor did I know the brutal history of betrayals that the Indigenous community suffered as they were shunted from one backwoods block to another. History that deserves to be told to a wider audience.