Associate Professor Nancy Cushing

The recent actions taken against statues of figures associated with colonisation and racial oppression have again drawn attention to the enduring power of monuments in the landscape, even after many have disavowed the values they embody. This article shifts the critique from a focus on race to climate, with an examination of the Jubilee or Coal Monument erected in Newcastle, New South Wales in 1909. This monument was designed with the intention of celebrating coal as the foundation of the city's prosperity and a driver of modernity. In the midst of a climate crisis, its future warrants consideration. Taking an activist stance, it is argued that the monument should be removed to a museum for reframing and reinterpretation while in its place a counter-monument to coal, defined by James E. Young as a 'memorial space conceived to challenge the very premise of the monument', is erected. This counter-monument would serve as a transitional location for expressions of pride in past personal and corporate associations with the coal industry and grief at its passing, while avoiding the creation of an enduring monument which would inevitably become the target of future generations for whom coal will have very different meanings.

Food miles is a concept developed in the 1990s as a critique of the negative social and environmental consequences of transporting foods over very long distances. While intended to draw attention to a contemporary problem, the movement of food has a long history to which the concept of food miles can be usefully applied. Drawing upon government correspondence, statistics and personal journals, this article investigates the significance of food miles in establishing the colony of New South Wales, Australia, between 1788 and 1800, with a particular emphasis on sugar. While the some of the issues noted at the end of the twentieth century were present, other factors, such as the high costs of transport, associated waste, and food security were of greater concern to those provisioning the colony and led them to seek to reduce food miles by purchasing supplies in the region. However, other priorities, including preferences for familiar foods and for restricting trade to within the British Empire, created a countervailing pressure which kept food miles very high throughout the period under consideration. This study shows that long before the terminology was coined, food miles played a role in decision making around food supplies and invites the application of the concept to other historical periods.

Live animal export has a long history but it is rarely considered in the vigorous contemporary debates surrounding the practice. This article explores the origins, extent and nature of the trade in livestock, primarily sheep and cattle, conducted out of Britain's first Australian colony, New South Wales, between 1788 and 1880. Drawing upon contemporary accounts and official statistics related to the trade, it contributes to the literature on human¿animal relations by exploring the experience of animals during live export and the effect of the trade on attitudes to meat consumption. By subjecting animals to long sea voyages for the purposes of breeding or consumption, live export in the colonial period laid the groundwork for the commodification of animals used for food and the industrialisation of meat production in the twentieth century.

Australian native, nonhuman animals at first intrigued and then disappointed newcomers as Australia was colonized by the British in the late eighteenth century. They were disparaged as unproductive and unpalatable oddities, killed as competitors to introduced species, or harvested as a source of fur and feathers for export. Focusing on the period 1803 to 1939, this paper examines one exception to this general pattern: the keeping of native animals as "pets." Contemporary newspaper articles and advertisements are drawn upon to demonstrate that the Australian native fauna kept as pets were highly valued both emotionally by their "owners" and economically in the commercial trade and the courts. This valuation had few direct benefits to species overall because it remained focused on individual pets and was not shared with free-living animals, but it did keep alive an interest in native animals that greatly expanded in the mid-twentieth century.