Andrea Gaynor is Professor of History at The University of Western Australia, situated on the shores of the beautiful Swan River estuary in sunny Perth. She is primarily an environmental historian, and her research pursues various questions relating to the historical relationships between people and places in diverse Australian contexts. Her specific expertise encompasses the history of food production in Australian cities, Western Australian environmental history, agricultural history, animals in history, and the history of fish and fishing. She also enjoys teaching a first-year unit in global environmental history. Her research interests include Australia, conservation reserves, modernity, and posthumanism. Currently she is working with researchers from La Trobe University on an environmental history of the southern Mallee lands of Australia, undertaking research on the water history of Perth for the CRC for Water Sensitive Cities, and contemplating a new project on nature and modernity in Australia.
RCC Research Project: Australia’s Southern Mallee Lands and the Control of Nature
Lunchtime Colloquium Video - Entangled Histories: Nature and Modernity in Australia
Selected publications:
- "How to Eat a Wilderness: The Past and Future of the Wheatbelt." Griffith Review 47 (2015): 169–80.
- "Environmental Transformations." In The Cambridge History of Australia, edited by Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 1: 269–93.
- "State, Scientists and Citizens: Conserving Lake Magenta and Dragon Rocks, Western Australia." Historical Records of Australian Science 25, no. 2 (2014): 202–16.
- "Antipodean Eco-Nazis? The Organic Gardening and Farming Movement and Far-Right Ecology in Postwar Australia." Australian Historical Studies 43, no. 2 (2012): 253–69.
- Harvest of the Suburbs: an Environmental History of Growing Food in Australian Cities. Crawley: UWA Press, 2006.