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pointed out that while Germany had 65 professorsof Geography and Meteorology, Australia hadnone. Luckily for the establishment of Geography,the McCaughey Bequest to set up a lectureshipcame at just the right time. When Taylor left in1928 David had to act again with ‘furiouslobbying’ against a powerful move to get rid ofGeography, and retained the position by justtwo votes.

In World War I David volunteered, at age 57,and founded the Australian Tunnelling Corps.In Europe he combined with English (W.B.R.King) and later American (Douglas Johnson)geologists to develop the new discipline ofmilitary geology. He was responsible for thesimultaneous explosion of a series of 19 massivemines beneath the Messines Ridge in Belgiumin 1917. As Major-General Harington said:‘Gentlemen, we may not make history tomorrow,but we shall certainly change the geography’.This was the biggest explosion on Earth up tothat time.

With all his achievements, David is virtuallyforgotten today. Branagan discusses severalpossible explanations. His work was very diverse,and he did not have a single great success to callhis own, like Evolution or Continental Drift. Hewas hardly diffident, yet did not seek adulation.His Antarctic trip could have been written as agreat adventure (like Mawson’s

Home of theBlizzard

) but it is almost unknown. He lived inan era when Science was held up as ‘an attrac-tive pursuit of welcome appeal’, but the popularmind is no longer so thrilled by science.

With so much to say about the man, there islittle space to describe the book. It is well pro-duced, illuminated by interesting old photos andsufficient maps and diagrams, full of fascinatingdetails and beautiful to read. There are manyscholarly references, and copious end-notes.Branagan, a geologist-historian formerly atSydney University, does a brilliant job, tellingthe story straight but letting ambiguities andinconsistencies emerge which, together with theendnotes, enable you to read between the lines.

David often carried humility to an extreme,but this hid a steely resolve to get his own way.He was capable of taking the glory for the workof others, such as Priestly who wrote virtuallyall the results from the Shackleton expedition.The resentful Mawson seems to have only toler-ated David because he needed him. In returnDavid was very loyal to his friends and ex-studentswho certainly gained from his support. Not goodwith money and never particularly well off, he

was a gifted fund-raiser for expeditions. HisFunafuti drilling expedition was vastly overspent,but he persuaded the government to let him off.Despite his large number of publications, he wasnot a good finisher of large projects. Althoughhe could live on blubber and penguins in Ant-arctica, he had dietary fads. We are told he hada bent for machinery, yet he never learned todrive a car. David’s somewhat austere wife Carawas said to be a pragmatic counter to David’sromantic style. She was an ardent teetotallerwho ran campaigns for early closing of pubs,yet when David was mapping the Pokolbin winedistrict, the samples provided at each farmhouseensured that no work was done in the afternoon.She gave much of the vast amount of paperDavid left behind to the waste paper collectionof the Girl Guides. The stories of heroes likeLivingstone and Scott have been much revisedin recent years. Could the inconsistencies lead toa different biography of David? David who?

Australian geographers should all be acquaintedwith this book. It is the story of a remarkableman, a description of the foundation of geographyin Australia, and a great read.

REFERENCESGale, S.J., 1997: The beginning of University Geography in

Australia.

Australian Geographical Studies

35, 349–351.

Gale, S.J., 1998: Edgeworth David and Australian Geography.

Australian Geographical Studies

37, 73–77.

Cliff Ollier

University of Western Australia

Sustainability and Change in Rural Australia

C. Cocklin and J. Dibden (eds), University ofNew South Wales Press, Sydney, 2005, xii + 298pp, ISBN 0 86840 631 7 (paperback) A$39.95.

This book is a sequel or, more accurately, acompanion to Cocklin and Alston (eds)

Commu-nity Sustainability in Rural Australia: a Ques-tion of Capital?

(2003). Both volumes resultfrom an Australian Research Council /Academyof the Social Sciences Learned Academies Spe-cial Project in which teams from universities inall the mainland states investigated sustainabilityin the context of six rural communities. The pre-vious Cocklin and Alston volume presented thesix case studies, and the work discussed here takesa more thematic approach to rural sustainabilityand change in Australia.

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The 14 contributors are not only representativein national terms, but also of the Social Sciences.The six geographers form the largest groupamongst them, and there are also contributionsby four sociologists, an anthropologist, an eco-nomist, a historian and a social worker. While thebook addresses all aspects of sustainability, thesocial, and particularly the community, dimen-sion of this topic receives the most extensivetreatment. As several contributors rightly note,this is the aspect of sustainability which has tendedto receive least attention, certainly in policy, ifnot in academic, terms.

The somewhat slippery concepts of sustaina-bility and community are interrogated extensively,both in an overview/definitional chapter by AlanBlack and by most of the individual contributors.The term ‘rural’, however, is treated rather some-what variably. Graeme Hugo, in a chapter on thedemographic background, covers the whole ofnon-metropolitan Australia. Most contributorstend, explicitly or implicitly, to exclude remote,pastoral, peri-urban and coastal areas from theirconsideration, and Peter Smailes, Trevor Griffinand Neil Argent consider a somewhat emotivelytermed “rural heartland” in south eastern Australia(albeit one with pastoral and coastal fringes).Most of the discussion therefore focuses onAustralia’s frequently depopulating broad acrefarming regions.

In their introductory chapter, the editors revisitthe concept of ‘capitals’ (natural, human, social,institutional and produced) which provided theframework for the Learned Academies projectand which has also been adopted by many of thecontributors to this volume. Significantly theyalso remain true to the book’s title, arguing that‘sustainability does not imply stasis’ (p. 7) andpointing out that, while they and their co-authorsseek to illustrate the choices and policy optionsfor rural Australia these do not and cannotinclude the maintenance of the rural status quoin economic, social or environmental terms.

The remainder of the book is organised intothree sections. Part One contextualises theproblems facing contemporary rural Australia.Following Black’s definitional chapter, GraemeDavison presents an historical view of Australia’srural development. In this cogent presentation,he makes two salutary points which emphasisethe inherently temporal nature of sustainability.Firstly, that ‘with hindsight we may judge thatmost of the previous phases of rural developmentin Australia were founded on false hopes’ (p. 54),and secondly that the goal of sustainability is a

significant climb down from earlier growthoriented hopes for this sector. The remainingchapters, by Hugo and by Smailes

et al

., effec-tively portray the diversity and the idiosyncrasiesof non-metropolitan Australia. With referenceto demographic and to a wide range of socio-economic data, respectively, they both show that‘perceived amenity’ (p. 97) is now a criticalvariable in the success – or otherwise – of ruralcommunities.

Part Two takes a more compartmentalisedapproach to the topic. Both Geoffrey Lawrence(on agricultural production systems) andRichard Stanyer (on rural communities) focus onthe economic aspects of sustainability, with anemphasis on recent trends. Their conclusions arenot sanguine and Stanyer’s contention (p. 138)that ‘the history of the failure of primary indus-tries to create economically and socially sustain-able communities in rural Australia suggest thatthese will not be the engine of growth for ruralcommunities’ is particularly challenging. MargaretAlston’s chapters on gender and on social exclu-sion emphasise how, even in areas with limitedpopulation resources, traditional social structurescan limit the amount of ‘human capital’ availableto local communities. While Chris Cocklin’schapter has ‘natural capital’ as its starting point,it is both a skilful and an effective study of agri-cultural sustainability through its sympatheticexamination of the conflicting social, economicand environmental pressures currently facingAustralian farmers.

Part Three considers the extent to which ruralsustainability can be achieved in the current his-torical and political contexts. Matthew Tontsefficiently summarises the wide range of recentgovernment policies which have impacted onrural sustainability and correctly identifies theirtendency towards a reductionist approach andtheir resultant lack of integration. Jackie Dibdenand Lynda Cheshire chart the shift of ‘Commu-nity Development’ from an ‘empowering’ (thatis, promoting equity and inclusion) to an ‘instru-mental’ (that is, self help) role in rural commu-nities. Ian Gray contrasts the ‘determinist’ (inwhich most are ‘rooned’ by global forces)and ‘revivalist’ (in which all can be saved byindividual /community action) arguments inthe ongoing small (country) town debate, butultimately acknowledges that the ‘dependencyembodied in the metropolitan-regional relation-ship makes it difficult for small communities toensure that change really serves their interests’(p. 236).

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It is always possible to point to omissions inan edited collection. In this case, Indigenousissues receive relatively little attention, thoughthey are significant in at least one of the originalcase study areas. Furthermore, given the policyfocus of this volume, the recency of One Nation’sdemise, the large number of non-metropolitanmarginal seats at the federal level and the heatednature of the one vote one value contest in West-ern Australia, a greater focus on more narrowlydefined political/electoral issues might also havebeen expected. Conversely, there is a possiblyinevitable degree of duplication since severalcontributors provide different perspectives onwhat are essentially the same issues.

Nevertheless, one of the two main strengthsof this collection is its diversity of approaches.This is apparent not only in disciplinary termsbut also in its inclusion of the polemical as wellas the (predominantly) balanced and of the cau-tiously hopeful as well as the (predominantly)pessimistic. As indicated above, its other greatstrength is in the consistency of its main message,namely that ‘sustainability and change go handin hand’ (p. 252), a challenging proposition thatis well argued throughout.

Roy Jones

Curtin University of TechnologyAustralia

Emotional Geographies

Joyce Davidson, Liz Bondi and Mick Smith(eds), Ashgate, Aldershot (UK), 2005, xiii +258pp, ISBN 0 7546 4375 1 (hardback) £45.

The postmodern turn in academic enquiry hasthrown up a number of new perspectives for thesocial sciences (for example, Harvey, 1989; Soja,1989; Sandercock, 1998; Flyvberg, 2001) andthis book is no exception. Like many other areasof emerging academic endeavour this collectioncan be characterised by collaboration acrosstraditional disciplinary boundaries, qualitativeapproaches to analysis, personalised accounts(stories) and a (sometimes) tortuous engagementwith diverse theoretical perspectives.

Emotional Geographies is a collection of con-tributions dominated by UK academics but alsoincluding authors from Canada and Australia.Perhaps not surprisingly they are drawn from awide range of disciplines including geography,sociology, philosophy, health and psychology.As the editors note ‘… emotions slip through

and between disciplinary borders’ (p. 2). Thebridge to geography is of course a spatial one oras the editors put it: ‘an emotional geography …attempts to understand emotion – experientiallyand conceptually – in terms of its socio

spatial

mediation and articulation ...’ (p. 3).This approach gives the authors considerable

license and the substantive content of the chaptersincludes a rich mixture of subjects: aging, grief,illness, travel, death, recreation, memory and eventouch. There is something for everyone here.While the theoretical skirmishes are a bit densemost chapters evolve into discursive analyses thatare for the most part insightful and interesting. Theapproach and style is almost journalistic: a limitednumber of in-depth interviews; selective quotingof subjects; and, over generalised conclusions.

The book is divided into three sectionsentitled Locating Emotion, Relating Emotion andRepresenting Emotion. The distinction betweenthe three categories is not always obvious to thereader. Locating emotions covers the ‘intercon-nected location of emotions in people and places’(p. 5). There are interesting contributions on thepowerful emotions surrounding grief and deathand their relationship and projection into sur-rounding spaces and places. On a more cheerfulnote the emotional attachment or detachmentthat Western travellers feel when confronted byMacDonald’s golden arches in exotic and faraway places is almost humorous. Guilt plays animportant role in this story.

Relating Emotion ‘explores the emotionalrelations between people and environments atdifferent scales and in diverse contexts’ (p. 8).The scales in question range from regions (theScottish Highlands) through domestic spaces(aged persons’ housing) to the individual humanbody. While the impact or relevance of some ofthe research may be questioned this is not todeny its authenticity and integrity. The potentialcontribution of this emergent field of enquiryis clearly evident in the chapter entitled ‘TheGeographies of “Going Out”: Emotion andEmbodiment in the Evening Economy’. In thischapter the emotional terrain of evening recrea-tion is carefully explored and cleverly related tothe broader planning policy agendas relating tocity centre renaissance in UK towns. In this casethe choices between ‘out of town’ and ‘downtown’ entertainment venues are explored againstthe background of the comparative emotions(fear, security, excitement, anxiety, etc.) gener-ated in individuals at different entertainmentplaces. It is a good example of where this