AustLit

'Australia and other settler colonies need to address complex problems in unpacking historical divides between culture and nature, humans and non-humans, arts and science, tradition and modernity, and male and female, even conscious and unconscious anthropogenic agents. These divides are thrown into especially stark relief in Australia, as one of the last formed settler colonies, with its dual cultures. Differences in approaches to the environment could hardly have been greater. On the one hand is the history of adaptation (and maladaptation) to rapid changes in the environment of its European settlers, both on the individual level through the shocks of rupture and disconnection through the experience of migration, and on the wider community level with the loss of biodiversity, through both introduction of European species and species extinction, of planting of commercial timber and de-forestation of old growth forests.' (56)