Conference Report: IV British World Conference, The University of Auckland, 14–16 July 2005

© 2006 The AuthorsJournal compilation © The New Zealand Geographical Society 2006.

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Geo-News

her enthusiasm for geographical study. Sheretained links with her geographer friends else-where through frequent correspondence withcontributors to the

Record

and regular parti-cipation in the Society’s conferences, whichwere inaugurated in 1955. Eileen also wentto conferences and field trips in England andEurope and took time out to travel more widelywith Eileen Fairbairn.

The New Zealand conferences became amixed blessing as their substantial

Proceedings

seemed to offer a more prestigious outlet thanthe

Record

. Branch meetings were also drawingfewer members. Eileen rose to the challengeof finding additional material, foreshadowingthe need to focus more directly on materialof interest to secondary geography teachers.She included textbook reviews, comments onchanges in the school geography curriculumand brief surveys, with coloured samples ofrecently published official map series. Sheretired from the editorship of the

Record

early

in 1969, just before her retirement from teaching.It was succeeded by the

New Zealand Journalof Geography

, the first issue being numbered

‘47’ to

emphasize its links with its predecessor.Eileen’s long and dedicated service was

recognized by her election to Honorary LifeMembership of the Society. She was the firstsecondary teacher, first woman and first per-son outside a university to receive the award.She rejoined the Canterbury Branch of theSociety and also became an active member ofthe Canterbury Botanical Society, the Geolog-ical Society and the Forest and Bird ProtectionSociety. She will be remembered for her longand dedicated service to the New ZealandGeographical Society and as a much loved andmuch respected friend and colleague.

John Macaulay

Christchurch(with thanks to Margaret Banks and Garth Cant)

621

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Geo-News

Conference Report: IV British World Conference, The University of Auckland, 14–16 July 2005

The History Department of The University ofAuckland was host to the fourth in the seriesof annual British World’s conferences pre-viously held in Melbourne, Calgary, and (in2002) Cape Town. These took root out ofan earlier conference on ‘The British Worldc.1880s

−

1950s’ hosted by the Institute of Com-monwealth Studies in London. Setting asidethe more traditional focus of the older imper-ial history on Empire, trade, and defence, theBritish World meetings have instead sought toexplore senses of British identity. The themeof the Auckland conference was ‘Broadeningthe British World’. This was reflected in the sixmajor themes for the conference: the USA as thefirst Neo-Europe, the British World in comparativefocus, culture and sport, Britishness, indigenouspeoples, and genderings and sexualitites.

The five plenary addresses covered a spectrumof topics from ‘Unmaking the British world’(Angela Woollacott, Macquarie), to expatriateNew Zealander J.G.A. Pocock (Johns Hop-kins, USA) on ‘British history and the British

world’ which fleetingly touched on his newBritish history thesis originally articulated inthe 1970s and his latest book

The Discovery ofIslands

, to Jane Sampson (Alberta, Canada)on ‘Race and empire’.

A number of themes in the conference moregenerally were of interest to historical geogra-phers. Of particular importance were the ses-sions on environmental history and the specialsession on historical geography. Environmentalhistory currently provides a point of contactbeen historians and geographers in New Zea-land. This is notably the case in the ‘Empiresof Grass’ project reported on by ProfessorTom Brooking from the University of Otago.Brooking made the point that while mucheffort has been made in exploring the removalof the forests in New Zealand comparativelylittle attention has been paid to the political,economic and ecological dimension of the grasswith which it was replaced. Robert Peden, indiscussing sheep husbandry practices from theUK that underpinned the rise of pastoralism

© 2006 The AuthorsJournal compilation © The New Zealand Geographical Society 2006.

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83

in New Zealand during the 1850s and 1860s,also provided a sustained critique of one of thethemes of historical geographer Andrew Clark’s(1949)

Invasion of New Zealand by People,Plants and Animals

. Clark, then still close tothe influence of the Berkeley school of culturalgeography, argued that Australia was the crucialhearth area for the expansion of pastoralisminto New Zealand.

The historical geography session was moreeclectic in its spread of papers. These includeda case by Graeme Wynn (British Columbia,Canada) exploring the localized features ofthe British Columbian gold rushes. In effectthis offered a contra position to the PacificRim goldfields approach offered by the NewZealand historians such as W.P. Morrell in the1940s and Phil May in the 1970s. The otherpapers in the session all dealt with New Zea-land. Gordon Winder (Auckland) offered areinterpretation of port development andimperial networks focussing on Auckland inthe early 20th century. Michael Roche (Massey)adopted a biographical approach to look at thework of colonial forester Sir David Hutchins

in New Zealand from 1915 to 1920, particu-larly the manner in which local officials andscientists resisted his forestry proposals, whileMatt Henry (Massey) from a cultural-historicalperspective disentangled the boundary issuesin the exchange between Australian and NewZealand officials as it related to the issue ofpassports in the 1920s and 1930s.

Social and cultural concerns were well rep-resented on the programme mimicking recentchanges in human geography and other socialsciences (though without any hint of GIS).The meeting provided a number of points ofengagement for historical geographers and his-torians. Perhaps to date the onus has been onthe historical geographers to make the connec-tions rather than vice versa. On the other handthe efforts of the conference organizers inproviding a special session on British Worldgeographies are to be applauded.

Michael Roche

Geography ProgrammeSchool of People, Environment and Planning

Massey University