In 1957, Clinton Hartley Grattan, one of Australia’s most important foreign observers, wrote of the shadow of the “urban” in legends of the Australian “bush”.1 He argued that the early frontiers of Australian settlement were frontiers of men with private capital, or entrepreneurs, and those frontiers thus carried more elements of the urban tha…[Read more]

Article for The Conversation about the historic impact of status on land ownership in Australia.

The use of colour as a spatial metaphor is a familiar part of the language of urbanism: green, grey, brown and blue spaces abound in the literature, from Jane Jacobs’ attacks on the over-planning of American cities to Peter Borsay’s recent exploration of the place of nature in the history of English towns. This latter responds to a wider turn tow…[Read more]