77. Cities In A Sunburnt Country

City Road Podcast

This new book considers how Australians have provided water and sewerage for growing, sprawling urban centres. In this land of drought and flooding rains, we may need to rethink water use strategies, including embracing centuries of Aboriginal knowledge, seeing water as a resource to be conserved, rather than wasted or exploited. Panel Dr. Margaret Cook is an environmental historian who specialises in the history of ‘natural’ disasters in Australia, especially floods. The history of floods in the Brisbane River catchment was the subject of her PhD (UQ 2018) and is now a book, A River with a City Problem: A History of Brisbane Floods (UQ Press, 2019). Lionel Frost is an associate professor in the Department of Economics, and Head of the Monash Business School (Peninsula Campus). He is author of several books and articles on Australian and US urban history and Pacific Rim history, including contributions to the Cambridge History of Australia (2013), Cambridge World History (2015), and Cambridge Economic History of Australia (2015). He is current president of the Economic History Society of Australia and New Zealand. Dr. Ruth Morgan is an environmental historian, whose prize-winning work on the histories of water and climate has been generously funded by the Australian Research Council and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She is a lead author in Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report. Martin Shanahan is Professor of Economic and Business History at the University of South Australia and Elof Hansson Visiting Professor in International Business and Trade at Gothenburg University, Sweden. A recipient of the Butlin Prize in Economic History, he has also written on wealth and income distribution, international cartels, and water markets. Moderator Ms Claire Smith, Department of Management, Monash Business School