The farmland in the valley was green, the creek running through it lined with eucalypts—a reminder that once this stream flowed through forest. The rolling hills were beguiling. Some of them were covered in regenerating bush: new growth shooting straight from the ground while alongside blackened trunks told of recent burning. In the upper canopy, branches bursting with green leaves masked the charring and the scorched soil was once again covered in leaf litter. Vibrant birdsong almost drowned out environmental historian Tom Griffiths as he relayed a moving narrative of the events of 7 February 2009 to a group of historians from Australia, the US and UK. The fires of ‘Black Saturday’ burnt through 4500 square kilometres of land and claimed 173 human lives, including 10 from the small community of Steels Creek. It was to this area that Tom, who has written eloquently about the history of fire in Australia and co-edited a collection of stories from Steels Creek,¹ had guided us on a beautiful late spring day in November 2015.

This group of historians had gathered in Melbourne, Australia, to begin a three-day workshop exploring the nexus of oral and environmental history. Our intention was to consider the ways in which attention to memory and story-telling enhances our understanding of the relationship between place and story, settlement and sustainability, environment and change. Our journey to the site of the Black Saturday fires and our vantage point in Steels Creek, with views through recently regenerating bush to the valley below, embedded us in the more-than-human world.² We ventured into nearby forest where stands of mountain ash (Eucalyptus regnans) abut temperate rainforest, a legacy of the Gondwanaland period of the Australian continent. Within a 20-kilometre radius we had traversed an area of recent ecological disaster, heard powerful stories of human tragedy and survival, witnessed the extraordinary recuperative power of the natural environment and wandered through remnants of Australia’s deep time landscape.

Humans have been making sense of this landscape for millennia, shaping it with fire, stone, axes, ploughs and tractors. They have cared for it, denuded it, tended it, lived within it, creating it in their minds and with their hands. They have told stories about its birth, and its capacity to ignite with devastating ferocity. In the decades prior to 2009, settler Australians also demonstrated a striking capacity to forget the “frightening and awesome natural force” of fire and the “age-old elemental battle amongst the stringybark”.³ In the wake of Black Saturday, the work that Tom Griffiths and Christine Hansen undertook was in part to remember earlier iterations of this event, and the interrelationship between humans, fire and the ‘forests of ash’. Bringing together oral history and environmental history, they examined the intimate relationships between people and place, between individual and cultural memory, and their webs of connection with the natural world.

Over the subsequent two days of the workshop we convened at La Trobe University—only a 40-minute drive from the areas devastated by Black Saturday—to read and talk through papers by each of the participants, all of whom were working at the nexus of oral and environmental history. The field trip to Steels Creek had provided a poignant backdrop against which to consider the entanglement between humans, the ‘natural’ world, memory and change. Those papers, reworked and enriched in the light of discussion and exchange, are part of the collection gathered here.

The Gondwanaland vegetation we encountered on our field trip was a reminder that although the Australian continent appears isolated, it has been connected—and continues to be so in its botany and its people—with the Indian subcontinent and the lands around the Indian Ocean. The ancient and continuing botanical connection has survived despite the great differences in recent history, including colonisation of most areas by Europeans in the last three centuries. In Australia, there has been recent immigration by people from South Asia and the Indian Ocean, but European ‘settlers’ have retained demographic as well as political dominance in this as in other temperate colonies. Tropical colonies in Africa, across Asia and South America felt the heavy political impact of Europeans but have retained a demographic and cultural dominance of resident populations, although often expanded with the forced migration of unfree labourers. In former western colonising nations and in both types of former colonies, environmental history and oral history—that is, historical accounts recorded from the memories of everyday people—have flourished. Yet they have taken different forms in each.

In considering how to engage even further with the questions around how oral and environmental history can inform each other, it has been important to recognise this diversity of forms. It is impossible to cover all variations, but we have extended the range of countries and communities represented in the volume, and included chapters from authors unable to attend the workshop. One dimension of that extension has been to draw on authors from one region—the Indian subcontinent—which allows a comparison between the two broad types of colonial experience. The other dimension has been expansion of the category of ‘settler colonial’ to include Canada, where, in addition to debates over indigeneity and ‘settlers’, debates about the languages of memory occur as they do on the Indian subcontinent.

There are good reasons for building the conversation between the former colonies in temperate and tropical areas. There has been great depth of oral accounts in Indian environmental history, but because it has been conducted by anthropologists, sociologists and ecologists rather than historians, it has not often been recognised by historians from the west. In India, however, this rich body of oral accounts has usually been considered collectively, in class or caste analyses, and so it is seldom seen as ‘oral history’ by Indian historians. So, a conversation will be of value to all sides. Furthermore, there have been innovations in Indian analyses—using visual representations as one example—which offer exploratory pathways for oral and environmental historians everywhere.

Yet there are clearly many regions absent from this volume, including the diverse ecologies and societies of Africa, South East and East Asia, and Southern America. While each has fostered unique forms of both environmental and oral histories, they have common themes with those of the tropical and formerly colonised regions. One of these themes has been that of displacement of human and non-human species caused first by imperial land use and more recently by national parks, conservation and eco-tourism. Another has been deforestation and similar damage generated by monoculture and extraction for globalised trade. Yet another theme is the ecological impact of development and urbanisation in post-colonial nations as well as that arising from the distortions of colonialism. Another theme again has been the impact of warfare, leading to massive damage to ecologies as well as to human populations. Yet for each of these themes, in each region, research in oral history and environmental history have tended to proceed in parallel rather than together. Our purpose in this volume then is to explore—using just a few areas—the ways in which these two productive methodologies could be brought into effective conversation.

In many countries, oral history—as both a methodology and a subject matter—and environmental history are now thriving sub-fields of the historical discipline. Each has its own journals, its own conferences, and a large number of practitioners researching, writing and theorising about various aspects of their field. And within each field, there are those who engage with themes of the other: oral historians often write about place, attachment and meaning, but much less about the human/nature inter-relationship and the way these change. Environmental historians have used oral history to talk to people about landscape change, but have rarely problematised the nature of memory, story-telling or the interview relationship.

This collection is the first devoted specifically to exploring the intersections of oral history and environmental history. Oral history offers environmental historians the opportunity to understand the ways people’s perceptions, experiences and beliefs about environments—places in which people have lived, worked and played—change over time. Oral history brings attention to memory and story-telling, and in particular to the stories that everyday men and women tell about the environments they move into and across. It brings the opportunity to explore dimensions of class and race and gender into the experience of places. In turn, the insights of environmental history challenge oral historians to think more critically about the ways an active more-than-human world shapes experiences and people, the mutually constitutive relationship between people and places that is a core understanding of environmental history. The integration of these approaches enables us to more fully and critically understand the ways cultural and individual memory and experience shapes human interactions with the more-than-human world, just as it enables us to identify the ways human memory, identity and experience is moulded by the landscapes and environments in which people live and labour.

Oral historians have been increasingly attentive to the complex ways in which people experience and remember place.⁴ Places carry collections of meanings built up through patterns of behaviour and interactio...