Professor Tom Griffiths

Tom Griffiths is a Professor of History in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University, Canberra. Professor Griffiths is the author of Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia, which won the Victorian and NSW Premiers' Literary Prizes for Non-Fiction, the Eureka Prize, the Ernest Scott Prize and the NSW ‘Book of the Year' Award for 1996. He is also the author of Forests of Ash: An Environmental History (Cambridge University Press, 2001), which was a finalist in the Eureka Science Book Prize for 2002. In the summer of 2002-3 he travelled to Antarctica as a Humanities Fellow with the Australian Antarctic Division. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His research, writing and teaching are in the fields of Australian social, cultural and environmental history, the comparative environmental history of settler societies, the writing of non-fiction, and the history of Antarctica . His latest book is Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica (UNSW Press and Harvard University Press, 2007).

MAJOR PUBLICATIONS:

* Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica, University of NSW Press and Harvard University Press, 2007

* Forests of Ash: An Environmental History, Cambridge University Press, 2001

* Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia, Cambridge University Press, 1996

* Beechworth: An Australian Country Town and its Past, Greenhouse, 1987

* A Change in the Weather: Climate and Culture in Australia, NMA Press, 2005 (edited with Tim Sherratt and Libby Robin)

* Words for Country: Landscape and Language in Australia, UNSW Press, 2002 (edited with Tim Bonyhady)

* Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies, Keele University Press, 1997 (edited with Libby Robin)

* Prehistory to Politics: John Mulvaney, the Humanities and the Public Intellectual, Melbourne University Press, 1996 (edited with Tim Bonyhady)

* The Life and Adventures of Edward Snell, Angus & Robertson, 1988 (edited with Alan Platt)

SOME RECENT ESSAYS AND ARTICLES:

* ‘Discovering the continent of ice: The place of Antarctica in world history', [Introductory essay], 2007 Yearbook Australia, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Canberra, pp. 14-24.

* ‘Truth and fiction: Judith Wright as historian', La Trobe University Essay, Australian Book Review, no. 283, August 2006, pp. 25-30.

* (with Tim Sherratt) ‘What if the northern rivers had been turned inland to irrigate Australia's “Dead Heart”?', in Sean Scalmer and Stuart Macintyre (ed.) What Ifs in Australian History, Melbourne University Publishing, Melbourne 2006.

* (with Libby Robin) ‘Environmental History in Australasia ', Environment and History, 10 (2004): 439-74.

* ‘Playing the Professional Australian', Meanjin, vol. 63, no. 3, 2004, pp. 166-174.

* ‘Voyaging South', Conversations, Pandanus Books, vol. 4, no. 2, Summer 2004, pp. 10-45.

* Online documentary on the Black Friday 1939 bushfires, published in February 2004 on the ABC website: <abc.net.au/blackfriday> (Tom was an historical advisor and writer, working with producer and researcher Moira Fahy). This online documentary was winner of the ATOM (Australian Teachers of Media) Award for the ‘Best Educational Website in Australia, 2004', and nominated also for a National Media Award in 2004.

* ‘The Man from Snowy River ', Thesis Eleven, no. 74, August 2003, pp. 7-20.

* ‘The Culture of Nature and the Nature of Culture', in Hsu-Ming Teo and Richard White (eds), Cultural History in Australia, UNSW Press, Sydney, pp. 67-80.

*‘The Humanities and an Environmentally Sustainable Australia', Appendix I of The Humanities and Australia's National Research Priorities, Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training, Canberra, 2003, pp. 13-20.

* ‘Light Green, Dark Green: Blainey's environmentalism', in D Gare, T Stannage, S Macintyre and G Bolton (ed.) The Fuss That Never Ended: The Life and Work of Geoffrey Blainey, Melbourne University Press, 2002, pp. 53-66.

* ‘How many trees make a forest? Cultural debates about vegetation change in Australia', Australian Journal of Botany, CSIRO Publishing, vol. 50, no. 4, 2002, pp. 375-389.

* ‘The language of conflict', in Bain Attwood and Stephen Foster (ed.) Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience, National Museum of Australia, Canberra, pp. 135-149.

* ‘One hundred years of environmental crisis', Rangeland Journal, vol 23 (1), 2001, pp. 5-14.

* ‘Cooper Clay', in Mandy Martin, Jane Carruthers, Guy Fitzhardinge, Tom Griffiths and Peter Haynes, Inflows: The Channel Country, Mandy Martin/Goanna Print, 2001.

* ‘Deep Time and Australian History', History Today (UK), November 2001, pp. 2-7.

* ‘Going with the flow: Flying Fox and Drifting Sand ', in Marion Halligan (ed.) Storykeepers, Duffy & Snellgrove, Sydney, 2001, pp. 145-174.

* ‘Gallery of Life', Meanjin, November 2001, vol. 60, no. 4, pp. 85-92.

* ‘Social History and Deep Time', Public History Review, vol. 8, 2000, pp. 8-26.

* ‘The Poetics and Practicalities of Writing', in Ann Curthoys and Ann McGrath (eds), How to Write History, Monash Publications in History, Melbourne, 2000, pp. 1-13.

* ‘Discovering Hancock: The Journey to Monaro', Journal of Australian Studies, no. 62, 1999, pp. 171-181, 257-59.