N Cushing
Biographic Data
| ID | 41598 |
|---|---|
| NAME | N Cushing |
| GIVEN NAMES | N |
| FAMILY NAME | Cushing |
| SIGNATURE | CUSHING N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Newcastle Australia |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1204-9840 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 20 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
A case for cannibalism? What ‘Eat the Invaders’ doesn’t say
Carbon Old and New
Eco-anxiety and environmental history
Environmental historians, like others who study and write about the environment, have long worked with the emotional and psychological impacts of environmental change, including grief, anxiety, rage and despair.But the increasing prevalence of ecological anxiety in recent years, prompted by new indicators of planetary distress, suggests the need for new histories which address humans as subject together with other species to these disruptions in …
Making Machines of Animals
Citizen Social Science in the Classroom
Inspired by the longer established citizen science, citizen social science projects in the classroom can have positive effects on student engagement and learning outcomes. This article reports on the incorporation of a citizen social science assessment task requiring students to undertake the transcription of digitised historical prisoner records in Criminology and History courses at two Australian universities in 2020. Analysis of student respon…
Obstacle Course
Sex-segregated workforces were common in Australia in the twentieth century and male dominance of the massive steel industry in Newcastle, New South Wales (NSW), was especially pronounced. Although there was temporary employment of women in heavy industry during World War II, no permanent change occurred in Newcastle until the end of the 1970s, when local feminist aims for equality in the workforce were potentiated by a youth riot, which revealed…
CoalMustFall
The recent actions taken against statues of figures associated with colonisation and racial oppression have again drawn attention to the enduring power of monuments in the landscape, even after many have disavowed the values they embody. This article shifts the critique from a focus on race to climate, with an examination of the Jubilee or Coal Monument erected in Newcastle, New South Wales in 1909. This monument was designed with the intention o…
Re-storying monuments
Statues, monuments and memorials have been key sites of protest in recent years in communities around the world. Local demands for racial justice and historical truth-telling interacted with transnational movements and concerns. Responding to these urgent demands, some historians counsel re-interpretation of monuments, some eagerly push to topple statues, and others embrace the core of their discipline: to tell the truth about the past, seeking o…
Mallee Country
Mallee Country tells the powerful history of mallee lands and people across southern Australia from Deep Time to the present. Carefully shaped and managed by Aboriginal people for over 50,000 years, mallee country was dramatically transformed by settlers, first with sheep and rabbits, then by flattening and burning the mallee to make way for wheat. Government backed settlement schemes devastated lives and country, but some farmers learnt how to s…
Counting the food miles of sugar in early colonial Australia
Food miles is a concept developed in the 1990s as a critique of the negative social and environmental consequences of transporting foods over very long distances. While intended to draw attention to a contemporary problem, the movement of food has a long history to which the concept of food miles can be usefully applied. Drawing upon government correspondence, statistics and personal journals, this article investigates the significance of food mi…
Letters to Lizzie
Letters exchanged between immigrants and their relatives who remained ‘at home’ are recognised as a valuable resource for exploring identities and emotions in the formation of settler societies. This article departs from this cultural approach to focus instead on the materiality and mobility of the letters as ‘analogue’ sources of knowledge suitable for digitisation, and what this means for histories of place. Our case study traces the movement o…
Few Commodities are More Hazardous
Live animal export has a long history but it is rarely considered in the vigorous contemporary debates surrounding the practice. This article explores the origins, extent and nature of the trade in livestock, primarily sheep and cattle, conducted out of Britain's first Australian colony, New South Wales, between 1788 and 1880. Drawing upon contemporary accounts and official statistics related to the trade, it contributes to the literature on huma…
The Bird was a Valuable One”
Australian native, nonhuman animals at first intrigued and then disappointed newcomers as Australia was colonized by the British in the late eighteenth century. They were disparaged as unproductive and unpalatable oddities, killed as competitors to introduced species, or harvested as a source of fur and feathers for export. Focusing on the period 1803 to 1939, this paper examines one exception to this general pattern: the keeping of native animal…
The interspecies entanglements of eating kangaroo, 1788–1850
The practise of eating kangaroo meat lay at the heart of a complex set of relationships amongst humans and other animals in the early colonial period in Australia. An exploration of this eco-cultural network demonstrates the often overlooked role of Australian native animals in the colonial project. The affordances offered by the members of this network to one another established relationships marked by differing degrees of dependence. It is argu…
The “killer of the cane fields”
This paper makes an original contribution to human–animal studies through the application of social construction theory to an iconic species of Australian snake, the coastal taipan. Little research attention using this approach has been focused on reptiles, and this study addresses this gap in the literature. The taipan has achieved a high level of notoriety in Australia. This paper seeks to understand why and how this has occurred. Drawing on a …
Playing in the Bush
Exhibition Reviews
Australia's Smoke City
The City of Newcastle has been viewed as marginal to the main narratives of Australian history, despite its contribution to industrial development being likened in importance to that of a Pittsburgh or Birmingham. A focus on visible air pollution makes it possible to reposition Newcastle as the centre of environmental innovation, largely because of the knowledge gathered by Novocastrians about smoke abatement in the Anglo‐American industrial citi…
Platypus diplomacy
Making use of government archives, media coverage and family biography, this paper examines a little studied aspect of human-animal relations: the use of live native fauna as gifts for diplomatic purposes. Gifts of platypuses from the Australian government to their British and American allies in 1943 and 1947 reflect the status then enjoyed by iconic Australian fauna as a resource to be exploited in the national interest. The great scientific and…
Balancing Biography and Institutional History
When a young naturalist opened his new wildlife park at Wyoming on the NSW Central Coast in the late 1950s, he gave it his own name: Eric Worrell's Australian Reptile Park. Through the park, Worrell made a significant contribution to environmental education, the development of knowledge of captive animal care and display and the provision of antivenoms for the bites of a range of dangerous creatures. More than this, it was the geographic and emot…
The Mysterious Disappearance of Maize
Maize, one of the world's most widely grown and eaten grains, is also one of its most controversial. Originating in Central America, its reception in other parts of the world was mixed—with some regional cultures embracing it as a staple while others reviled it as an inferior and even dangerous food. In the British penal colony of New South Wales, maize was readily grown and was incorporated into the rations issued to most colonists during the fi…
Visions
(2005). Visions: 12th Biennial National Conference of The Australian Historical Association, Newcastle, 5 - 9 July 2004. History Australia: Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 19-1-19-3
JAS review of books
Margo Kingston, Not Happy, John: Defending Our Democracy, Penguin, Camberwell, 2004, pp 446, pb $24.95, ISBN 0143002589. Duncan Graham, The People Next Door: Understanding Indonesia, UWA Press, Nedlands, 2004, pp 190, pb $38.95, ISBN 1920694099. Jock Given, America's Pie: Trade and Culture After 9/11, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2003, pp 112, pb $16.95, ISBN 0868404713. Geoffrey Barker, Sexing it Up: Iraq, Intelligence and Australia, UNSW Press, Sydney, …
Coalopolis to steel city
Platypus diplomacy
Making use of government archives, media coverage and family biography, this paper examines a little studied aspect of human-animal relations: the use of live native fauna as gifts for diplomatic purposes. Gifts of platypuses from the Australian government to their British and American allies in 1943 and 1947 reflect the status then enjoyed by iconic Australian fauna as a resource to be exploited in the national interest. The great scientific and…
Mallee Country
Mallee Country tells the powerful history of mallee lands and people across southern Australia from Deep Time to the present. Carefully shaped and managed by Aboriginal people for over 50,000 years, mallee country was dramatically transformed by settlers, first with sheep and rabbits, then by flattening and burning the mallee to make way for wheat. Government backed settlement schemes devastated lives and country, but some farmers learnt how to s…
CoalMustFall
The recent actions taken against statues of figures associated with colonisation and racial oppression have again drawn attention to the enduring power of monuments in the landscape, even after many have disavowed the values they embody. This article shifts the critique from a focus on race to climate, with an examination of the Jubilee or Coal Monument erected in Newcastle, New South Wales in 1909. This monument was designed with the intention o…
Few Commodities are More Hazardous
Live animal export has a long history but it is rarely considered in the vigorous contemporary debates surrounding the practice. This article explores the origins, extent and nature of the trade in livestock, primarily sheep and cattle, conducted out of Britain's first Australian colony, New South Wales, between 1788 and 1880. Drawing upon contemporary accounts and official statistics related to the trade, it contributes to the literature on huma…
The interspecies entanglements of eating kangaroo, 1788–1850
The practise of eating kangaroo meat lay at the heart of a complex set of relationships amongst humans and other animals in the early colonial period in Australia. An exploration of this eco-cultural network demonstrates the often overlooked role of Australian native animals in the colonial project. The affordances offered by the members of this network to one another established relationships marked by differing degrees of dependence. It is argu…
The “killer of the cane fields”
This paper makes an original contribution to human–animal studies through the application of social construction theory to an iconic species of Australian snake, the coastal taipan. Little research attention using this approach has been focused on reptiles, and this study addresses this gap in the literature. The taipan has achieved a high level of notoriety in Australia. This paper seeks to understand why and how this has occurred. Drawing on a …
Re-storying monuments
Statues, monuments and memorials have been key sites of protest in recent years in communities around the world. Local demands for racial justice and historical truth-telling interacted with transnational movements and concerns. Responding to these urgent demands, some historians counsel re-interpretation of monuments, some eagerly push to topple statues, and others embrace the core of their discipline: to tell the truth about the past, seeking o…
Counting the food miles of sugar in early colonial Australia
Food miles is a concept developed in the 1990s as a critique of the negative social and environmental consequences of transporting foods over very long distances. While intended to draw attention to a contemporary problem, the movement of food has a long history to which the concept of food miles can be usefully applied. Drawing upon government correspondence, statistics and personal journals, this article investigates the significance of food mi…
The Bird was a Valuable One”
Australian native, nonhuman animals at first intrigued and then disappointed newcomers as Australia was colonized by the British in the late eighteenth century. They were disparaged as unproductive and unpalatable oddities, killed as competitors to introduced species, or harvested as a source of fur and feathers for export. Focusing on the period 1803 to 1939, this paper examines one exception to this general pattern: the keeping of native animal…
The Mysterious Disappearance of Maize
Maize, one of the world's most widely grown and eaten grains, is also one of its most controversial. Originating in Central America, its reception in other parts of the world was mixed—with some regional cultures embracing it as a staple while others reviled it as an inferior and even dangerous food. In the British penal colony of New South Wales, maize was readily grown and was incorporated into the rations issued to most colonists during the fi…
Coalopolis to steel city
Coalopolis to steel city
Visions
(2005). Visions: 12th Biennial National Conference of The Australian Historical Association, Newcastle, 5 - 9 July 2004. History Australia: Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 19-1-19-3
JAS review of books
Margo Kingston, Not Happy, John: Defending Our Democracy, Penguin, Camberwell, 2004, pp 446, pb $24.95, ISBN 0143002589. Duncan Graham, The People Next Door: Understanding Indonesia, UWA Press, Nedlands, 2004, pp 190, pb $38.95, ISBN 1920694099. Jock Given, America's Pie: Trade and Culture After 9/11, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2003, pp 112, pb $16.95, ISBN 0868404713. Geoffrey Barker, Sexing it Up: Iraq, Intelligence and Australia, UNSW Press, Sydney, …
The Mysterious Disappearance of Maize
Maize, one of the world's most widely grown and eaten grains, is also one of its most controversial. Originating in Central America, its reception in other parts of the world was mixed—with some regional cultures embracing it as a staple while others reviled it as an inferior and even dangerous food. In the British penal colony of New South Wales, maize was readily grown and was incorporated into the rations issued to most colonists during the fi…
Australia's Smoke City
The City of Newcastle has been viewed as marginal to the main narratives of Australian history, despite its contribution to industrial development being likened in importance to that of a Pittsburgh or Birmingham. A focus on visible air pollution makes it possible to reposition Newcastle as the centre of environmental innovation, largely because of the knowledge gathered by Novocastrians about smoke abatement in the Anglo‐American industrial citi…
Platypus diplomacy
Making use of government archives, media coverage and family biography, this paper examines a little studied aspect of human-animal relations: the use of live native fauna as gifts for diplomatic purposes. Gifts of platypuses from the Australian government to their British and American allies in 1943 and 1947 reflect the status then enjoyed by iconic Australian fauna as a resource to be exploited in the national interest. The great scientific and…
Balancing Biography and Institutional History
When a young naturalist opened his new wildlife park at Wyoming on the NSW Central Coast in the late 1950s, he gave it his own name: Eric Worrell's Australian Reptile Park. Through the park, Worrell made a significant contribution to environmental education, the development of knowledge of captive animal care and display and the provision of antivenoms for the bites of a range of dangerous creatures. More than this, it was the geographic and emot…
Exhibition Reviews
Playing in the Bush
The “killer of the cane fields”
This paper makes an original contribution to human–animal studies through the application of social construction theory to an iconic species of Australian snake, the coastal taipan. Little research attention using this approach has been focused on reptiles, and this study addresses this gap in the literature. The taipan has achieved a high level of notoriety in Australia. This paper seeks to understand why and how this has occurred. Drawing on a …
The interspecies entanglements of eating kangaroo, 1788–1850
The practise of eating kangaroo meat lay at the heart of a complex set of relationships amongst humans and other animals in the early colonial period in Australia. An exploration of this eco-cultural network demonstrates the often overlooked role of Australian native animals in the colonial project. The affordances offered by the members of this network to one another established relationships marked by differing degrees of dependence. It is argu…
The Bird was a Valuable One”
Australian native, nonhuman animals at first intrigued and then disappointed newcomers as Australia was colonized by the British in the late eighteenth century. They were disparaged as unproductive and unpalatable oddities, killed as competitors to introduced species, or harvested as a source of fur and feathers for export. Focusing on the period 1803 to 1939, this paper examines one exception to this general pattern: the keeping of native animal…
Letters to Lizzie
Letters exchanged between immigrants and their relatives who remained ‘at home’ are recognised as a valuable resource for exploring identities and emotions in the formation of settler societies. This article departs from this cultural approach to focus instead on the materiality and mobility of the letters as ‘analogue’ sources of knowledge suitable for digitisation, and what this means for histories of place. Our case study traces the movement o…
Few Commodities are More Hazardous
Live animal export has a long history but it is rarely considered in the vigorous contemporary debates surrounding the practice. This article explores the origins, extent and nature of the trade in livestock, primarily sheep and cattle, conducted out of Britain's first Australian colony, New South Wales, between 1788 and 1880. Drawing upon contemporary accounts and official statistics related to the trade, it contributes to the literature on huma…
Mallee Country
Mallee Country tells the powerful history of mallee lands and people across southern Australia from Deep Time to the present. Carefully shaped and managed by Aboriginal people for over 50,000 years, mallee country was dramatically transformed by settlers, first with sheep and rabbits, then by flattening and burning the mallee to make way for wheat. Government backed settlement schemes devastated lives and country, but some farmers learnt how to s…
Counting the food miles of sugar in early colonial Australia
Food miles is a concept developed in the 1990s as a critique of the negative social and environmental consequences of transporting foods over very long distances. While intended to draw attention to a contemporary problem, the movement of food has a long history to which the concept of food miles can be usefully applied. Drawing upon government correspondence, statistics and personal journals, this article investigates the significance of food mi…
CoalMustFall
The recent actions taken against statues of figures associated with colonisation and racial oppression have again drawn attention to the enduring power of monuments in the landscape, even after many have disavowed the values they embody. This article shifts the critique from a focus on race to climate, with an examination of the Jubilee or Coal Monument erected in Newcastle, New South Wales in 1909. This monument was designed with the intention o…
Re-storying monuments
Statues, monuments and memorials have been key sites of protest in recent years in communities around the world. Local demands for racial justice and historical truth-telling interacted with transnational movements and concerns. Responding to these urgent demands, some historians counsel re-interpretation of monuments, some eagerly push to topple statues, and others embrace the core of their discipline: to tell the truth about the past, seeking o…
Obstacle Course
Sex-segregated workforces were common in Australia in the twentieth century and male dominance of the massive steel industry in Newcastle, New South Wales (NSW), was especially pronounced. Although there was temporary employment of women in heavy industry during World War II, no permanent change occurred in Newcastle until the end of the 1970s, when local feminist aims for equality in the workforce were potentiated by a youth riot, which revealed…
Citizen Social Science in the Classroom
Inspired by the longer established citizen science, citizen social science projects in the classroom can have positive effects on student engagement and learning outcomes. This article reports on the incorporation of a citizen social science assessment task requiring students to undertake the transcription of digitised historical prisoner records in Criminology and History courses at two Australian universities in 2020. Analysis of student respon…
Carbon Old and New
Eco-anxiety and environmental history
Environmental historians, like others who study and write about the environment, have long worked with the emotional and psychological impacts of environmental change, including grief, anxiety, rage and despair.But the increasing prevalence of ecological anxiety in recent years, prompted by new indicators of planetary distress, suggests the need for new histories which address humans as subject together with other species to these disruptions in …
Making Machines of Animals
A case for cannibalism? What ‘Eat the Invaders’ doesn’t say
Sociology (14 works) · History (12 works) · History (11 works) · Political science (10 works) · Archaeology (9 works) · Geography (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Biology (8 works) · Art (7 works) · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies (7 works)