VCE Australian history - units 3 & 4

Students investigate the way in which Australian’s perspectives of the environment changed and/or remained the same after 1950.

They consider the changing nature and economic importance of rural and resource industries during this time. They explore the perspectives of conservation movements and political parties which emerged to raise awareness and/or contest land use and environmental issues.

Students analyse the role and voice of Indigenous peoples both in Australia and in other nations in the debates about environmental protection, and examine how movements challenged the extent to which human actions and responses to environmental issues changed. (VCE History Study Design 2022–2026 p.59)

• Lancaster, S.  Green Australia
• Ritter, D. L.Black and green revisited : understanding the relationship between indigenous and environmental political formations
• Bible, V  Terania Creek and the forging of modern environmental activism
• Neumeier, B. & Tiffin, H. Ecocritical concerns and the Australian continent
• Robin, L. Defending the Little Desert : the rise of ecological consciousness in Australia
• Jackson, S. The Australian Greens : from activism to Australia's third party
• Colman, J.The house that Jack built : Jack Mundey, green bans hero
• Burgmann, M., Burgmann, Verity, Green bans, red union : the saving of a city

Lake Pedder

•  Buckman, G.  Tasmania's Wilderness Battles: a History.
• News articles about Lake Pedder

Green Bans

• Verity Burgmann, & Andrew Milner. (2011). Ecotopians in Hardhats: The Australian Green Bans Movement. Utopian Studies, 22(1), 125–142.
  • choose the 'Download' option for full-text
• Burgmann, V. (2008). The Green Bans Movement: Workers’ Power and Ecological Radicalism in Australia in the 1970s. Journal for the Study of Radicalism, 2(1), 63–89.
• Anderson, I. (2015). “Whose green bans?" The builders labourers’ federation, the trade union movement and green bans in Queensland in the 1970s. The Queensland Journal of Labour History, (20), 26–37.
  • choose PDF/EPUB option above Abstract to download
• Bleakley, P. (2021). Unconventional labour: environmental justice and working-class ecology in the New South Wales green bans. Studies in Social Justice, 15 (3), 458-474.

Maralinga

• Walker, F. Maralinga : The chilling expose of our secret nuclear shame and betrayal of our troops and country
• Tynan, E., Atomic thunder : the Maralinga story
• Mittmann, J. (2017). Maralinga: Aboriginal poison country. Agora  52(3), 25–31.

  • choose PDF/EPUB option above Abstract to download

• Search our Library catalogue
• Databases, eresources & ebooks
• Ask a librarian
• Become a Library member
• Library systems status