Academic literature on the topic 'Paper mills Tasmania'

This paper analyzes how a key conflict in Australia's pulp and paper industry became generalized to other sites through environmental action, government regulation, and industry initiative. From 1987–91, Australians debated construction of a new, world-class, export-oriented pulp mill in Tasmania. Rural residents, fishermen, and environmentalists, allied with the Australian Labor Party, succeeded in scuttling the project. Subsequently, the national government launched a major research program, state governments tightened regulations, and industry reduced elemental chlorine use. Any new mills constructed in Australia today would be among the cleanest in the world. This paper is part of a larger, comparative study of technological innovation in the pulp and paper industries of Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. The author interviewed industry officials, government regulators, research scientists, and environmentalists; visited pulp and paper mills; attended technical conferences; and conducted archival work in these countries during a 12-month period.

A number of functions were investigated that related the costs of thermomechanical pulp (TMP) and high-brightness newsprint production, using Pinus radiata D. Don, to important pulp and paper quality (breeding objective) variables, including specific energy consumption and pulp handsheet tear and tensile strength, brightness, and opacity. Pulp handsheet quality traits were considered to be reasonable two-dimensional predictors of paper quality traits in this context. A specific production process that requires the use of a reinforcement kraft pulp and an artificial clay filler to improve the quality of paper produced from the bleached TMP fibres was investigated, similar to the production process used by Australian Newspaper Mills' Boyer Mill in Tasmania, Australia. Pulp and pulp handsheet quality variables could be explained by significant (P > 0.05) wood traits using multiple linear regression equations. This provided a method to predict the economic importance of each wood trait in relation to the thermomechanical production process investigated. The results showed that tracheid length, wood density, wood brightness, and tracheid coarseness were the best predictors of costs. Increases in tracheid length, wood density, and wood brightness and decreases in tracheid coarseness resulted in decreasing the total costs of TMP and high-brightness newsprint production.

This article examines the Australian Pulp and Paper Mills Ltd. (APPM) dispute which took place in Burnie, Tasmania between March 3 and June 10, 1992. The dispute is placed within the context of major changes in Australian industrial relations, which have been in process since 1986. Management and unions throughout Australia are still experimenting with a variety of industrial weapons to achieve their aims and goals within the parameters of the “Structural Efficiency Principle” and “enterprise bargaining”, constructed in Accords III through VI, from 1986 to the present. It is argued that the crucial change during the past six years has been the ability of companies to re-establish managerial prerogative through litigation. This has provided management with the power to confront secondary issues and agents of change such as the Accord, the Australian Industrial Relations Commission, Structural Efficiency, Enterprise Bargaining and Restructuring with a new vigour, toughness and effectuality. Increasingly docile, debilitated and legally disabled union officials and workers seem to be coming to the view that a union victory occurs if the company agrees to abide by the law while directing its workforce, and recognises the workers' right to be represented by a “third party”.

Introduction The recipe is more than just a list of ingredients and the instructions on how to prepare a particular dish. Recipes also are, as Janet Floyd and Laurel Foster argue, a form of narrative that tells a myriad of stories, “of family sagas and community, of historical and cultural moments and also of personal histories and narratives of self” (Floyd and Forster 2). Among the most intimate and personal sources of recipes are manuscript cookbooks. These typically contained original handwritten recipes created by the author as well as those shared by family and friends; some recipes were copied from published cookbooks or clipped out of newspapers and magazines. However, these books are more than a mere collection of recipes and domestic instructions, they also paint a unique and vivid picture of the life of their authors. These manuscript cookbooks were a common sight in many Australian colonial kitchens, yet they are a rarely examined and rich archival source that provides a valuable insight into foodways, material culture, and the lives and social relationships of the women who created them. This article will examine the manuscript cookbook created by Phillis Clark in the Darling Downs during the 1860s. Through a close examination of Clark’s manuscript cookbook, this article will explore colonial domestic habits and the cultural context in which they were formed. It will also highlight the historical value of manuscript cookbooks as social texts that chronicle daily life, both inside and outside the kitchen, in colonial Australia. A Colonial Woman Phillis Clark was born in Tasmania in 1836. She was the daughter of Charles Seal, the pioneer of the whaling industry in that state. In 1858 she married Charles George Clark, the eldest son of a well-known Tasmanian family. Both the Seal and Clark families were at the centre of social and political life in Tasmania. In 1861, the couple moved to Talgai, twenty two kilometres north-west of Warwick in the Darling Downs region of Queensland. Here, Charles Clark established himself as a storekeeper and became a partner in the Ellinthorp Steam Flour Mills, the first successful flour mill in Queensland (Waterson 3). He also represented Warwick in the Queensland Legislative assembly between 1871 and 1873. Clark’s brother, George Clark, also settled in the area together with his wife and family. In 1868, both families set up home in adjoining properties known as East Talgai and West Talgai. This joint property, with its well manicured gardens, English trees, and fruit orchard, has been described as a small oasis “in an empty, brown and dusty summer landscape” (Waterson, Squatter 19). The Manuscript Sometime during this period Clark began to compile her very own manuscript cookbook. The front of Clark’s manuscript is dated 1866, yet there is ample evidence to suggest that she began work on this manuscript some years earlier. Clark was scrupulous in acknowledging the sources of her recipes, a habit common to many manuscript cookbook authors (Newlyn 35). She also initialled her own creations, firstly with P.S., for her maiden name Phillis Seal, and later P.S.C. for Phillis Seal Clark, her married name. By 1866 Clarke had been married for eight years so it can be assumed that she commenced her manuscript some time before 1858. A number of the recipes that appear in the manuscript appear to be credited to people living in Tasmania. Furthermore, a number of the newspaper clippings found in her manuscript can be dated to before 1866, including one for 1861. The manuscript itself is a hard bound and lined notebook, sturdy enough to withstand the rigours of daily use in the kitchen. The majority of recipes are handwritten but there are also a number of recipes clipped from newspapers interspaced within the manuscript. The handwritten recipes are in a neat copperplate style and all appear to be written in the same hand. The recipes are not found in distinct sections, although there are some small clusters of particular types of recipes, highlighting the fact that they were added to the manuscript over a period of time. At the front of the manuscript there is a detailed index noting the page number on which each recipe is to be found. The recipes themselves follow the standard conventions of the period. The Sources The sources from which Clark gathered some of the recipes in her manuscript indicate the variety of texts that were available to her. There are a number of newspaper clippings pasted in the pages of her manuscript for a range of both recipes for foods as well as the so-called domestic remedies (medicines) and receipts for household products. Amongst the food recipes there are to be found instructions in the making of cream cheese in the Irish manner and a recipe for stewed shoulder of mutton as well as two different methods for preparing kangaroo. While it is impossible to fully know what newspapers all these clippings have been taken from, at least one of them came from the Darling Downs Gazette and General Advertiser and it is likely that some of them might also have come from a number of the local Warwick papers (one which was founded by her brother-in-law George Clark) that were in publication during Clark’s residence in the area. Clark also utilised a number of published cookbooks as sources for some of the recipes in her own manuscripts. Like most Australians until the last few decades of the nineteenth century, Clark would have mainly resorted to the British cookbooks that were available. The two most commonly acknowledged cookbooks in her manuscript were Enquire Within Upon Everything and Eliza Acton’s. Enquire Within Upon Everything was an immensely popular general household guide amassing eighty-nine editions in a little over forty years in print. It contained information on a plethora of subjects (over three thousand individual entries) including such topics as etiquette, first aid, domestic hints, and recipes. It first appeared on the British market in 1856, under the editorship of Robert Kemp Philp, and became available in Australia in the same year. Booksellers in the Darling Downs advertised copies of the book for the price of three shillings and six pence. Eliza Acton, for her part, was one of Britain’s leading cookbook authors. Her books were widely available throughout the colonies with copies advertised for sale by J. Walch and Sons booksellers in Hobart (‘Advertising’ 1). Extracts from her cookbook Modern Cookery for Private Families began to appear in Australian newspapers only months after it first was published in Britain in 1845 (‘Bullion’ 4). Although Modern Cookery did not provide any recipes directly catering for Australian conditions, its simple and straightforward approach to cookery made it an invaluable resource in the colonial kitchen. Such was the popularity and reputation of Acton’s work that in the preface to Australia’s first cookbook, The English and Australian Cookery Book, the author, Tasmanian born Edward Abbott, stated that he hoped that his cook book would posses “all the advantages of Mrs. Acton’s work” (Abbott vi). The range of printed sources contained within Clark’s manuscript indicate that women in colonial households were far from isolated from the culinary trends occurring in other parts of Australia and the wider British empire. The Recipes Like many Australian women of her class and generation, Phillis Clark reproduced the predominant British food culture in her kitchen. The great majority of recipes contained in her manuscript are for typically English dishes, particularly those for sweet dishes such as biscuits, cakes, and puddings. Plum pudding, trifle, and custard pudding are all featured in her book. As well, many of the savoury dishes such as curry, roast beef, and Yorkshire pudding similarly reflect the British palate. In There is No Taste like Home: The Food of Empire, Adele Wessell argues that the maintenance of British food habits in Australia was a device to reaffirm “cultural and historical bonds and sustain a shared sense of British identity” (811). However, as in many other rural kitchens, native ingredients also found a place. Her manuscript included a number of recipes for the preparation of kangaroo and detailed instructions for the butchering of the animal. Clark’s recipe for “Jugged Hare or Kangaroo” bares a close resemblance to the one that appears in Edward Abbott’s cookbook. Clark’s father and Abbott were from the same, small social milieu in colonial Hobart and were both active in the same political causes. This raises the intriguing possibility that Phillis also knew Abbott and came into contact with some of his culinary ideas. Australians consumed all manners of native ingredients, not only as a matter of necessity but also as a matter of choice. The inclusion of freshly killed native game in Clark’s kitchen would have served to alleviate the monotony of the salted beef and mutton that were common staples during this period. The distinct Australian flavour that began to appear in manuscript cookbooks like Clark’s would later be replicated in their printed counterparts. Australian cookbooks published in the last decades of the nineteenth century demonstrate the importance of native ingredients in colonial kitchens (Singley 37). The Darling Downs region had been a popular destination for German migrants from the 1850s and Clark’s manuscript contained a number of recipes for German dishes. This included one for the traditional German Christmas cake Lebkuchen as well as for various German puddings and biscuits. Clark also included an elaborate recipe for making ham or bacon in the traditional Westphalian fashion. This was a laborious process that involved vigorously rubbing salt, sugar, and beer into the leg of ham every day for a fortnight after which it is then hung to dry for a couple of days and then smoked. Katie Hume, a fellow Darling Downs resident and a close friend of the extended Clark family described feeling like a “gute verstandige Hausfrau” (a good sensible housewife) after salting 112 pounds of pork she had purchased from a neighbour (152). While, unlike their counterparts in the Barossa valley in South Australia, the Germans who lived in the Darling Downs area did not leave a significant mark on the local culinary landscape, the inclusion of German recipes in Clark’s manuscript indicates that there was not only some cross-cultural transmission of culinary knowledge, but also some willingness to go beyond traditional British fare. Many, more mundane recipes also populate Clark’s manuscript. “Toad in a Hole”, “Mutton Pie” and “Stewed Sirloin” all merit an entry. Yet, even with such simple dishes, Clark demonstrated a keen eye for detail. This is attested by her method for the preparation of a simple dish of roasted pumpkin: “Cut into slices 1 inch thick and about 5 inches long, have ready a baking dish with boiling fat—lay the slices in it so that the fat will cover them and bake for 20 minutes (by fat I mean good dripping) Half an hour will not bake them too much. They ought to be brown” (Clark 13). Whilst Clark’s manuscript is not indicative of the foodways of all classes across Queensland society, it does provide some insight as to what was consumed at the table of a well-heeled rural household. As the wife of a prominent businessman and a local dignitary, Phillis Clark would have also undoubtedly been called upon to play the role of hostess and to entertain her husband’s commercial and political acquaintances. Her manuscript also reflects the overwhelmingly British nature of colonial Australian foodways despite the intrusion of some foreign dishes. As Anne Murcott argues, the preparation and consumption of food provides a way through which individuals can express the more abstract significance of cultural values and social systems (204). The Clark household also showed some interest in producing a broad range of products in the home. There are, for example, a number of recipes for beverages including those for non-alcoholic ginger beers and flavoured cordials. They were also far from abstemious, with recipes for wine, mead, and ale included in the manuscript. This last recipe was given to her by her brother Alfred who, according to Clark, “understands brewing and therefore I think it can be depended upon” (Clark 43). Clark also bottled her own fruit, made a wide range of jams, including grape and mock melon, as well as making her own butter, confectionery, and vinegar. The production of goods like these within the home indicates the level of self-reliance in many colonial households, particularly those finding themselves far from the convenience of shops and markets. Many culinary historians argue that there exists a significant time lag between the initial appearance and consumption of a particular dish in a society and its subsequent appearance in the pages of a cookbook. This time lag can be between forty and 150 years long (Mennell 44; Mason 23). However, manuscript cookbooks reflect the immediacy of eating practices. The very personal nature of manuscript cookbooks would suggest that the recipes included within their pages were ones that the author intended to use in her own kitchen. Moreover, from the reciprocal nature of recipe sharing that is evident from these types of cookbooks it can be concluded that the recipes in Clark’s manuscript were ones that, at least in her own social milieu, were in common usage. In her manuscript Clark clearly noted those recipes which she especially liked or otherwise found useful. Many recipes throughout the manuscript have been marked as “proved” indicating that Clark had used and tested them at some stage. A number of them have also been favourably annotated as being “delicious”, “very nice”, “the best”, and “very good”. Amongst the number of recipes for “Soda Cake” that feature in the manuscript Clarke clearly indicates that “Number 1 is the best”. However, she was not averse to commenting on recipes and altering them to suit her taste. In a recipe for “A nice light Cake”, for example, Clark noted that the addition of a “little peel and currants is an improvement” (89). This form of marginal intrusion was a common practice amongst many women and it can even be seen in the margins of many published cookbooks (Theophano 186). These annotations, according to Sandra Sherman, are not transgressive, since the manuscripts are not authored “by” anyone (Sherman 121). In fact, annotations personalise the recipe and confirm the compiler’s confidence in it (Sherman 121). Not Just Food: ‘Domestic Receipts’ As noted above, Clark’s manuscript contained more than just recipes for food and drink. Many of them are “Domestic Receipts” that reflect the complex nature of running a household in rural Australia. Some of Clark’s domestic receipts are in the form of newspaper clippings and are general instructions for the manufacture of simple household products such as a “ready to use glue” and a home-made tooth powder. Others are handwritten and copied from other domestic advice books or were given to Clark by family and friends. A recipe for manufacturing “blacking for stoves”, essential in the maintenance of cast iron stoves, was, for example, culled from Enquire Within Upon Everything. Here, with some authorial intrusion, Clark includes her own list of measured ingredients to prepare the mixture. An intriguing method for the “artificial preparation of ice” involving the use of ammonium nitrate and bicarbonate of soda was given to Clark by Mrs. McKeachie, the wife of Charles Clark’s business partner. Clark also showed an interest in beekeeping and in raising turkeys, with instructions for both these tasks included in her manuscript. The wide range of miscellaneous receipts featured in Clark’s book highlights the breadth of activities that were carried out in many homes in rural Australia. A hint of Clark’s artistic side is also in evidence, with detailed instructions on how to create delicate fern impressions on paper also included in her book. As with many other women in colonial Australia, Clark was expected to take on the role of caregiver when members of her family fell ill or were injured. Her manuscript included a number of recipes for “domestic remedies”, another common trope in books of this kind as well as in their printed counterparts. These remedies included recipes for a cough mixture composed of linseed, liquorice, and water and a liniment to treat rheumatism which was made by mixing rape seed oil and turpentine with a hefty dose of laudanum. Clark used olive oil in a number of medical recipes to treat burns and scalds. As well, treatments for diphtheria, cholera, and diarrhoea feature prominently in her manuscript. The Darling Downs had been subject to a number of outbreaks of dysentery and cholera during Clark’s residency in the area (Waterson, Squatter 71). For “a pain in the chest” Clark recommended the following: “a piece of brown paper spread with tallow and placed on the chest” (69).The inclusion of these domestic remedies and Clark’s obvious concerns for her family’s health is particularly poignant given her personal history. Her family was plagued by misfortune and illness and she lost three of her ten children in a six-year period including two within just months of each other. Clark herself would die during childbirth in 1874. Sharing and Caring The word “recipe” has its origins in the Latin recipere meaning to “receive”. In order to receive there has to be, by implication, someone doing the giving. A recipe signifies an exchange and a connection between individuals. The sharing of recipes was a common activity for many women in nineteenth century Australia. Wilhelmina Rawson, Queensland’s first published cookbook author, was keenly aware of the manner in which women shared recipes and culinary knowledge. This act of reciprocity, she argued, not only helped to ease the isolation of bush living but also allowed each individual to be “benefited by the cleverness of the whole number” (14). For many, food often has a deeply private and personal component, being prepared and consumed within the realm of the home. However, food is also a communal experience and is openly shared through rituals, feasts, the contexts in which it is bought and sold, and, most importantly, reciprocal exchange. In her manuscript, Clark acknowledged a number of different individuals as the source for the recipes she included within its pages. The convention of acknowledging the sources of recipes in manuscript cookbooks functions as a way to assert the recipe’s authority and to ensure that they are proven (Sherman 122). This act of acknowledgement also locates Clark within a social network of women who not only shared recipes but also, one can imagine, many of the vicissitudes of domestic life in a remote rural setting. In her study of women’s manuscript cookbooks, entitled Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote, Janet Theophano describes these texts as “the maps of the social and cultural life they inhabited” (13). This circulation of recipes allowed women to share their knowledge, skills, and creativity. Those who received and used these recipes not only engaged in a conversation with the writer of these recipes but also formed a connection with a broader community that allowed them to learn more about themselves and the world. Conclusion The manuscript cookbook created by Phillis Clark is a fascinating prism through which to explore domestic life in colonial Australia. The recipes contained in Clark’s manuscript reflect the eating habits of her own family and those of a particular social class in Queensland. They not only demonstrate the tenacity of British foodways in Australia but also show the degree of culinary adventurism that existed in some homes. The personal, almost autobiographical nature of manuscript cookbooks also provides an intimate view in the life of its creator. In the splattered pages of Phillis Clark’s book we can read the many travails, joys, and tragedies of her life. References Abbott, Edward. The English and Australian Cookery Book: Cookery for the Many, as Well as for the Upper Ten Thousand. London: Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, 1864. ‘Advertising’. Launceston Examiner 9 Mar. 1858: 1. ‘Boullion, The Common Soup of France’. The Sydney Morning Herald 22 Aug. 1845: 4. Clark, Phillis. “Manuscript Cookbook”. 1863 Floyd, Janet, and Laurel Forster. “The Recipe in Its Cultural Content.” The Recipe Reader: Narratives, Contexts, Traditions. Ed. Janet Floyd and Laurel Forster. Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate. 2003. Hume, Anna Kate. Katie Hume on the Darling Downs, a Colonial Marriage: Letters of a Colonial Lady, 1866-1871. Ed. Nancy Bonnin. Toowoomba: DDIP, 1985. Mason, Laura. Food Culture in Great Britain. Greenwood, 2004. Mennell, Stephen. All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present. Oxford, UK: B. Blackwell, 1985. Murcott, Anne. “The Cultural Significance of Food and Eating”. Proceedings of the Nutrition Society 41.02 (1982): 203–10. Newlyn, Andrea K. “Redefining ‘Rudimentary’ Narrative: Women’s Nineteenth Century Manuscript Cookbooks”. The Recipe Reader: Narratives, Contexts, Traditions. Ed. Janet Floyd and Laurel Forster. Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate, 2003. Rawson, Wilhelmina. Australian Enquiry Book of Household and General Information: A Practical Guide for the Cottage, Villa and Bush Home. Melbourne: Pater and Knapton, 1894. Sherman, S. “‘The Whole Art and Mystery of Cooking’: What Cookbooks Taught Readers in the Eighteenth Century”. Eighteenth-Century Life 28.1 (2004): 115–35. Singley, Blake. “‘Hardly Anything Fit for Man to Eat’: Food and Colonialism in Australia.” History Australia 9.3 (2012): 27–42. Theophano, Janet. Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote. New York, N.Y: Palgrave, 2002. Waterson, D. B. “A Darling Downs Quartet”. Queensland Heritage 1.7 (1967): 3–14. Waterson, D. B. Squatter, Selector and Storekeeper: A History of the Darling Downs, 1859-93. Sydney: Sydney UP, 1968. Wessell, Adele. “There’s No Taste Like Home: The Food of Empire”. Exploring the British World: Identity, Cultural Production, Institutions. Ed. Kate Darian-Smith and Patricia Grimshaw. Melbourne: RMIT, 2004.

Property as both an idea and a practice has been interpreted through the prism of a liberal, law and economics paradigm since at least the 18th century. This dominant (and domineering) perspective stresses the primacy of individualism, the power of exclusion, and the values of private commodity. By contrast, concepts of property that evolved out of the counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s challenged this hegemony. Countercultural, or Aquarian, ideas of property stressed pre-liberal, long forgotten property norms such as sociability, community, inclusion and personhood, and contested a private uniformity that seemed “totalizing and universalizing” (Blomley, Unsettling 102). This paper situates what it terms “Aquarian property” in the context of emergent property theory in the 1960s and 1970s, and the propertied practices these new theories engendered. Importantly, this paper also grounds Aquarian ideas of property to location. As legal geographers observe, the law inexorably occurs in place as well as time. “Nearly every aspect of law is located, takes place, is in motion, or has some spatial frame of reference” (Braverman et al. 1). Property’s radical yet simultaneously ancient alter-narrative found fertile soil where the countercultural experiment flourished. In Australia, one such place was the green, sub-tropical landscape of the New South Wales Northern Rivers, home of the 1973 Australian Union of Student’s Aquarius Festival at Nimbin. The Counterculture and Property Theory Well before the “Age of Aquarius” entered western youth consciousness (Munro-Clark 56), and 19 years before the Nimbin Aquarius Festival, US legal scholar Felix Cohen defined property in seminally private and exclusionary terms. To the world: Keep off X unless you have my permission, which I may grant or withhold.Signed: Private citizenEndorsed: The state. (374) Cohen’s formula was private property at its 1950s apogee, an unambiguous expression of its centrality to post-war materialism. William Blackstone’s famous trope of property as “that sole and despotic dominion” had become self-fulfilling (Rose, Canons). Why had this occurred? What had made property so narrow and instrumentalist to a private end? Several property theorists identify the enclosure period in the 17th and 18th centuries as seminal to this change (Blomley, Law; Graham). The enclosures, and their discourse of improvement and modernity, saw ancient common rights swept away in favour of the liberal private right. Property diversity was supplanted by monotony, group rights by the individual, and inclusion by exclusion. Common property rights were rights of shared use, traditionally agrarian incidents enjoyed through community membership. However, for the proponents of enclosure, common rights stood in the way of progress. Thus, what was once a vested right (such as the common right to glean) became a “mere practice”, condemned by its “universal promiscuity” and perceptions of vagrancy (Buck 17-8). What was once sited to context, to village and parish, evolved into abstraction. And what had meaning for person and place, “a sense of self; […] a part of a tribe’ (Neeson 180), became a tradable commodity, detached and indifferent to the consequences of its adverse use (Leopold). These were the transformed ideas of property exported to so-called “settler” societies, where colonialists demanded the secure property rights denied to them at home. In the common law tradition, a very modern yet selective amnesia took hold, a collective forgetting of property’s shared and sociable past (McLaren). Yet, property as commodity proved to be a narrow, one-sided account of property, an unsatisfactory “half right” explanation (Alexander 2) that omits inconvenient links between ownership on the one hand, and self and place on the other. Pioneering US conservationist Aldo Leopold detected as much a few years before Felix Cohen’s defining statement of private dominance. In Leopold’s iconic A Sand County Almanac, he wrote presciently of the curious phenomenon of hardheaded farmers replanting selected paddocks with native wildflowers. As if foreseeing what the next few decades may bring, Leopold describes a growing resistance to the dominant property paradigm: I call it Revolt – revolt against the tedium of the merely economic attitude towards land. We assume that because we had to subjugate the land to live on it, the best farm is therefore the one most completely tamed. These […] farmers have learned from experience that the wholly tamed farm offers not only a slender livelihood but a constricted life. (188)By the early 1960s, frustrations over the constrictions of post-war life were given voice in dissenting property literature. Affirming that property is a social institution, emerging ideas of property conformed to the contours of changing values (Singer), and the countercultural zeitgeist sweeping America’s universities (Miller). Thus, in 1964, Charles Reich saw property as the vanguard for a new civic compact, an ambitious “New Property” that would transform “government largess” into a property right to address social inequity. For Joseph Sax, property scholar and author of a groundbreaking citizen’s manifesto, the assertion of public property rights were critical to the protection of the environment (174). And in 1972, to Christopher Stone, it seemed a natural property incident that trees should enjoy equivalent standing to legal persons. In an age when “progress” was measured by the installation of plastic trees in Los Angeles median strips (Tribe), jurists aspired to new ideas of property with social justice and environmental resonance. Theirs was a scholarly “Revolt” against the tedium of property as commodity, an act of resistance to the centuries-old conformity of the enclosures (Blomley, Law). Aquarian Theory in Propertied Practice Imagining new property ideas in theory yielded in practice a diverse Aquarian tenure. In the emerging communes and intentional communities of the late 1960s and early 1970s, common property norms were unwittingly absorbed into their ethos and legal structure (Zablocki; Page). As a “way out of a dead-end future” (Smith and Crossley), a generation of young, mostly university-educated people sought new ways to relate to land. Yet, as Benjamin Zablocki observed at the time, “there is surprisingly little awareness among present-day communitarians of their historical forebears” (43). The alchemy that was property and the counterculture was given form and substance by place, time, geography, climate, culture, and social history. Unlike the dominant private paradigm that was placeless and universal, the tenurial experiments of the counter-culture were contextual and diverse. Hence, to generalise is to invite the problematic. Nonetheless, three broad themes of Aquarian property are discernible. First, property ceased being a vehicle for the acquisition of private wealth; rather it invested self-meaning within a communitarian context, “a sense of self [as] a part of a tribe.” Second, the “back to the land” movement signified a return to the country, an interregnum in the otherwise unidirectional post-enclosure drift to the city. Third, Aquarian property was premised on obligation, recognising that ownership was more than a bundle of autonomous rights, but rights imbricated with a corresponding duty to land health. Like common property and its practices of sustained yield, Aquarian owners were environmental stewards, with inter-connected responsibilities to others and the earth (Page). The counterculture was a journey in self-fulfillment, a search for personal identity amidst the empowerment of community. Property’s role in the counterculture was to affirm the under-regarded notion of property as propriety; where ownership fostered well lived and capacious lives in flourishing communities (Alexander). As Margaret Munro-Clark observed of the early 1970s, “the enrichment of individual identity or selfhood [is] the distinguishing mark of the current wave of communitarianism” (33). Or, as another 1970s settler remarked twenty years later, “our ownership means that we can’t liquefy our assets and move on with any appreciable amount of capital. This arrangement has many advantages; we don’t waste time wondering if we would be better off living somewhere else, so we have commitment to place and community” (Metcalf 52). In personhood terms, property became “who we are, how we live” (Lismore Regional Gallery), not a measure of commoditised worth. Personhood also took legal form, manifested in early title-holding structures, where consensus-based co-operatives (in which capital gain was precluded) were favoured ideologically over the capitalist, majority-rules corporation (Munro-Clark). As noted, Aquarian property was also predominantly rural. For many communitarians, the way out of a soulless urban life was to abandon its difficulties for the yearnings of a simpler rural idyll (Smith and Crossley). The 1970s saw an extraordinary return to the physicality of land, measured by a willingness to get “earth under the nails” (Farran). In Australia, communities proliferated on the NSW Northern Rivers, in Western Australia’s southwest, and in the rural hinterlands behind Queensland’s Sunshine Coast and Cairns. In New Zealand, intentional communities appeared on the rural Coromandel Peninsula, east of Auckland, and in the Golden Bay region on the remote northwestern tip of the South Island. In all these localities, land was plentiful, the climate seemed sunny, and the landscape soulful. Aquarians “bought cheap land in beautiful places in which to opt out and live a simpler life [...] in remote backwaters, up mountains, in steep valleys, or on the shorelines of wild coastal districts” (Sargisson and Sargent 117). Their “hard won freedom” was to escape from city life, suffused by a belief that “the city is hardly needed, life should spring out of the country” (Jones and Baker 5). Aquarian property likewise instilled environmental ethics into the notion of land ownership. Michael Metzger, writing in 1975 in the barely minted Ecology Law Quarterly, observed that humankind had forgotten three basic ecological laws, that “everything is connected to everything else”, that “everything must go somewhere”, and that “nature knows best” (797). With an ever-increasing focus on abstraction, the language of private property: enabled us to create separate realities, and to remove ourselves from the natural world in which we live to a cerebral world of our own creation. When we act in accord with our artificial world, the disastrous impact of our fantasies upon the natural world in which we live is ignored. (796)By contrast, Aquarian property was intrinsically contextual. It revolved around the owner as environmental steward, whose duty it was “to repair the ravages of previous land use battles, and to live in accord with the natural environment” (Aquarian Archives). Reflecting ancient common rights, Aquarian property rights internalised norms of prudence, proportionality and moderation of resource use (Rose, Futures). Simply, an ecological view of land ownership was necessary for survival. As Dr. Moss Cass, the Federal environment minister wrote in the preface to The Way Out: Radical Alternatives in Australia, ‘”there is a common conviction that something is rotten at the core of conventional human existence.” Across the Tasman, the sense of latent environmental crisis was equally palpable, “we are surrounded by glistening surfaces and rotten centres” (Jones and Baker 5). Property and Countercultural Place and Time In the emerging discipline of legal geography, the law and its institutions (such as property) are explained through the prism of spatiotemporal context. What even more recent law and geography scholarship argues is that space is privileged as “theoretically interesting” while “temporality is reduced to empirical history” (Braverman et al. 53). This part seeks to consider the intersection of property, the counterculture, and time and place without privileging either the spatial or temporal dimensions. It considers simply the place of Nimbin, New South Wales, in early May 1973, and how property conformed to the exigencies of both. Legal geographers also see property through the theory of performance. Through this view, property is a “relational effect, not a prior ground, that is brought into being by the very act of performance” (Blomley, Performing 13). In other words, doing does not merely describe or represent property, but it enacts, such that property becomes a reality through its performance. In short, property is because it does. Performance theory is liberating (Page et al) because it concentrates not on property’s arcane rules and doctrines, nor on the legal geographer’s alleged privileging of place over time, but on its simple doing. Thus, Nicholas Blomley sees private property as a series of constant and reiterative performances: paying rates, building fences, registering titles, and so on. Adopting this approach, Aquarian property is described as a series of performances, seen through the prism of the legal practitioner, and its countercultural participants. The intersection of counterculture and property law implicated my family in its performative narrative. My father had been a solicitor in Nimbin since 1948; his modest legal practice was conducted from the side annexe of the School of Arts. Equipped with a battered leather briefcase and a trusty portable typewriter, like clockwork, he drove the 20 miles from Lismore to Nimbin every Saturday morning. I often accompanied him on his weekly visits. Forty-one years ago, in early May 1973, we drove into town to an extraordinary sight. Seen through ten-year old eyes, surreal scenes of energy, colour, and longhaired, bare-footed young people remain vivid. At almost the exact halfway point in my father’s legal career, new ways of thinking about property rushed headlong and irrevocably into his working life. After May 1973, dinnertime conversations became very different. Gone was the mundane monopoly of mortgages, subdivisions, and cottage conveyancing. The topics now ranged to hippies, communes, co-operatives and shared ownerships. Property was no longer a dull transactional monochrome, a lifeless file bound in pink legal tape. It became an idea replete with diversity and innovation, a concept populated with interesting characters and entertaining, often quirky stories. If property is a narrative (Rose, Persuasion), then the micro-story of property on the NSW Northern Rivers became infinitely more compelling and interesting in the years after Aquarius. For the practitioner, Aquarian property involved new practices and skills: the registration of co-operatives, the drafting of shareholder deeds that regulated the use of common lands, the settling of idealistic trusts, and the ever-increasing frequency of visits to the Nimbin School of Arts every working Saturday. For the 1970s settler in Nimbin, performing Aquarian property took more direct and lived forms. It may have started by reading the open letter that festival co-organiser Graeme Dunstan wrote to the Federal Minister for Urban Affairs, Tom Uren, inviting him to Nimbin as a “holiday rather than a political duty”, and seeking his support for “a community group of 100-200 people to hold a lease dedicated to building a self-sufficient community [...] whose central design principles are creative living and ecological survival” (1). It lay in the performances at the Festival’s Learning Exchange, where ideas of philosophy, organic farming, alternative technology, and law reform were debated in free and unstructured form, the key topics of the latter being abortion and land. And as the Festival came to its conclusion, it was the gathering at the showground, titled “After Nimbin What?—How will the social and environmental experiment at Nimbin effect the setting up of alternative communities, not only in the North Coast, but generally in Australia” (Richmond River Historical Society). In the days and months after Aquarius, it was the founding of new communities such as Co-ordination Co-operative at Tuntable Creek, described by co-founder Terry McGee in 1973 as “a radical experiment in a new way of life. The people who join us […] have to be prepared to jump off the cliff with the certainty that when they get to the bottom, they will be all right” (Munro-Clark 126; Cock 121). The image of jumping off a cliff is a metaphorical performance that supposes a leap into the unknown. While orthodox concepts of property in land were left behind, discarded at the top, the Aquarian leap was not so much into the unknown, but the long forgotten. The success of those communities that survived lay in the innovative and adaptive ways in which common forms of property fitted into registered land title, a system otherwise premised on individual ownership. Achieved through the use of outside private shells—title-holding co-operatives or companies (Page)—inside the shell, the norms and practices of common property were inclusively facilitated and performed (McLaren; Rose, Futures). In 2014, the performance of Aquarian property endures, in the dozens of intentional communities in the Nimbin environs that remain a witness to the zeal and spirit of the times and its countercultural ideals. Conclusion The Aquarian idea of property had profound meaning for self, community, and the environment. It was simultaneously new and old, radical as well as ancient. It re-invented a pre-liberal, pre-enclosure idea of property. For property theory, its legacy is its imaginings of diversity, the idea that property can take pluralistic forms and assert multiple values, a defiant challenge to the dominant paradigm. Aquarian property offers rich pickings compared to the pauperised private monotone. 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