'Mulligan and Hill's Ecological Pioneers provides a rate conjunction: a rattling good read that is also a work of wide-ranging yet meticulously detailed scholarship … its emphasis on the human and the vulnerable makes for an account that is more than usually engaging … it is my opinion that this is a very fine book … what emerges is an informative, compelling, compassionate, grounded and immensely entertaining social history of Australian environmentalism.' Ecopolitics
1. Introduction; 2. The colonisation of Australian nature and the first stirrings of ecological thought; 3. Seeing the land in a new light: people and landscapes in Australian art; 4. Of drovers' wives and a timeless land: land and identity in Australian literature; 5. Taking nature to the public: nature education in public media; 6. Towards a conservation ethic: birth of the conservation movement; 7. Working at the edges of mainstream science: Australian innovations in ecological science; 8. Thinking like an ecosystem: Australian innovations in reconceptualising and redesigning land and resource management; 9. Challenging terra nullius views of people and nature: on the origins and impact of the Aboriginal Land Rights Movement; 10. Green politics in the wide brown land: the cross-fertilisation of wilderness politics and social justice agendas; 11. Towards a communicative ethic: some Australian contributions to ecophilosophy; 12. Conclusions.