Before Environmental Law: A History of a Vanishing Continent

This open access book unveils the history of defending Australia's natural environment and examines the subject's legal and political contexts from the birth of the nation in 1901 until the advent of the so—called modern era of environmental regulation in the late 1960s.

It rejects the mythology that Australia lacked environmental law before the late 1960s in revealing how many of today's environmental laws, from pollution control to nature conservation, emerged from precedents or events mu...