This chapter investigates the four narratives of place which exemplify the complex and ambiguous environmental, racial, social and ethnic semiotics that inflected the pastoral cartographies created by Scots and Irish squatters in Victoria and New South Wales. Charles Fetherstonhaugh, James Hamilton and William Moodie wrote autobiographies celebrating Australia's pioneering era and their role in it. It is apparent that for some squatters, the indigenous presence formed a disquieting element within their colonial present. Acts of enclosure such as those by Patrick Coady Buckley created a new and, for settlers, arguably universal vocabulary of landscape. Scottish architecture offers firmer grounds on which to establish deliberate invocations of ethnic memory. Each squatter's engagement with the physical landscape depended upon cognitive behaviour and environmental learning that were equally subjective. The place meanings enacted in the pastoral landscapes of Victoria and New South Wales by Irish and Scottish squatters were characteristically ambiguous.

This chapter summarises the book’s principal conclusions about the experience of motherhood in England in the post-1945 decades. It concludes that motherhood is a subject fraught with contradictions and ambiguities and these tensions are reflected in the way women now articulate their attitudes to, and experiences of, motherhood. It demonstrates the real difficulties that mothers from all backgrounds have faced and which were visible in all aspects of their lives. However it also argues that the stereotyping of the immediate post-war period as one of conservatism before the changes that began in the late 1960s and 1970s means that women’s activism and the ways in which they were already organising themselves to improve their lives has tended to be disregarded. Women used their shared experience of being mothers of young children to develop social networks and form communities of women with the aim of alleviating some of difficulties and inequities they faced.

This chapter introduces present green literary criticism that is used on late medieval texts and ecocritical literary study. It first tries to define the term ecocriticism and then addresses the issue of anthropocentrism. This chapter also tries to show an analogy between ecosystems and literary analysis, and takes a look at several texts that have been subjected to green criticism.

Edward Macarthur, like all the colonial lobbyists and officials, regarded metropolitan influence as critical for colonial concerns. This chapter considers lobbyists campaigning on the Cape Colony or New South Wales, demonstrating that lobbyists who dealt with quite different issues nevertheless shared an understanding of colonial power and how it might be manipulated. As the networks of colonial lobbyists overlapped one another, the chapter looks first at the activities of those lobbying on New South Wales, and then at those associated with the Cape Colony. It focuses on the lobbying of Exclusives and Emancipists before 1843 as seen through their competing networks. The chapter traces the Macarthurs' reflections on the nature and legitimacy of political lobbying over the next fifteen years. Aside from their different focuses and networks, John Philip and Thomas Fowell Buxton's tactics, perceptions of the use of information, and of metropolitan society analysed by their lobbying experiences.

This chapter sums up the key findings of this study on Italian language learning in England during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It highlights the significant contributions of John Florio and Giovanni Torriano in the teaching and learning of the Italian language in England. This chapter also analyses the works of John Milton and suggests that he is the last significant example in seventeenth-century England of a student learning the Italian language primarily to benefit from the wealth of its literary heritage, rather than for the more practical and increasingly popular motives of travel and trade.

This chapter argues that the social context cannot be discounted when assessing tribunalists' responses to pacifist sentiments. Their hostility to expressions of conscience was often apparent; less obvious, but equally prevalent, was their anxiety not to excite local grievances by demonstrably inconsistent or inequitable judgements. The broader criticism of the Tribunals is more difficult to rebut. Defining ‘conscience’ was a further problem for the Tribunals. It is suggested that local Tribunals were dealing peremptorily with conscientious objectors. The Tribunal were prepared to take the initiative in setting the terms of their authority in cases of conscience. A conscience of palpable integrity might entice a notable degree of respect from a Tribunal. Northamptonshire was a predominantly rural county with a strong tradition of voluntary recruitment. The Tribunals' ability to bridge the resulting gap largely determined the utility of their respective policies on conscience.

This chapter addresses the process of educating women to be mothers. It asks whether commentators in these decades, and women themselves, felt that they needed to be taught how to mother or whether they thought it came naturally to them. It then considers the debate about where this instruction should take place, and who should provide it: home, school, or medical professionals. The chapter charts how changing attitudes about the roles women should be performing, both at a governmental and societal level, determined how girl were educated to become adult women. Through an analysis of the oral history interviews the influence of these national debates on individual experiences is shown. Three principal discursive models surrounding education for motherhood are discussed: motherhood as innate, commonsensical, or a skill that needed to be learnt.

This chapter outlines the history of colonisation, settlement, and decolonisation in Mauritius and the Chagos Archipelago. It shows that the inhabitants of the Chagos Archipelago were already marginal within colonial Mauritius, and that their marginality was compounded by their relocation to Mauritius during the decade around independence, which was a period of social, economic, and political unrest.

This chapter describes Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy's pacifism over her militancy. She wrote of ‘our outlanders’ at home, castigating the government for preparing to defend the rights of disenfranchised male settlers in the Boer Republics of South Africa while every British woman remained without a political voice. Her personal construction of militancy was never one that would envisage the loss of human life. Elizabeth's peerless organisational skills and her philosophy of ‘consent’ to government based on personal autonomy were crucial in achieving the success of the National Convention. She undertook the arduous work following the National Convention at a time of extreme anxiousness in her private life. Her engagement with socialist ideals took a final and possibly surprising turn and her total commitment to the style of militancy advocated by the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) was revised.

The use of computer-mediated communication (CMC) might contribute to the formation of new forms and processes of politics, or cyberspace itself may become normalised, its politics merely reflecting offline politics. This chapter outlines the most suitable theoretical framework for the analysis of environmentalists' activities to establish a coherent understanding of technological change. Social movement theories explain the formation, nature and workings of social movements, and explore the how and the why of their actions and their impact upon civil society. Any examination of CMC use by activists requires not only an understanding of the processes of political activism but a framework through which technological change can be conceptualised. There has been relatively little attempt to examine the implications of CMC use within social movement debates.