Governing nature : the problem of Northern Australia

Scholars have explored the history of attitudes toward northern Australia primarily in the context of the White Australia policy and its implications for the troubling human diversity of the north. This article argues that alongside this history is another story, in which the problem of northern Australia was not so much about managing humanity, as managing nature. This article explores the way in which conceptions of northern Australia, and ambitions for its development from the late nineteenth century, were shaped by two intellectual traditions that find their origins in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British imperialism: political economy, and a Protestant theology of mankind’s proper relationship with the earth.