Epilogue: Future Research Directions

Abstract

In addition to offering new and stimulating perspectives on climate, science, and colonization, we hope this book will inspire new research and approaches on these themes and topics. We hope, for instance, that the chapters in this collection might serve as starting points for developing stronger comparisons of different climatic understandings in and beyond Australia and New Zealand. Such comparative work is important because much of the historiography on Australian and New Zealand climates has been dominated by an implicit methodological orientation that positions the nation-state as the privileged frame for environmental stories. As work within the evolving realm of transnational history has shown us, and as the volume’s contributors have demonstrated, a focus on localities and networks renders problematic the framing of environments within take-for-granted political boundaries by highlighting the intricate, albeit uneven, intersections of climate variability, environmental learning and everyday practice that have taken place across New Zealand and Australia. As this book illustrates, just as the climatic processes that have shaped Australia and New Zealand cross political boundaries, so too have ideas and learning moved between the two countries and flowed to the rest of the world. For example, Kirsty Douglas (chapter 5) has demonstrated the fruitfulness of international comparative research between Australia and the United States, while Matt Henry (chapter 12) has highlighted how geopolitical considerations shaped the ways in which weather forecasts were understood, recorded and circulated.