Early career researchers: meet Dr Jarrod Hore

We had the pleasure of chatting with Dr Jarrod Hore, an environmental historian of settler colonial landscapes, published author and prolific collaborator. During our conversation, Jarrod spoke about how his unique upbringing shaped his sensitivity to landscapes and environments and the many privileges and rewards in his line of work.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

I’m a historian of settler colonial landscapes, nature writing, and geology in the New Earth Histories Research Group, which is within the School of Humanities and Languages. I was trained as a historian at Macquarie University, where I did a PhD on the transnational connections between early landscape photographers in Australia and California, and I moved to UNSW in 2019 to work with Professor Alison Bashford. My book on those landscape photographers and their understandings of settler colonialism, Indigenous dispossession, and environmental beauty came out last year, published by the University of California Press as Visions of Nature: How Landscape Photography Shaped Settler Colonialism.

Since moving to UNSW, I’ve been expanding my research into colonial geology and resource extraction. I’m currently a postdoctoral researcher on an ARC project called ‘Antipodean Geology,’ which involves studying the modern history of the ancient supercontinent Gondwanaland. My role on this project has been to examine the work of a series of geologists working in the southern hemisphere to identify and extract certain materials – coal, diamonds, oil – just before ‘Gondwana-Land’ was hypothesised in the late 19^th century. I’m hoping to show that their work collecting all this data was more important to the acceptance of the theory than has traditionally been understood. 

In addition to the nuts and bolts of this work, I also serve as the Co-Chair of the Faculty’s early-career representative committee and as the Co-Director of the research group New Earth Histories.

What or who sparked your interest in this area of research?

I’ve always had a lot of very encouraging teachers and lecturers who have helped point the way to interesting or under-researched topics. During my PhD, I wrote a chapter about the relationships between the camera and the geological survey in the American West. I remember thinking then that this historical moment when technologies, practices, and materials (in this case, the camera, the survey, and newly valuable resources like coal) were coming together in new ways that needed further investigation. I’m certainly not the only person doing this, but I’d like to think that my work is part of a new wave of historical interest in environments and how they are both culturally and technologically understood/produced. 

On a deeper level, my family background is in farming – market garden, dairy, and some cattle – and I think this led to some kind of attunement with or attention to environmental processes from a very young age. As children, my brother and I were always out in the bush, and I happened to go to a high school where students were taught quite high-level bushcraft. In some ways, all these things have stuck with me as I’ve begun to write about landscapes and environments, and I’d like to think they infuse my interest in environmental history and, of course, my writing.

What are you working on right now? 

I’m currently working on two related things. The first is a collection of essays and chapters that I am assembling and editing with Professor Alison Bashford and Professor Pratik Chakrabarti from the University of Houston. The book is about the modern history of Gondwanaland, the southern hemisphere supercontinent consisting of Australia, India, Antarctica, Africa, and South America that existed 200 million years ago. This is an ARC Discovery project that we’ve been working on since 2021 (Chief Investigators are Professor Bashford and environmental historian at Flinders University, Dr Alessandro Antonello). The book includes chapters from historians and other researchers covering each of the places that once were part of Gondwanaland. The interesting thing about Gondwanaland is that it had this powerful life after it was first suggested as a geological idea. It now means very different things in India, where it originated as a name for the lands of the Adivasi Gond people and also in Australia, South Africa, and South America. This is what we’re trying to set out and make sense of in the book. 

The second thing I’m working on is my next book, which will be a history of modern earth science from a series of southern hemisphere sites that have always been kind of peripheral in the histories of geology and of science. In this book, I’m aiming to explain how the mid-20th century consensus about a dynamic, mobile crust depended upon the collection of vast amounts of information from resource frontiers outside of Europe and North America. This history has conventionally been told from the perspective of English or American geologists and geophysicists, but I’ve been investigating the figures at the other end of the information chain; geologists and prospectors looking for resources like good soil, coal, diamonds, and oil in India, Australia, South Africa, Brazil, and the middle East.

What do you find most rewarding about being a researcher? 

Many of my historian colleagues love the time they spend in archives, in close contact (both intellectually and physically) with the different records that they use to compose their articles, chapters, and books. This kind of work is a great privilege for historians, especially because of the focus that it requires and rewards. For me though, I think the most rewarding aspect of my work is the time I get to spend talking about ideas – both formally and informally – with colleagues. I get a real thrill out of the shift in perspective that can only really come from sustained and focused discussions with brilliant thinkers and writers.

What piece of advice would you give to other early career researchers?

I’m reluctant to offer advice. I don’t really think there is a way to ‘hack’ the juggle, and something that works well for one person is unlikely to work well for someone else. When I’m struggling with this though, I like to think of the unique opportunity academics have to do good work, be it researching or teaching. That can sound like a bit of a cop-out, but I think it does mean something (or at least I hope it does).

To learn more about Dr Jarrod Hore’s research, projects and achievements, visit his Researcher Profile.