Dr Rachel Sanderson

Rachel Sanderson

Dr Rachel Sanderson is an historian whose main areas of research are environmental history and history of science.

In 2006 Rachel was jointly awarded the National Museum of Australia's Student Prize for the History of Australian Science. Rachel's essay, 'Many Beautiful Things', covered colonial botany in North Queensland rainforests.

After completing her PhD, Rachel worked as a co-writer and researcher on a French-Australian feature length documentary film, End of the Rainbow. The film, which examines gold mining in Kalimantan and West Africa, was awarded the First Appearance prize at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam in 2007. It will be screened on SBS television in 2008.

Australian environmental history, history of science, history of environmentalism.

• Tangled Visions. A history of scientific understandings of tropical rainforest in North Queensland.
• Memoirs of a Plague. Feature length documentary film.

R Sanderson, 'Re-writing the history of Australia's tropical rainforests: alien invasives or ancient indigenes?', forthcoming in Environment and History, 2008.

R Sanderson, 'Many beautiful things: colonial botanists and the North Queensland rainforests', Historical Records of Australian Science, June 2007, vol. 17, no. 3.

R Sanderson, 'The battle for the Daintree', National Library of Australia News, July 2004, vol. 14, no. 10.

R Sanderson, 'Visions of progress in the North Queensland rainforests', Limina, 2004, vol. 10, pp. 98-116.

R Sanderson, 'Queensland shows the world: globalisation, regionalism and modernity at Brisbane's World Expo 88', Journal of Australian Studies, 2003, vol. 79, pp. 65-77.