My research interests extend across the full domain of Australian environmental law. They also include many aspects of cultural history. My initial interest was Australian art, with a particular emphasis on the colonial period, the subject of three of my first books. Then my interests extended to interrelationships between art, sicnece and exploration, which I examined in my book, Burke and Wills: From Melbourne to Myth. In The Colonial Earth I brought by legal and cultural interests together for the first time in a substantial way as I examined the origins of environmental concern in Australia. In Good Living Street my focus switched to Central Europe and Vienna, with questions of art, religion and identity looming large in a mult-generational family history focussing on my mother, maternal grandmother and great-grandmother
