Oral Histories and Scientific Knowledge in Understanding Environmental Change: a case study in the Tumut Region, NSW RUTH LANE What can professional land managers gain by consulting with local communities? Scientific knowledge provides valuable insights into the causes of environmental change and the processes by which it occurs but often lacks a historical dimension. Recollections of local people can supplement both historical records and scientific understandings of cause and process to achieve a more comprehensive picture of change over time. However, the process of memory is tied to life experience and is highly selective. Any attempt to use oral accounts in constructing a picture of environmental change over time must also include an analysis of the process of memory itself. Drawing on oral histories with long term residents of the Tumut region of NSW, this paper explores the nature of local environmental knowledge and evaluates oral history as a source of information for understanding environmental history and the impact of changing patterns of land use. In a recent issue of this journal, Finlayson and Brizga (1995) warn that oral sources may contain major misconceptions of past environments and describe examples of poor land management decisions based on oral traditions that enshrined gross misunder- standings within the locally accepted version of environmental history. Their study provides a valuable cautionary tale, but should not divert attention from the potential of local knowledge, used appropriately, to provide valuable information that can inform and extend professional knowledge bases in ways that other sources cannot. This paper examines the uses of oral history in understanding the patterns of environmental change in the Tumut region of New South Wales and the responses of local people to change. The high country just to the east of Tumut is typical of the kind of country on the western slopes of the Australian Alps, and the history of land use change in the Tumut region has many parallels throughout the Southern Tablelands. Two specific localities, Tumorrama and Argalong, are examined in more detail. Of the two, Argalong is steeper and less accessible country which pastoralists were slower to occupy than Tumorrama and had less incentive 195 Australian Geographical Studies • July 1997 • 35(2):195-205 Ruth Lane is curator, People’s Interaction with the Australian Environment, National Museum of Australia, GPO Box 1901, Canberra, ACT 2601.