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Australia's environment encompasses a vast range, from tropical rainforest to temperate grasslands and sandy desert dunefields. Only perennial snow and ice are missing, though they were once here, as this book shows, and helped to shape the continent as it drifted northward to its present location. Stimulating, harsh, relentless, abundant, this natural environment has confronted two great cultures... More

Australia's environment encompasses a vast range, from tropical rainforest to temperate grasslands and sandy desert dunefields. Only perennial snow and ice are missing, though they were once here, as this book shows, and helped to shape the continent as it drifted northward to its present location. Stimulating, harsh, relentless, abundant, this natural environment has confronted two great cultures, that of the Aborigines and that of modern capitalist civilization: both have had to learn its rules and bend to its whims. Australia, the "hag of the five continents" as one poet put it, is here examined scientifically as to its climates, hydrology, landform evolution and character, soils, vegetation and hazards as an aid to understanding. Understanding is necessary because the problems are formidable. Once an easy trust in technology assumed that all would be well, that the country could be conquered by money, labour and imported know-how; those easy technical solutions are now reaping the harvest of salinity, soil erosion and land degradation reported here. The scientific study of Australia, which can result in a more successful land use in an end to environmental degradation, is here reported at its present stage. In many areas a specifically Australian picture is emerging, to complement the generalizations mostly drawn from northern hemisphere studies. Based on work mainly carried out by geographers in Australian universities, this is a comprehensive short survey of what is now known of the Australian natural environment.

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