TRAVEL the length and breadth of Australia and you will find a breathtaking variety of environments, from the rainforests of the Pacific seaboard, the scrub woodlands fringing the Southern Ocean to the centre's harsh deserts dominated by tough mulga bushes, and the monsoon-governed north.
These environments can be divided into interrelated, patchily distributed subenvironments, each characterised by its microclimate, soils and flora. Even a short journey can take you across myriad landscapes, only some of which have been blatantly altered, or ruined, to suit the needs of their human inhabitants. What a strange wonderland all this must have seemed more than two centuries ago to the early visitors from a crowded Europe.
Events of the past, global and local, have shaped the modern scenery of Australia, the low continent. And this past has been dominated by great geological episodes, including the generation of broad cratonic areas in the west and ...
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