Australia: a Biography - The Beginnings from the Cosmos to the Genesis of Gondwana, and its Rivers, Forests, Flora, Fauna and Fecundity

By Eric Rolls, St Lucia: UQP, 2000, 320 pages, paperback, $35.00. Reviewed by George Seddon in the September 2001 issue.

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This book is a flawed gem, but nonetheless a gem. The first hundred or so pages are, as I see it, a mistake. His 'biography of Australia' begins with a brief history of the cosmos followed by a sprint through the physical and evolutionary history of the planet before we get to a recognisable Australia. What can be said for this section is that Rolls writes well, as always; has done a great deal of homework, especially in reading and recording recent research; he reports it with a high degree of accuracy, even getting right the spelling of all but a few of the welter of scientific names, no mean feat. The oddest slip is that he calls Agonis 'the Native Cedar'; it is usually called the Peppermint, with good reason. Does he mean Toona australis, which is unrelated?

Rolls is remarkably thorough. In going through the palaeontological record we even get the microfossils -- the conodontsand foraminifera, for example, so useful for indicating age equivalence and sometimes, conditions of deposition. Moreover, Rolls seems to have seen specimens through a microscope and wondered at their intricate beauty ('For whose eyes were they made?' he puzzles). But none of this can conceal the endless piling up of information, tied together only by broad chronological sequence and the author's enthusiasm. There is no delving into process, only a cheery teleology attributing purpose and direction (of fish with lobe fins that had humerus, radius and ulna, he suggests that 'perhaps they were preparing to be crocodiles', p 52). The teleology is tongue in cheek and unobjectionable in itself but it is hardly enough to drive the section.

By the time we get to the Tertiary, however, Rolls hits his straps and gets better and better as he goes on. The difference is that once he gets into the recent past and the present, he can talk in terms of function, process, ecosystems, and the book becomes magical, a celebration of all creatures great and small. Especially small. Not just the tiny mammals and the insects but all the invertebrates from soil bacteria to sea lice. Rolls' knowledge, backed by current scientific research is very often confirmed by direct personal observation. He seems to have been everywhere, seen everything, so the book is deeply personal and in effect, lyrical, although the prose is chaste.

What shines through above all is his sense of wonder at the beauty and intricacy of the created world, although this is never stated directly. But there is also a keen sense of loss, since he is often obliged to use the past tense of self-balancing systems that are no more; so we have eulogy and elegy. He describes, for example, the value of riverine forest as water filters: 'Waterbrown with mud reveals the bottom at a metre's depth after travelling forty kilometres through Barmah-Millewa conglomeration of forests' (p 218). And so it was on the Namoi 'when it was a living river instead of an irrigation canal'.

This is a valuable text for conservationists in that Rolls knows and shows the value of what Australia has lost or is losing, but the voice is never shrill and he avoids over simplification, indeed embraces complexity. For example, fire 'is a necessary disruption, renewal of feeding grounds, provided it does not burn a huge area. A homogeneous landscape is unattractive to plant and animal including ourselves'. But it is horses for courses; some plants, some animals, need cool burns, some hot, some early in the season, or late, some crown fires, some brush and under storey, some frequent, some infrequent, some never. And Rolls knows which is which.

This is the first of two volumes. The second, still to come, will be The Peopling of the continent. Eric Rolls has already shown his hand; he accepts the hypothesis put forward by the archaeologist Mike Morwood that Homo erectus got to Australia, and that Homo sapiens evolved separately from Homo erectus in a number of centres, of which Australia was one. So we can look forward to the new volume. In the meantime, read this one.

Citation

• George Seddon. 'Review: Australia: a Biography - The Beginnings from the Cosmos to the Genesis of Gondwana, and its Rivers, Forests, Flora, Fauna and Fecundity by Eric Rolls' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), September 2001. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 10 September 2010].

Back Cover Blurb

• Eric Rolls, author of the much loved They All Ran Wild and A Million Wild Acres, has explained Australia as no one else could. An exciting story of natural events and scientific discovery, Australia: A Biography takes us from the infinity of creation to the detail of Australia's land, plants and animals.

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