Australia's Four-Billion-Year Diary
by Reg Morrison
click here to see his website

Price

$16.90+ postage

ISBN: 0-958 1055-2-9

Schools email for a speical price.

In this FANTASTIC book the life of our planet has been told in 12 calander months.Australia is the time capsule of planet Earth. The evolutionary story embedded in the continent’s rocks, in its fossil record, and in the genes of its modern plants and animals encompasses 95% of our planet’s lifetime.

In documenting this, Australia’s Four-Billion-Year Diary also takes us on a 100,000 kilometre voyage round the world, visiting both poles not once, but twice! During this epic odyssey Australia’s older components have been crumpled into alpine folds, stretched and fragmented, sheeted in ice, inundated by seas, clothed in lush rainforest and scorched to desert. It has been a momentous journey.

To bring unimaginable spans of time within easy grasp, the life of the planet has been set against a single calendar year and divided into twelve ‘monthly’ instalments. Each of these instalments outlines the physical development of the continental raft during that ‘month’, and in a parallel ‘Diary of You,’ ticks off some of the coincidental biological milestones that now help to make us what we are.

Reg Morrison has been photographing and writing about Australia, its people, plants and animals, for almost four decades, and in 1986 he was appointed an Associate of the Australian Museum in recognition of his work. During that period he authored three books on Australia, and one on the evolutionary origins of humanity’s massive impact on the global environment.