The Voyage of Continent Australiainland grasses. Charles Darwin described the landscape when he reached the Bathurst
plains during his visit to Australia in January 1836 as follows:
The extreme uniformity of the vegetation is the most remarkable feature of the landscape of
the greater part of New South Wales. Everywhere we have an open woodland, the ground
being partially covered with a very thin pasture. The trees nearly all belong to one family, and
mostly have their leaves placed in a vertical, instead of, as in Europe, in a nearly horizontal
position: the foliage is scanty, and of a peculiar pale green tint, without any gloss. Hence the
woods appear light and shadowless.The plants of Australia were also forged in the fire generated from lightning strikes
and later by Aborigines using fire to capture animals for food. Eucalypts encourage
fire because of the high volatile oil content in their leaves but have the ability to
recover from the hottest fires and within months their trunks and main branches start
to bristle with new leaf growth. This ability to recover from fire through budding
and regrowth from the trunk is unique to the eucalypts. Firestick burning was used
by the Aborigines to produce a flush of new shoots favoured by grazing marsupials
which could be more easily hunted in a contained area. Fire also favours the growth
of underground tubers such as yams which formed a staple of the Aboriginal diet.
Many plants that are destroyed by fire have seeds that will regenerate in their place,
for example banksias hold their seeds in woody fruits that open when the parent plant
is burnt, and wattle seeds can lie dormant in the soil for years until germinating in
response to heat from fire.
It was around the time of the break-up of Gondwanaland that three lineages of
mammals emerged. The most primitive are the egg-laying monotremes such as the
platypus which is only found in Australia, and the echidna which is only found in
Australia and New Guinea. The second lineage are the marsupials which raise their
young in pouches and are fed by a nipple inside the pouch and are almost exclusively
only found in Australasia. The third group, the placental mammals, which includes
ourselves, had the baby’s development take place entirely within the mother’s womb
and these are mainly found in the northern hemisphere. These are the dominant
group of mammals found throughout most of the world but for some reason it is the
marsupials that have thrived in Australia.
The platypus and the echidna are enigmas of the animal world. If they had been
found as fossils they would have created less astonishment than they do as living
creatures. The unusual appearance of the platypus, this egg-laying, duck-billed,
beaver-tailed, otter-footed mammal, baffled European naturalists when they first
encountered it. In fact, when the first platypus skin was sent back to England in 1799 it
was considered an elaborate hoax. Monotremes are the most primitive of all mammals,
17