A Journey through Australia's Landscapes and Wildlife

Many countries around the world have wonderfully unique and amazing scenery and animals that are found nowhere else. Australia, the island continent, has its fair share. In fact some might say it has far more than its fair share.

The home of some of the oldest landscapes on Earth and with an amazing assemblage of marsupials and monotremes that have remained quarantined from the relatively hectic pace of evolutionary change that swept the rest of the globe. Animals like the monotremes - the platypus and echidna, remind us of a time, millions of years ago, when the evolution of mammals had just started. Although Australia also has its share of modern placental mammals that have moved across from the Asian continent in relatively recent times. They include rodents, many of our bats and, of course, man.

The landscape, having succumed to the forces of erosion over hundreds of millions of years, is now essentially flat. Once upon a time, its mountain ranges stood taller than the Himalayas and its dry dusty interior was cloaked in ancient rainforest. It's not easy to reconcile all this with what we see today, but perhaps you can glean some fragment of appreciation when you stand in a central Australian gorge and place your hands on the stone-embedded ripple marks in the quartzite strata; ripples that formed in an ancient, shallow sea before life itself ever existed on Earth. We can only pretend to imagne the time span - in fact, it is unimaginable.

So how much of this can I impart to you, the viewer through a website? Through a series of photographs? Quite honestly, I'm not sure, but I know that I would be remiss if I didn't try. After all, appreciation of our natural world is the cornerstone upon which we build a deeper understanding and concern for conservation. Something we all should do.

All of the scenery images that I take have no people in them and there are no human artifacts either. This is a deliberate ploy on my part, since this is how I see our natural world. Likewise the animals and birds are portrayed in their natural habitats and almost all have been photographed in the wild, which is ultimately the most rewarding experience for me. I also think that those of us who are conservationists at heart and have an eye for aesthetics will find that there is an added appeal and abiance in seeing wildlife 'at home' - that is, photographed in the context of their natural environments.

Bruce Thomson

AUSTRALIAN WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHIC
TOURS

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