‘THE OLD COUNTRY’ for my mother, Australian born, was Britain, as for most of her generation, although she had never set foot on its sacred soil. Neither had she ever been Home, although she first left it (in central Queensland) at the age of twenty–three to be married, and returned to it often.

For my generation, Australia is the old country. Many of our landscapes are old. Although they have undergone countless cycles of weathering, they have not experienced the cataclysms of mountain building resulting in the Rockies and the Sierras that transformed the ‘New World’ and the Alps in the ‘Old World’ (thus made new). Massive glaciations later scoured both continents in the Ice Age, wiping the slate clean, a new beginning for plants and man.

Our last comparable Ice Age was in the Permian, not one million but more than two hundred million years ago, when most of the western third of the continent was scoured and scored, the striations sometimes still to be seen in the ancient granites and gneisses of the Darling Plateau near sunny Perth.

Geology is a continuum so, like every other land-mass, Australia has rocks of all ages from the Archaeozoic – almost the beginning of earth-time – to the present, including comparatively recent volcanic activity in Victoria and the drowning of a substantial fringe of coastal land when the seas rose with the melting of Pleistocene ice some 10 000 years ago.