Steve Morton - Australian Deserts: Ecology and Landscapes

Steve Morton 2022

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.

ISBN: 9781486305995 (pbk)

ISBN: 9781486306008 (epdf)

ISBN: 9781486306015 (epub)

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Morton S (2022) Australian Deserts: Ecology and Landscapes. CSIRO Publishing, Melbourne.

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Front cover: Foothills of the MacDonnell Ranges, with rich plant life dominated in the foreground by mulla mullas (photo by Mike Gillam).

Back cover: Itjaritjari, a marsupial mole, on a rare excursion to the surface of a sand dune (photo by Mike Gillam).

Title page: Budgerigars in synchronised flight, caught at the instant when their wings have folded (photo by Mike Gillam).

Set in 10.5/14 Palatino and Optima

Edited by Anne Findlay, Melbourne

Cover design by Cath Pirret

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Index by Bruce Gillespie

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Acknowledgement

CSIRO acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the lands that we live and work on across Australia and pays its respect to Elders past and present. CSIRO recognises that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have made and will continue to make extraordinary contributions to all aspects of Australian life including culture, economy and science. CSIRO is committed to reconciliation and demonstrating respect for Indigenous knowledge and science. The use of Western science in this publication should not be interpreted as diminishing the knowledge of plants, animals and environment from Indigenous ecological knowledge systems.

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Oct21_01

Nature documentaries became popular in the 1980s because of David Attenboroughs wonderful film making. At the time I was a young scientist in Alice Springs and enjoyed many experiences working with film crews keen to display the red Australian desert on screen. On one occasion I met with a visiting group in our laboratory, to advise on potential locations for various scenes, and then welcomed them on their return some days later. I was familiar with conditions in the bush and used to seeing people come back to town unkempt and in dirty clothes but this group looked as if they had spent the week in a dust storm. The reason became apparent when I asked how things had gone. Wonderfully well. We got nearly everything we were after, and quickly, but we could not find the images we needed of blowing sand dunes. In the end we fixed the problem by clearing the spinifex off a dune and creating a big expanse of bare sand. We finished this morning with a good wind. Excellent outcome!

I was a polite young man, so I smiled and congratulated the group on a successful trip. Internally, though, I remember disquieting feelings of ecological disorientation. What on Earth did they think they were doing? The spinifex they had removed is a tough desert plant with its own distinctive story of desert life, and home to a unique array of specialised animals. But my film makers had brought with them in their minds an unshakeable picture of wind-blown dunes, derived of course from typical images of the Sahara Desert, and reality had been erased to serve a myth. The scientist in me declared in favour of realities, of telling of arid Australia as it is. Some decades later, this motivation to describe the place on its own merits lies behind my book.

Inland Australia is known to most Australians only by reputation or by fleeting visit, so an overlay of fable is to be expected. In any case, myths often serve their own good purposes, and I am not driven by any need to tear them apart. Rather, as an ecologist, I want to speak up about what we do know of the Australian deserts. Scientists are thin on the ground, yet over the past decades they have created a body of learning that reveals much about the Outback, about its plants and animals, and about how through evolutionary time these occupants of the desert came to call it home. I attempt here to distil that knowledge.

The book is based on science, although it is written as a narrative rather than as a scientific text, without ranks of numbers or tables of statistical analysis. A glossary explains necessary scientific terms, yet they are kept to a minimum. Each section aims to draw out what is most illuminating about the lives of a group of plants or animals, especially in relation to peculiarities of climate and continental history. Each chapter finishes with summaries of what has been learned.

Management of natural resources is not considered in the book. Such topics have, indeed, frequently stimulated much of the research that is summarised, yet I have left them mostly on the periphery. Likewise, traditional knowledge of Aboriginal people, their land management, and their influences on the environment of inland Australia are of great significance, as mentioned in several sections. Yet both these matters demand their own focus, and several fine book-length treatments of them are recommended to readers in Chapter 9.

The book is a celebration of the Australian deserts, of 5 million square kilometres of wonderful . Additionally, it is a tribute to the patient and diligent accumulation of knowledge by numerous scientists and of their insights into why arid Australia is as it is. I hope that it enhances your understanding as you experience the Outback for yourself.

Fig. 0.1. Map of Australia showing places mentioned in the text.

The photographs are by Mike Gillam, with only three images credited otherwise. Mike Gillam lives in Alice Springs and his photographs focus on his home region of central Australia. He and I had to confront the impossibility of representing the variety of the entire arid zone in a modest number of photographs, and so we decided to use his images to reflect the text for this one part of the Outback as a representation of the whole.