Ian Hoskins

Teoksen Sydney Harbour tekijä

5 teosta 46 jäsentä 1 Review

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Sydney Harbour (2009) 20 kappaletta

Coast: A History of the New South Wales Edge (2013) 10 kappaletta

Rivers (2020) 9 kappaletta

Australia & the Pacific: A history (2021) 6 kappaletta

Was thinking of home today .... North Sydney and the Great War (2008) 1 kappale

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Rivers: The Lifeblood of Australia

When I was a girl, I learned the geography of my home state with a plastic template and a box of coloured pencils. One of the few teachers I remember from my peripatetic education was the redoubtable Mrs Sheedy, who set us the task of marking railway routes and rivers on the maps we made with the template. Woe betide you if you couldn't mark them in the correct places without an atlas when it was time for testing. So I grew up knowing where these features were, but also with the assumption that rivers were like railway lines, fixed and immutable.

Which, as we in Australia know, is far from the case.

Ian Hoskins begins this fascinating book with the story of an old atlas of Australia that is a revelation to him:

Most numerous of all are the thousands of thin blue lines—tremulous, organic and almost wriggling across the pages. These are waterways of various sizes, some of them feeding into lakes, others emptying into the sea, many petering out soon after they begin. There are hundreds of 'swamps' that today we would call wetlands. Some of these have no doubt disappeared in the past 50 years with agricultural reclamation and climate change. It is a revelation to see that the driest inhabited continent on the planet is literally covered with water, or at least its traces. The creeks are too numerous to count and, it would seem, too numerous to name. The rivers are identified, but there are many that are unfamiliar to me. The atlas distinguishes between 'perennial' and 'non-perennial' rivers and streams, with the latter being far more abundant. So the many lines and swamps represent potential, rather than actual ever-present water. (p.5)

To reinforce the point, this text is accompanied by a full page colour photo in marked contrast to the beautiful one on the front cover, of the bone dry salt pan that we know as Lake Eyre/Kata Thanda, typifying the character of Australia's inland as a parched, dead centre. Hoskins reminds us that it's also the end point for water from Queensland's Channel Country and is periodically transformed into an inland sea. But that aberration is never going to replace the image of a lake that isn't a lake in my mind. To me it's the place where Donald Campbell set his world land speed record in 1964. We watched the newsreel on TV (click the link) and were awed by the desolation of the landscape.

The chapter goes on to reshape ideas about Australia's rivers in other ways. Hoskins tells us about the 1971 Ramsay convention, the first modern treaty to protect the interconnected wetlands of the world... and there are cases in international courts that signal that the intrinsic right to exist has been extended from animals to plants, and on to landforms and ecosystems. He quotes the memoir in which the author Jill Ker Conway describes how her parents' property was transformed from a patch of red dust into an Edenic garden as seeds lying dormant in the soil sprang into life. River water also carries seeds along, spreading species—some of which are not always welcome. Willow trees romanticised in English art and poetry are weeds here, where they colonise kilometres of riverbank.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/09/08/rivers-the-lifeblood-of-australia-by-ian-hos...… (lisätietoja)

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anzlitlovers | Sep 8, 2020 |

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