I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains;
I love her far horizons
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror -
The wide brown land for me!
Dorothea Mackellar 1911

These simple lines of a poem that is learned by nearly every school child in Australia is prophetic of my fascination with that country. Prophetic, because I only learned of the poem long after my fascination had developed. The fascination was first inspired by my postgraduate mentor George Bartholomew, from the University of California, Los Angeles, who spent sabbatical leaves in the 1950s and 1960s in Perth and Brisbane, and who, by his own work there, showed it to be an unusually fertile arena for students of physiological ecology. Many of his former graduate and postdoctoral students, and their academic progeny developed this fascination nearly to the point of an obsession to make at least one sojourn to this sunburned country. I have probably been as guilty as anyone in developing this obsession to a near addiction, and feel that an explanation is in order by way of this volume.

$15.95
Paperback, 6x9
ISBN: 978-159858-383-0
248 pages

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