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Sto caricando le informazioni... Riversdi Ian Hoskins
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Rivers have long run in the blood of Australians. Givers of life and subjects of anguish, Australian rivers have shaped the nation from the moment the first Australians arrived tens of thousands of years ago. Offering the vital ingredient for life, they are also guardians of culture, a means of transportation, sites for play and leisure, and sources of power, deeply entrenched in almost every aspect of human life and an irreplaceable part of the global ecosystem. Australia's vast inland seas of some 50 million years ago have disappeared, leaving a continent that is mostly desert. Of the waters and wetlands that remain, most of which are connected to rivers, 65 are listed as Ramsar Wetlands of International Importance. They are also of incredible, sometimes painful, local importance, as reminders of the dispossession suffered by those first peoples and their descendants and evidence of the devastation wrought by drought and dying waterways. The damming of Western Australia's Ord River during the 1960s and 1970s captured monsoonal rains within a catchment of over 55,000 square kilometres, creating the largest artificial lake on mainland Australia while destroying sites of cultural significance to the Miriwoong people and changing the ecosystem irrevocably. Barely ten years after the completion of the Ord project, the success of the Save the Franklin campaign in Tasmania is a testament to evolving understanding of the precious nature of waterways. Yet even this triumph was fraught: environmentalists' argument for preservation of Tasmania's 'wilderness' contained the implication that the land was without people, despite Indigenous habitation for at least 30,000 years. In this broad-ranging survey of some of Australia's most well-known, loved, engineered and fought over rivers, from Melbourne's Yarra to the Alligator rivers of Kakadu, award-winning author Ian Hoskins presents a history of our complex connections to water. Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
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Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)551.4830994Natural sciences and mathematics Earth sciences & geology Geology, Hydrology Meteorology Surface features of the earth Rivers; LakesVotoMedia:
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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:
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... ( )