The environment

Throughout the twentieth century white Australians came to recognise that the continent on which they lived had climates and ecologies that were markedly different from those in Eurasia, the Americas and even nearby New Zealand. In a sense, they had to learn what most of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people already knew: that much of Australia is prone to drought, flood and fire. Though most Indigenous people learned about these cycles and processes through oral histories, culture and experience,2 their knowledge was not incorporated into state environment management models or popular interpretations of nature until the last decades of the twentieth century. Extreme events helped introduce the Australian public to the climatic factors shaping the continent's weather. The best known include the Federation Drought of 1895-1903, the 'Black Friday' forest fires in Victoria in 1939, Cyclone Tracy in Darwin and the Brisbane flood in 1974.