Well, it was definitely pretty fatal, Max....
Sensational? My reading of Aussie history was mainly Robert Hughes's The Fatal Shore...
Doug
On 2011-10-03, at 7:41 PM, Max Richards wrote:
> While Andrew Burke is in Tasmania, I just happen on this, in The Fatal Impact, by
> Alan Moorehead (Penguin, p.267 Penguin]
>
> There were still in Tasmania at this time [1820? maybe he means later] great
> unexplored rain-forests with tree-ferns said to be a hundred feet high, and, at
> the other end of the scale, plants so minute and sensitive that the closed at
> the sound of a passing butterfly. Like the aborigines, the fauna was already
> vanishing. The Tasmanian devil, an untameable cat of nocturnal habits, was on
> the way to becoming extinct, and the flocks of parrots that were once so thick
> that Flinders found he could not take the altitude of the sun at midday, were no
> longer to be seen.
>
> Hmmm, copying this out makes it seem a melange of the dubious sensational...
>
>
> Max in melbourne
>
>
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Douglas Barbour
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