Australia Remastered returns to ABC in a 3 part series billed as Australia Remastered: Nature’s Great Divide.
Australia and Asia are divided by a narrow strait that separates the Indonesian islands of Bali and Lombok. Known as the Wallace line, it’s one of the greatest divides in nature. Safe behind this barrier, life in Australia has evolved in isolation, creating species found nowhere else on earth.
A Separate Realm:
While elephants and tigers patrol the lush forests of South East Asia, on the Australian side of the Wallace Line, kangaroos and giant lizards roam across vast plains. Safe from large predators, marsupials and strange monotremes have adapted to survive in Australia’s harsh landscape. This is the story of how Nature’s Great Divide has protected Australia’s wild world, allowing life to evolve in parallel, and creating a separate and unique wild realm.
9:30pm Tuesday November 30 on ABC.
Where Australia Collides with Asia
This book follows the epic voyages of natural history of Continent Australia, Joseph Banks, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace.
The voyage of Continent Australia after it breaks away from Antarctica 50 million years ago with its raft of Gondwanaland flora and fauna and begins its journey north towards the equator.
The voyage of Joseph Banks on the Endeavour who with Daniel Solander became the first trained naturalists to describe the unique flora and fauna of Continent Australia that had evolved during its 30 million years of isolation.
The voyage of Charles Darwin on the Beagle, who after his observations in South America and the Galapagos Islands, sat on the banks of the Coxs River in New South Wales and tried to rationalize his belief in the idea of biblical creation and understand the origin of species.
The voyage of Alfred Russel Wallace, who realized that the Lombok Strait in Indonesia represents the biogeographical boundary between the fauna of Asia and those of Australasia. It was tectonic plate movement that brought these disparate worlds together and it was Alfred Russel Wallace’s ‘Letter from Ternate’ that forced Charles Darwin to finally publish his landmark work ‘On the Origin of Species’.
spiceislandsblog 