Places Preserved [antikvár]

Introduction I love maps. I love unfolding an enormous map of the entire continent or opening a page in a road atlas. I can look, at maps for hours: reading place names, looking at the convoluted shapes of rivers and coastlines, mountain ranges, deserts. I particularly love the green sections on the patchwork page, for these are the Places Preserved: the national parks, conservation reserves, state forests and other areas set aside for protection against exploitation and abuse. Seeing these place names induces a reverie. My imagination conjures up landforms, animals, wildflowers and emotions I would expect while walking through these places. While my imagination cannot dojustice to the richness and complexity of the actual experience, there is much to stimulate the mind on any of the pages of an Australian road atlas. This is because Australia has one of the greatest national park, systems in the world. Almost eight percent of the entire continent is under protection. There are J]6 national parks with an additional 2700 designated conservation reserves and Wj marine protected areas on this island continent and its territories. These range from coastal reserves, unspoilt rainforest, mountain wilderness, wetlands, woodlands, arid desert and almost any other conceivable ecosystem found in Australia. Notjust extensive, our National Park system is also old. The Royal National Parle, just south of Sydney, is the second oldest in the world, proclaimed shortly after Yellowstone in the United States. Prom even before that time, Australian has had a passionate and colourful history of environmental action. This became very evident in the early l^SOs when the Tasmanian government approved a scheme allowing the damming of the Franklin River below the Franklin/ Gordon confluence. The dam for hydroelectric power generation would have wiped out vast areas of important and unicjue rainforest; however a massive environmental campaign over several years influenced the federal government to introduce legislation empowering them to issue proclamations stopping the work. On July 1st, the High Court ruled that the Act and Proclamations were lawful, and that the federal government did indeed have the power to stop the dam. These powers were later used to protect Queensland's Daintree rainforest and Tasmania's Lemonthyme forest. A significant item in the campaign was Peter Dombrovskis's picture of the franklin River's Rock Island Bend. Since that time, I have understood the power of photography to illustrate our country's spectacular natural wonders. This book is a tribute to all those conservationists, community groups and politicians who have had the foresight and dedication to resist sometimes enormous pressure from the "forces of progress". It is my sincerest wish that it may also be a small source of inspiration for others to support the formation of future Places Preserved. Andrew Teakle