TAG 166 - Geological Society of Australia

this land, and showing the richness of thelast 50 to 100 000 years of our landscapes,landforms and recent life forms. The authorhere invites us to take our geoheritage workback into the ‘deep past’ of Australia.Her colleague Tom Griffiths at ANU says (inone of several reviews available on the CSIROPublishing website), “Her book is remarkable,and her vision highly original. She bringstogether geology, glaciology, biology,paleontology, climatology, archaeology,anthropology, geography, cultural history,heritage studies, politics, museology,environmental history, local history, nationalhistory, world history, philosophy, literature,poetry and, and … I could go on! It is anastonishing synthesis.”Douglas (2006) first published a paper ona theory of geological heritage, which concentratedon three landscapes in Australia.This book continues to use as examplesAdelaide’s Hallett Cove, inland SouthAustralia’s Lake Callabonna Fossil Reserve andthe World Heritage listed Willandra Lakes ofwestern New South Wales. Once thought ofas ‘wasteland, desert, forsaken, degraded,unproductive and isolated’, such features arenow being referred to as of ‘world renown’ or‘classic ground’. Douglas points to an evolvingmethodology of geological heritage inAustralia, citing the work of the GSA and theformer Australian Heritage Commission (nowAustralian Heritage Council). She includes abibliography of 22 pages on heritage andgeology in Australia, divided into publishedand unpublished material.What the author is doing in her book is‘telling stories’ — and she has three stories inall. This approach is now often suggested asthe way to interest the public in heritage, inthis case specifically geological heritage.(Today we mostly use the term ‘geoheritage’,while increasingly we also feel the need toemphasise the landforms and landscape —aspects covered by the term ‘geomorphology’.)The iconic Lake Mungo in the Willandra LakesWorld Heritage Area/Place is one such place.Part three in the book examines Lake Mungo,discussing, “human antiquity and the wateredinland: reading the scripture of the landscape”and the iconic geomorphological workof Jim Bowler which goes over 40 000 yearsinto the past.This is all part of a new and hopefulapproach, where we can incorporateAboriginal stories, young landscape stories(megafauna in South Australia, Queenslandand Victoria), young volcanic landscapes ofsoutheastern and northern Australia — andnot just dinosaurs, which are more remote intime from us!Part one of the book discusses Hallett Cove,with geological heritage extending well backin time, and including remnants of a Permianglacial landscape. The book relates the battleto save Hallett Cove led by local GSA heritageworker Maud McBriar — another iconicworker in Australian geoheritage.Part two is entitled ‘Dirt, bones and thediprotodons of Lake Callabonna: discoveringthe lost worlds of vertebrate palaeontology’. Ittells the story of Australia’s first fossil reserveusing striking images of dying megafauna40 000+ years ago.Although a rather low-key presentation forCSIRO Publishing, this book belies its appearance.‘Iconic’ is nowadays a rather overusedword, but we might use it yet again and applyit to Kirsty Douglas’s important book. I urgeyou to read it if you are concerned about thefuture of our geoheritage.EB JOYCEEvolution of the LevantMargin and Western ArabiaPlatform since the MesozoicC Homberg & M Bachmann (Eds)Geological Society of London, SpecialPublication 341, London, 2010, 338 pagesISBN 978-1862393066This publication is a review of the disciplinesemployed in the study of the developmentand deformation processes of the LevantBasin. The data are derived from the MiddleEast Basin Evolution Program and the ‘LevantGroup’ meeting led by C Homberg of theUniversité Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris, in2006. The papers are in three sectionsrelating to the offshore deep basin, and thesouthern and northern platform areas of theLevant. There are 15 papers of which six referto tectonic evolution and a further six tobasin correlations, facies patterns, carbonisotopes, biostratigraphy, paleontology andpaleoenvironment studies. The remainingpapers cover seismic stratigraphy and welldata, development of syndepositional structuresand the structural interpretation ofexposed surface features from satellite views.The value in the compilation is the release ofmultidisciplinary data and interpretationsfrom a region with a key tectonic setting,which is readily visualised in a plate tectoniccontext that can thus be applied to otherareas and geological ages. Notable figuresinclude the Tethyan rift system of the Levantregion, a seismic ‘depth to top crystallinebasement’ map and generalised colourcross-sections illustrating the stratigraphicsuccession of the Levant Basin. There are anumber of large-scale interpreted seismicprofiles illustrating growth faulting (bothmarine and on the platform) and simplifiedgeological and structural maps of Sinai andthe Naqb Desert. There are also annotatedcolour satellite images of significantstructures and folds of the North Sinai.The publication is relevant to postgraduatestudents as the concepts developed might beapplied to parallel studies. The work shouldbe available to students and on-hand inpetroleum company libraries for general readingand training.A few editorials creep in with ‘epiorogenical’and detachment of Gondwanan ‘terrains’(p 12) but the summaries of structure andtectonics are very readable. There is howeveronly limited reference to thin-skinnedtectonics in the deep Egyptian margin or to46 |TAG March 2013