Mark Tredinnick - The Little Red Writing Book-University of New South Wales Press (2006)

Hear how this sounds like speech, heightened:
The Australian earth is very old.There is a shield of land in
the north-west—the upper part of Western Australia and
the Northern Territory—that is computed to have been
above water for one thousand six hundred million years. It
is probably the nearest approach to the surface of the moon
that the earth can show.Water, wind, and its own excoriated
surface have worn it down to something more final and
enduring than time itself.
—M Barnard Eldershaw, My Australia
Hear how this does not:
Several mechanisms have been suggested for the uplift [of
what we call the Great Dividing Range]. One involves
thermal expansion in the asthenosphere during partial
melting (Wellman 1979b; Smith 1982). The second relates
isostatic rise to igneous underplating and intra-plating
(emplacement at various levels of the crust) (Wellman
1979b, 1987). However, these two mechanisms are not
sufficient in their own right, and Lister and Etheridge
(1989) expanded their earlier model (Lister, Etheridge &
Symonds 1986) of upper plate passive margin development
to explain the elevation of the Eastern Highlands.The uplift
is supposed to have been caused by a complex interaction
involving:
• negative buoyancy caused by decrease in the crustal
thickness by a combination of pure and simple shear
above and below an extensional detachment beneath an
upper-plate passive margin;
• positive buoyancy induced by overall temperature rise
(higher geothermal gradient);
• positive buoyancy induced by igneous underplating from
an anomalously hot asthenosphere; and
• the effects of flexure of the lithosphere.
—Helen Basden (ed.), Geology of New South Wales
Lore 23