A lakeland from the dreamtime the second founders' lecture

Abstract

The mountainous wilderness of Tasmania's World Heritage Area and contiguous land is a district of lakes and rivers of immense beauty and interest. A congruence of change in climate, relief, geology, soils and vegetation divides the island into western and eastern provinces. A jagged, western land of ancient rocks is mantled by peat-forming rainforest and sedgeland, where creeks run, unenriched with minerals, to topaz, red-window lakes. Eastwards lies a younger, flatter land, covered by sclerophyll forests of Eucalyptus. Minerals from the soluble rocks give the lakes distinctive chemistry compared with the brown dilute sea-water which drains the western quartz. No peat extracts stain these eastern lakes and they lie crystal clear with deep green windows.

In this wilderness is a rich diversity of rare microscopic organisms. Some, long forgotten, have been rediscovered there. Others, new and novel, turn up with every cast of the net. Among the richest sites are the coastal, fresh-water lagoons which the Aboriginal inhabitants would have known intimately. Beside the Gordon River are small lakes of very special interest. Periodically, they are topped up with salt water from the estuary, keeping them meromictic, with brackish water below and fresh water above. Such lakes and their unusual features are uncommon in the world. They have social relevance. Because of their meromictic condition, their sediments hold an especially fine-resolution chronology of prehistoric climates and vegetational changes which shaped aboriginal fortunes to the times of European contact.

Tasmania must stand as one of the finest lake districts of the world. Perhaps nowhere else is there such limnological richness and diverity in so small an encompass as this island. Add to this its predominantly pristine nature, its uniqueness and its beauty, and we have in all respects a World Heritage wetland unsurpassed in this degraded world.