Nature of Australia 1. A Separate Creation (1 of 17)

Nature of Australia

This series is a magnificent illustration of Australia's dramatic landscape, the evolution of its flora and fauna, and the origins of its most extraordinary inhabitants.

It explores the diversity of its landscape from the seas to the arid interior, the effects of flood, drought and bushfire and the impact of 200 years of European settlement on the land, its plant and animals.

(INTRIGUING MUSIC) (DIDGERIDOO MUSIC) The mighty kangaroo.
There's no animal like it in the world.
So strange, that the first Europeans were tempted to believe it arose from a separate Creation.

Separate and different.
The first white explorers found a land where almost nothing seemed to match their previous experience.
Terra Australis - the great south land - nearly 4,000km across, stretching from the tropics to the edge of the Antarctic Seas.
(MAJESTIC MUSIC) The very texture of the land seemed alien, ancient, worn, scoured to its very bones.
Craters gouged by exploding meteorites deepened the sense of a harsher world.
The endless parched plains seemed hostile to Europeans from a green and gentle land.
They searched in vain for familiar plants, and even animals they might recognise took strange and startling forms.
Here the inland rivers run mostly with sand.
Water is precious, and a little has to go a long way.
Yet it sustains an assortment of life, much of it unique to this greatest of islands.
A land often parched and ungiving, but also a place of the most startling abundance.