Australia's Mammal Extinctions: A 50 000 year History

Abstract

Tim Flannery?s The Future Eaters holistic ecological history invigorated Australians and took ccoiohry to the dinner table and into the pub. It was a monumental achievement. The problem with The Future Eaters for many Australian ecologists was that despite the wonderful prose and apparently beautiful logic of the simple story many of the details did not seem to add up or were presented rhetorically. At the time of reading, I had just finished a survey of the dry rainforests along the eastern seaboard and there were many fcatures of these ecologically tantalizing environments that were incompatible with them as the ?relic? environments central to Flannery?s story (Fensham 1995). The contribution of The Future Eaters as a provocateur of debate was immense, but it had ultimate shortcomings because Flannery could not afford the forensic scrutiny required, in a book that was packaged as a popular best seller.