UNIQUE TO AUSTRALIA
By Bill Beatty
Minor browning to closed page edges, covers a little creased and worn but a good-plus paperback.
From the collection of well-known big game and saltwater angler Jack Reece, with his angling bookplate tipped in.
(1952) 1968 Walkabout Pocketbooks edition. Small 8vo paperback (114 x 183mm). Pp224. Colour and b/w photograph plates. Card covers.
Pictures show the actual copy being offered for sale.
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"Australia is the oldest continent - and the strangest. Her aboriginal people are of the Stone Age, the oldest inhabitants on earth. Her geological structure is distinctive, her plant life contains much that is unique; and her amazing wild life ('the animals Noah forgot', was 'Banjo' Paterson's phrase) has never ceased to fascinate scientists and visitors - and Australians themselves. Nowhere else in the world will you find such a creature as the beautiful lyrebird, the prince of mimics; or the kangaroo and the koala, which carry their young in pouches; or the platypus, the fur-clad, duck-billed, web-footed amphibious animal that lays eggs and suckles its young. Nowhere else will you find anything so remarkable as Ayers Rock (the biggest stone in the world, eleven hundred feet high, five miles around the base), or the Great Barrier Reef of Queensland, whose twelve-hundred-mile chain of coral structures, the greatest in the seven seas, makes a tropical paradise for tourists. And if you think of the works of man, where else could you find a cattle station as big as Belgium, or a railway that tracks across a plain for three hundred miles without a curve, or a radio 'school of the air', or a town where the council lays on near-boiling water to every house from an underground artesian bore? Australian's know something about some of these things; but Bill Beatty's Unique to Australia is no mere catalogue of the country's best-known oddities. It is a 'little encyclopaedia' of Australia's peculiar and distinctive features, with a wealth of fascinating and authentic information for the Australian and the overseas reader alike. Illustrated with seventy-six colour and black and white photographs." (Publisher's blurb).
Contents include:- Unknown Australia; The Aborigines; Legends of the Aborigines; Animals; Birds; Lizards and snakes; Earthworms; Spiders; Butterflies and bees; Termites; Water life; The Great Barrier Reef; Trees; Wildflowers and strange plants; Strange natural features; The bountiful earth; The Australian Alps; Here and there; Index.