THE INLAND SEA

At the beginning of the 19th Century, the first European explorers who crossed the mountain barrier to the west of the foundling settlement of Sydney, opening their path to the continent’s interior, noted that most of the inland rivers ran towards the west. This soon sparked the notion that they were draining towards a vast inland sea and this became a magnet that drew them, one after the other, to push ever further to the westward. What they found was an ever drier landscape, and it cost the lives of many and left all manner of clutter across a parched land, from whaleboats to pianos.

The big trouble for them all was that they were about sixty million years too late. That’s when the centre of Australia, as with many of the world’s continents at the time, was covered by a vast shallow sea. The world’s temperature was warmer than it is today, and sea levels were much higher. It was a time when the great supercontinent of Pangaea – in which all the world’s land masses had welded themselves together – was breaking apart and without the collision of land masses the necessary