The koala is both an Australian icon and an animal that has attained flagship status around the world. Yet its history tells a different story. While the koala figured prominently in Aboriginal Dreaming and Creation stories, its presence was not recorded in Australia until 15 years after white settlement. Then it would figure as a scientific oddity, despatched to museums in Britain and Europe, a native animal driven increasingly from its habitat by tree felling and human settlement, and a subject of relentless hunting by trappers for its valuable fur. It was not until the late 1920s that slowly emerging protective legislation and the enterprise of private protectors came to its aid. This book surveys the koalas fascinating history, its evolutionary survival in Australia for over 30 million years, its strikingly adaptive physiognomy, its private life, and the strong cultural impact it has had through its rich fertilisation of Australian literature. The work also focuses on the complex problems of Australias national wildlife and conservation policies and the challenges surrounding the environmental, economic and social questions concerning koala management. Koala embraces the story of this famous marsupial in an engaging historical narrative, extensively illustrated from widely sourced pictorial material.
J.E. Moyal has been pronounced 'one of Australia's most remarkable thinkers'. Yet, he was, essentially, a scientific maverick. Educated in a modest high school in Tel Aviv, he took himself to France to train as an engineer, statistician and mathematician and escaped to England as France fell. It was from outside academia that he entered into communication with the 'high priest' of British theoretical physics, P.A.M. Dirac, challenging him with the idea of a statistical basis of quantum mechanics. Their correspondence forms the core of this book and opens up an important and hitherto unknown chapter for physicists, mathematicians and historians of science. Moyal's classic paper, 'A statistical basis for quantum mechanics', also reproduced here in full, has come to underlie an explosion of research and to underpin an array of major technological developments."--Publisher's description.
In this volume of the National Library's biography series An Australian Life, Ann Moyal brilliantly illuminates the passion and creative energy which drove Alan Moorehead's life and work. Moorehead was one of Australia's most adventurous and celebrated writers and his work remains a vitally important part of our literature.
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