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As John Woinarski, of Charles Darwin Universityhas stated: “The most formative book for me was H.H. Finlayson’s 1935 classic The Red Centre… Finlayson was the last to collect and record many of these mammal species: he witnessed this loss. But in his many scientific papers, and in The Red Centre, he also foretold it, explained it and mourned it…Musing in The Red Centre on the losses: ...The old Australia is passing... The environment which moulded the most remarkable fauna in the world is beset on all sides by influences which are reducing it to a medley of semi-artificial environments, in which the original plan is lost and the final outcome of which no man may predict.From more than 80 years ago, these words still haunt; and they still describe the ongoing loss of Australian nature – due to what we have done to this country…It is a classic of Australian writing on the environment, an exquisite and poignant account of a now-lost nature, an enduring blueprint for understanding our country. I owe a lot to it.

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9781922698803

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Hedley Herbert Finlayson (1895-1991), mammalogist, was born on 19 March 1895 in Adelaide. Finlayson travelled widely collecting Australian mammals, most notably in outback South Australia and the Northern Territory. In the period 1931-35 he privately financed four collecting expeditions to these regions during the height of summer over the long university break (resulting the publication of The Red Centre). Determined and capable, he also had the good fortune to be working at a time when many small- to medium-sized ground-dwelling desert mammals were still to be found, though much of his early success came from working with local pastoralists and Aboriginal people. When he returned to central Australia in the 1950s he found that many of the species he had collected in the 1930s had either declined or disappeared completely, including the desert rat kangaroo and lesser bilby. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Finlayson was one of the earliest advocates of the need for large conservation reserves in outback Australia.

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