thei | Accept no imitations | About - Location

It was never really intended as a place for people.

No ape ever walked upright in Australia’s thickets and savannas, no tarsier or lemur chattered in its trees, no half-man in the first light of humanity’s awakening crouched watchful in his middens. The great land slept on its southern seas, while on all the other continents the human race developed and spread and made its artefacts and began its ceremonies. Bone had been carved and needles made and the cave walls of Lascaux and Alta Mira magically painted before any man ever trod the earth of the southern continent.

Roughly three-quarters of the surface of the Australian continent is comprised of outcrops of Pre-Cambrian rock, most of the worn down by wind, dust, frost, rain and time into a vast, low-lying plateau. Some scientists believe this is the largest and most intact great fragment of the ancient primal continent of Gondwanaland, which once linked what are now India, Africa, South America, Australia and Antarctica. This residue of the lost time from the earth’s birth labours has been reasonably stable for about 500 million years. Parts of it – the 280,000 square miles of the barren wasteland in Western Australia, which geologists have named Yilgarn, the eroded domes which form the Musgrave Ranges and the bizarre monoliths of Ayers Rock and the Olgas in the Northern Territory – go back perhaps 1,000 or 2,000 million years. It is enough to say that few parts of the earth’s surface are known to be older than this.
Goodman and Johnson, The Australians, The Griffin Press (1966)