Abstract The Holocene eolian barrier of the Younghusband peninsula, South Australia, is an accessible and well-studied modern analog for ancient eolian carbonate and mixed quartz-carbonate barriers, as well as the associated suites of sedimentary structures that might be expected in such settings. The barrier has formed from the shoreward drift of Lacepede Shelf biogenic carbonate fragments as well as the longshore drift of quartz sand from the Murray River. The Younghusband barrier carbonate content increases from roughly 12 percent at the mouth of the Murray River southeastward to nearly 75 percent at Lacepede Bay, near Kingston. The barrier consists mainly of eolian dune and sand-sheet deposits. Dune bedforms consist of parabolic, blowout, coppice, and various subtypes of transverse dunes including barchan, barchanoid ridge, and transverse ridge dunes. There is a low foredune along the shore, landward of which lies a narrow sabkha mat separates this foredune from the main barrier. Where vegetation has been destroyed or thinned, deflation forms large blowouts, parabolic dunes, and transverse dunes, whose advance is causing the barrier to shift northeastward into the Coorong Lagoon. The abundant carbonate material within the barrier includes transported bryozoans and coralline algae that originated on the cool-water Lacepede Shelf. These materials, along with broken shells of lagoonal and nearshore fauna such as gastropods and mollusks, have been incorporated into the cross stratification. This process has produced such coarse, shelly textures in the eolian barrier sediments, particularly the sand-sheet deposits, that it would be difficult to identify these sediments as eolian in the ancient record. This is not merely because of the presence of shell debris but also because of unusual sedimentary structures. Nevertheless, common eolian sedimentary features are present and identifiable, and provide a key to proper interpretation of this group of sediments in ancient rocks. The Holocene Younghusband barrier and the landward Pleistocene carbonate barriers are viable analogues for subsurface petroleum reservoirs. The Younghusband barrier, if buried and preserved, would be a very narrow but elongate sand lens about a kilometer wide at maximum, and up to 30 meters thick, with enormous reservoir volume because of its great length. It would consist mainly of clean eolian sands, composed dominantly of either quartz or carbonate depending upon position along the barrier. These sediments would be interbedded with nearshore and lagoonal facies (potential source rocks). Recognition of the eolian nature of such a barrier-originated petroleum reservoir would allow correct paleogeographic placement of the sediments, and would facilitate both development drilling and further exploration for new barriers or extensions of the current field. Further, the knowledge that the modern barriers exist in trends controlled by sea-level stands would suggest that petroleum reservoirs in such ancient systems might occur in multiple fields parallel to bathymetric contours of an ancient marine shelf. The current preservation of eolian parts of older barriers in the South Australia region onshore but below sea level (observed in shallow-drilling programs) and offshore as subsea “ranges” proves that such preservation of the eolian component of barriers is not only possible but should be expected in the ancient record.

Abstract Australian climate and vegetation, known from marine and lacustrine sediments and fossils, varied dramatically throughout the Cenozoic Era, with several warm reversals superimposed on overall drying and cooling. A suite of landforms, including stony deserts, dunefields and playa lakes, formed in response to the advancing aridity but their age generally remained uncertain until fairly recently, owing to a lack of suitable dating methods. Within the last 5 years, the chronology of Late Quaternary fluctuations of lakes, dunes and dust-mantles has been established by luminescence dating methods, and mid-Pleistocene onset of playa conditions in a few closed basins has been estimated using palaeomagnetic reversal chronology. Only recently has it been shown, by cosmogenic isotope dating, that major tracts of arid landforms including the Simpson Desert dunefield, and stony deserts of the Lake Eyre Basin, were formed in early Pleistocene and late Pliocene times, respectively. These landscapes represent a stepwise response to progressive climatic drying and, speculatively, were accompanied by biological adaptations. Recent molecular DNA studies indicate that Australia's arid-adapted species evolved from mesic-adapted ancestors during the Pliocene or earlier, but whether speciation rapidly accompanied the development of stony deserts and other arid geomorphological provinces awaits further studies of arid landscape chronology.

Abstract There are some 300 bodies of cavernous limestone in eastern Australia, extending from Precipitous Bluff in southeastern Tasmania to the Mitchell Palmer region in north Queensland. These impounded karsts, developed in Palaeozoic limestones of the Tasman Fold Belt System, contain many caves. The caves have a suite of features in common that allows them to be thought of as a major group: the Tasmanic Caves. The Tasmanic Caves include multiphase hypogene caves such as Cathedral Cave at Wellington and multiphase, multiprocess caves such as Jenolan with Carboniferous hypogene and younger paragenetic and fluvial elements. Active hypogene caves occur at Wee Jasper and possibly at five other localities. The Tasmanic Caves are one of the most complex suites of caves in folded Palaeozoic limestones in the world. Field techniques developed to study these caves are now being applied to complex caves in central Europe: in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia.

Abstract Despite the wide diversity of beliefs, personalities and geological expertise of 10 ‘clerical geologists’ of varying Christian denominations who worked in Australia, mainly during the nineteenth century, there is little indication that they saw any contradiction between a belief in a divine being and the pursuit of geology. There was a continuity of these attitudes throughout the century, within the changing social and professional geological environment as Australia moved from being a set of independent colonies to a federation. Four of the ‘clerical geologists’, Johannes Menge, W. B. Clarke, J. E. Tenison Woods and Walter Howchin, made significant contributions to geological science, which deserve to be better known internationally.

Abstract From its earliest years the Geological Society of London attracted the attention of scientifically- and technically-minded men in Australia and New Zealand. Members ‘at home’ in Britain were also eager for geological information about the antipodes. The publications of the Society acted as a major source of information about the geology of these southern lands, from vertebrate palaeontology and modern glaciation at sea level to ancient glaciations and mineralization (particularly of gold). At least 360 members were active in Australasia in the nineteenth century. Strong antipodean Society membership continued through the twentieth century. What is noteworthy is the number of mining figures, of varying scientific competence, who boasted of their membership. There were significant contributions to the Society’s journals on Australasian geology from the 1820s to the early 1900s. Many topographic features on the maps of both Australia and New Zealand are named for Members and Fellows of the Geological Society. The lists of elected and ‘would-be’ antipodean members include a few enigmatic examples of chicanery, fraud and disappearance.