6. A Fossil Continent

If an intelligent Australian colonist were suddenly to be translated
backward from Collins Street, Melbourne, into the flourishing woods of
the secondary geological period--say about the precise moment of time
when the English chalk downs were slowly accumulating, speck by speck,
on the silent floor of some long-forgotten Mediterranean--the
intelligent colonist would look around him with a sweet smile of
cheerful recognition, and say to himself in some surprise, 'Why, this is
just like Australia.' The animals, the trees, the plants, the insects,
would all more or less vividly remind him of those he had left behind
him in his happy home of the southern seas and the nineteenth century.
The sun would have moved back on the dial of ages for a few million
summers or so, indefinitely (in geology we refuse to be bound by dates),
and would have landed him at last, to his immense astonishment, pretty
much at the exact point whence he first started.

In other words, with a few needful qualifications, to be made hereafter,
Australia is, so to speak, a fossil continent, a country still in its
secondary age, a surviving fragment of the primitive world of the chalk
period or earlier ages. Isolated from all the remainder of the earth
about the beginning of the tertiary epoch, long before the mammoth and
the mastodon had yet dreamt of appearing upon the stage of existence,
long before the first shadowy ancestor of the horse had turned tail on
nature's rough draft of the still undeveloped and unspecialised lion,
long before the extinct dinotheriums and gigantic Irish elks and
colossal giraffes of late tertiary times had even begun to run their
race on the broad plains of Europe and America, the Australian continent
found itself at an early period of its development cut off entirely from
all social intercourse with the remainder of our planet, and turned upon
itself, like the German philosopher, to evolve its own plants and
animals out of its own inner consciousness. The natural consequence was
that progress in Australia has been absurdly slow, and that the country
as a whole has fallen most woefully behind the times in all matters
pertaining to the existence of life upon its surface. Everybody knows
that Australia as a whole is a very peculiar and original continent; its
peculiarity, however, consists, at bottom, for the most part in the fact
that it still remains at very nearly the same early point of development
which Europe had attained a couple of million years ago or thereabouts.
"Advance, Australia," says the national motto; and, indeed, it is quite
time nowadays that Australia should advance; for, so far, she has been
left out of the running for some four mundane ages or so at a rough
computation.