What makes the environment of Western Australia Unique. See link below for lesson plan. http://www.thehotrock.org.au/hotrockcatalogue/society--environment/year-10/the-story-of-your-place-.aspx

1. The Story of Your Place: South-West
Australia
What makes it unique?

2. Our Earth is
more than 4
billion
years old.
We have some of
the oldest bits of the
earth’s surface right
on our doorstep.
Pilbara = 3.4 billion years old
Darling plateau = 2.5 – 2.9 billion years old
Some volcanic islands
are just a couple of
million years old.
Tiny Zircon crystals found in the North
West are the oldest known bits of the
earth’s crust. 4.3 billion years old.

3. Click here, then drag the arrow to
• 40 million years ago Australia broke
away from Antarctica and started to drift
North to where it is today.
• It’s still moving North at the same rate
as your finger nails grow each year.

4. In Perth we live on
sand many KMs
deep.
A craton is an area of the planet’s
crust that has been stable for more
than 1.5 billion years.
The Yilgarn Craton is a
big old lump of granite
that pokes through to
the surface at spots
where, for example,
you find boulders in the
Perth hills.
This is sediment
ground down out of
the old Yilgarn
Craton to our east
as well as the
remains of shells
and marine animals
from thousands of
years ago.
Ernest Hodgkin’s Swanland by Anne Brearley (UWA Press).

5. What makes us a biological Island?
What stops plants
and animals moving
south and west? The sea
What stops
plants and
animals moving
North and East?
The hot and
inhospitable
desert
Some life, such as
mulga and salt
bush, can exist in
the drier country,
but most of the
plants and animals
around here stay
put in the south-
west corner where
the rainfall is
above 300 ml per
year.
Look at the chart.
Where does
rainfall drop
below 300ml per
year?
Ernest Hodgkin’s Swanland by Anne Brearley (UWA Press).

6. Plants in Australia manage to grow
out of deeply weathered and
exhausted sandy, soils that are
many, many millions of years old.
These beautiful
little sundew
plants, that you
might notice on
the ground in the
bush, or say,
King’s Park, tell
a story about our
soils in south-
western
Australia.
In Europe the soils are no older than
forty-five thousand years old
The Sundew
(click here to find
out more)

7. There are more than 50 known species of Sundews (Drosera) in
Australia, and forty two of those are confined to WA. In fact the
greatest concentration of sundews in the world is found here in
south-west Australia.
Sundews are plants that eat insects. These little plants glisten
with drops of what smells like nectar on hairy stems and leaves.
But what smells like nectar is actually a sticky solution of
enzymes full of bacteria. Insects land on the sundew to drink,
they are caught in the fluid, and the enzymes and bacteria digest
them, and feed them to the plant.
This system of collecting nutrients means that sundews can out-
compete many other plants in places where nutrients are not
readily come by in the soil.
Next time you see the sticky little plants on the ground,
remember that you are looking at a plant which speaks the
nature of the land here. Sundew catching a fly

8. More species of bird-
pollinated flower grow in
the south-west than in any
other place on earth.
Birds have good eyesight
and in the competition to
attract pollinators the
plants with the most
visually impressive flowers
proliferate. That’s why we
have so many bright and
impressive flowers.
Our isolation has led to the evolution of unique groups
of living things.
Did you know..........
The Kangaroo Paw draws wattle-birds and honey eaters to come and drink
nectar from the flower. Because of the arching shape of the flowers the
stamen brushes the bird as it sticks its beak in the flower. Its beak is long
to reach deep inside the flower. The bird then carries the pollen far away
and ensures genetic diversity in the seeds.

9. The flower’s
beautiful shape
is bound up
with the shape
of local birds
and their long
beaks.
Our state’s floral
emblem is an
example of the way
in which when you
take hold of one
thing in nature, you
find that it is hitched
to everything else
in the universe.

10. This is a surface stream of warm, low-salinity water that
travels at 2km per hour down the WA coast, often
against the wind, from northern Australia, past Perth. It
goes a long way.
Like the Gulf Stream in England, this thermal conveyor
belt keeps our waters warm. Its strength depends on
the amount of tropical water flowing through the
Indonesian islands from the Pacific Ocean. In winter
there can be as much as 5o
C difference between the
colder offshore waters and the middle of the Leeuwin
Current.
Much of our winter rainfall comes from evaporation of
this warm current.
On every other continental west coast in
temperate latitudes you find cold water marine
currents, rising from the ocean depths they bring
nutrients and plankton to the surface, attracting
fish, birds and marine mammals.
Not here.
We are different.
We have the Leeuwin Current
The red and orange on
this satellite image show
the warm Leeuwin Current
moving down the coast.

11. When you go snorkeling on Rottnest you get to see an
interesting intermingling of tropical and temperate
plants, molluscs and fish. It is thanks to this ocean
current that tropical marine conditions get closer to the
South pole on the WA coast than any other place on
earth… for which Rottnest snorkellers can give thanks!

12. Homework Task
• Go to a natural place close to where you live.
• Do the same exercise that you did at the start of this class. Record your
perceptions in your book.
• Use a digital camera and/or mobile phone to take pictures, video and/or
record sounds at this place. These should help to convey what the place
means to you and what you find interesting. There are no ‘right’ things to
take pictures of record, its your perceptions that are important.
• Interview people of different ages (your family or other people who live in the
area) to find out what they feel about your chosen area, what they use it for
and if possible how it has changed and any stories about its history.
• Email me 1 or 2 of your photos before next lesson.
• Save the rest of your work as you will need it to complete the assessment
task at the end of this module.
• This assessment task will be to:
– Produce a multimedia ‘document’ that expresses what a natural environment in
Western Australia means to you.

13. Maps taken from Ernest Hodgkin’s Swanland by Anne Brearley (UWA Press). All
photos copyright Tom Wilson.