ABSTRACT
The Australian land mass was once part of the great southern Gondwana continent, comprising the present land masses of South America, Africa, Antarctica and New Zealand. Some 45 million years ago the Australian continent broke away from Gondwana. Since that time Australia has been physically separated from the rest of the world. This long isolation has given rise to a distinct and remarkably diverse flora and fauna. Australia is widely recognized as one of the great bio-geographic regions of the world. Flannery notes that Australia supports 25,000 species of plants compared to only 17,500 species in the whole of Europe (including Turkey, the Eastern part of the old Soviet Union and the Mediterranean islands) and that there are more species of vascular plants in the Sydney region alone than in the whole of the British Isles (Flannery 1994:75).
