ABSTRACT
In the course of day-to-day life in Australian cities, it is possible - indeed easy - to forget that our cities have in the past been responsible for rapidly and dramatically changing the landscape, and are still doing so. As the historian Geoffrey Bolton has observed, our hardworking ancestors were a mixture of honest 'toilers' and aggressive 'spoilers' who left a mixed environmental legacy, especially in our most intensely setded areas, the cities. 1 Trees were cut down, the earth reshaped, grasslands ploughed up, creeks and rivers redirected. And the original inhabitants - both human and non-human -were driven out while brick, steel and concrete structures were erected and the earth was paved over. The air over cities, the water that flows through cities and the lives of the flora and fauna that find their home in the city have all been massively altered in the relatively short time since Europeans settled Australia. Before European contact, the Aboriginal peoples had only minimally modified the Australian landscape.
