Australia displayed: A review article

Summary

Such critical comments as have been made in the foregoing pages are not meant to detract from the profound admiration that all geographers must have for the tremendous amount of work and thought that has gone into the creation of this Atlas. By any standards it is, on the whole, a remarkable piece of work, and anyone who has tried to work with Australian official statistics must wonder at the resourcefulness and ingenuity of the compilers. Again, one must offer profound thanks that these sheets have been made available publicly $^{5}$ and not merely retained within departmental files. At the same time, it must also be regretted profoundly that the Atlas has been brought to an end at this particular juncture. There are two reasons for saying this. In the first place, in a country developing as rapidly as Australia information equally rapidly becomes outdated. Even now some of the earlier sheets of the Atlas are already in need of revision to take account of new developments, more recent and sometimes better statistical information, and the results of additional research work. In the second place, there are a number of new sheets that could well earn a place in this production. It would indeed be a pity if the word "resources" in the title, which seems to have limited the approach in the past, was allowed to stultify further thinking about it in the future. The bare fact is that unless the Department of National Development has second thoughts about leaving the Atlas where it