Book reviews: An atlas of Australia

Summary

J. Tricart reviews four volumes of the Atlas of Australian Resources, Third Series: Soils and Land Use, Population, Agriculture, and Climate. They combine colour maps, often folding, with substantial commentary and illustrations. Volume 1 simplifies soil classification into three categories of limitations for planning; its land-use map expresses grazing intensity through area per animal and, in Tricart’s assessment, strikingly displays the continent’s east–west imbalance. The population volume examines distribution in 1976, changes since 1971 and metropolitan patterns. The agriculture volume maps livestock, pasture, crops and farm types. The climate volume covers numerous climatic variables and their relationships to agriculture, cities and other activities. Tricart situates this still-incomplete, planned ten-volume series within the atlas’s successive revisions, following the First Series of 1953–1960 and Second Series of 1962–1977. He notes that the redesign prevents overlaying maps with earlier editions for comparison. He praises the atlas’s richness and production quality but regrets delays approaching ten years, exemplified by climate maps published in 1986 using 1976 as their reference year, while judging it an exceptionally valuable documentary resource.