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by the state are functional to the process of capital accumulation and therefore inevitable under capitalism. This view stimulated a good deal of discussion and it was somethinig of a pity that there were no further contributions from the political economy perspective. Instead Glen Searle explored the likely geography of employment in Sydney in 2015 (in the process giving a good example of how government planners edge forward in an incrementalist fashion) and Jim Walmsley examined the changing nature of fiscal federalism, paying particular attention to the rise of ‘Big Government’ and to recent attempts to cope with the vertical and horizontal financial imbalance that is characteristic of the Australian federal system.

In summary, the day was a rewarding one. The papers were not as disparate as they may have seemed at first sight and there were common threads running through the various discussions. This is not to say that the session was entirely satisfying. Too much attention seemed to be directed to detailed discussion of case studies and insufficient attention directed to fundamental issues. In fact, late in the day Peter Rimmer, acting as Chairman, raised a vital but unmentioned question that perhaps should have been a focus to the day’s proceedings: should welfare provision be targeted at individuals, at classes, or at regions? Until such questions are addressed, it seems unlikely that geographers will make great strides in the study of how governments can and should cope with change.

Dust mantles: pollen and palaeoenvi ron ments

GURDIP SINGH

The 54th Congress of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science (ANZAAS) had the lofty ideal of informing the Australasian public on the horizons of science. The organisers of the section on Geographical Sciences, in the’ir enthusiasm not to be outdone by others, chose to have ‘Dust on the Horizon’ as their sectional theme. In substance, however, only the session on ‘Dust mantles: pollen and palaeoenvironments’ dealt with the phenomenon of dust, as such. Due to time constraints, this session, nevertheless considered only the benign aspects of dust (leaving those worried about the dust following a nuclear holocaust, and those interested in allergenic dust, wondering in amazement) and stressed how wonderful it was to have the dust mantles around us because without them it would be impossible to piece together the environmental history of the Mother Earth in all its past grandeur.

Professor D. Walker chaired the session admirably and let the discussion flow smoothly across different areas within the overall theme of the symposium. The first part was devoted to Quaternary dust processes and mechanisms of dust transportation and deposition in Africa, Australasia and China. Grant McTainsh of the School of Australian Environmental Studies

Department of Biogeography and Geomorphology. Research School of Pacific Studies, The Australian National University, P.O. Box 4, Canberra Civic, A.C.T. 2601. Australian Geographical Studies 22, October 1984

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at the Griffith University set the ball rolling with his paper comparing the contemporary sediment supply, dust entrainment and deposition in the Chad Basin in Africa with the conditions prevailing in the Lake Eyre Basin in Australia. He drew attention to studies on Quaternary records of dust found on land and in the ocean sediments in the two regions. His paper was followed by a first hand account of the extensive loess deposits of China by Jim Bowler who emphasised their significance in the reconstruction of palaeoenvironments. Bowler showed a glaring contrast between the aeolian deposits found in Australia and China. The Australian arid zone, according to Bowler, lacked the freeze-thaw processes necessary to reduce large quantities of quartz to silt size and hence did not produce the abundance of materials for true loess deposition. Instead, thin blankets of ‘pama’, a deposit with a high proportion of clay characteristics resulted from deflation of arid zone surfaces in Australia. Both the papers pointed towards the dearth of data on contemporary dust processes in Australia.

Palynology, in the widest sense of the term, represents the study of dust. So, the remaining four papers were devoted to different aspects of pollen studies and all came from members of the Department of Biogeography and Geomorphology at the Australian National University. Nigel Wace reviewed past studies on long distance, intercontinental drift of pollen in the atmosphere and also gave an account of his preliminary findings from Tristan da Cunha group, Kerguelen, Heard Island and the Antarctica Peninsula. Wace’s paper provided a cautionary signal for the interpretation of pollen records from areas where there was little or only sparse vegetation growing in the region (e.g. remote islands). His paper was complemented by Jon Luly’s exposition of aspects of the modern pollen-rain in semi-arid northwestern Victoria, centering on Lake Tyrell. Through his analysis of pollen trap records and surface pollen spectra from the lake bed, in combination with measurements of the radioisotope 137 Caesium, Luly provided a valuable insight into processes unique to the salt lake environment. Both these papers, in conjunction with the first two on aeolian materials, laid the ground-work for the consideration of fossil pollen and charcoal records, A comparison between processes involving dust transportation on one hand and those of pollen and charcoal on the other prompted some heated discussion but the physics behind the contrasting behaviour of dust particles and pollen grains, spores and charcoal remained elusive. David Green, largely based on his own studies in Canada and Australia, gave a general account of the range of investigations which, now, are possible through fine resolution pollen and charcoal analysis. He particularly emphasised their relevance to problems of bush-fire management and forest conservation in Australia. The complexity as well the finesse of the state of the art of fine resolution pollen and analysis was illustrated through a case study, Bega Swamp in southeastern New South Wales, by Gurdip Singh in the concluding paper. Through this study, Singh made a valiant attempt at featuring some of the currently reachable horizons of pollen analysis. Through the use of atom bomb generated radiocarbon, and pollen contained in the sediments, Singh revealed an almost year by year record of changes in vegetation and rainfall from 1950 to 1975, paralleling the meteorological data. The techniques used showed a great potential for reconstructing fine resolution palaeoenvironmental records from times well before the instrumental monitoring began during the Holocene. The paper gave the impression that the ability to link field and instrumental data with fossil pollen records is not too far away!

The discussion that followed was both lively and informative and it seemed that the symposium had succeeded in generating fresh ideas as well as some vigorous interaction between the biogeographers and geomorphologists.