Of Simon Schama’s seminal work Landscape and Memory (Vintage Books, 1996), Australian writer Nicholas Jose reportedly observed, ‘the Australian landscape challenges Simon’s basic thesis quite profoundly – the Australian landscape is not mapped by memory entirely or simply, and not our memory’. 1 It is this view that informs Jose’s exploration of the politics of place in his novel The Custodians (Macmillan, 1997) and resonates through Kirsty Douglas’s impressive book Pictures of Time Beneath . Deploying her training in both geology and history, Douglas examines the ways in which Australia’s ‘deep past’ or geological history has been recursively invested with cultural meanings since the nineteenth century to reveal the inherent entanglement of ‘human’ and ‘environmental’ histories.