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The Channel Country is of special interest because its extreme aridity is disrupted unpredictably by summer monsoonal rains, causing massive flooding, and is followed by prodigious growth of plants and reproduction of animals before returning to daunting conditions of drought. Yet, it is a region teeming with life, both plant and animal, possessing unusual capacities for existing there. It is also a region favoured by hardy pastoralists and their livestock, who have learned to coexist with this harsh climate.
In this book, the authors describe their many adventures and misadventures in the region, with its climate, its animals and its human inhabitants. They also discuss results of their research, which reveals some of the secrets for survival of many of the native animals, including marsupials, rodents, birds and the remarkable desert crab. These studies are cast in the light of both the prehistoric and historic records of the Lake Eyre Basin, including the probable impacts of changing and/or stable climates, Aboriginal occupation, later European pastoral development and the influences of introduced exotic mammals.
