What changed in the October 2026 revision

The four biggest corrections

The poorest soil and the richest flora (Chapters 4, 7, 9, 13, 19)

The book said the wallum heath on the poorest sand is richer in plant species than the rainforest on the richest soil: "the pauper keeps the crowded house; the millionaire rattles around in a near-empty one". Queensland's own vegetation benchmarks say the reverse. Basalt rainforest carries some forty tree species in a half-hectare plot where wallum heath has one, and more smaller plants too. The wallum is still astonishingly rich for ground so poor. The first version of this correction said that only the rainforest holds more; on the same benchmarks most of the gum forests do too, and the book now says that as well. The range and the sand are both rich, in opposite ways.

The deep-time day (Chapters 2 and 17)

Squeeze twenty-five million years into a single day and one second is about 289 years. The book put people's whole time in Australia into "the last few seconds" and European settlement into "a thousandth of a second, the time it takes a camera to click". The arithmetic gives three or four minutes and about half a second. The camera-click is gone; settlement is the last tick of the clock.

Rainforest and fire (Chapters 6 and 13)

The book said a burnt rainforest "does not come back" and has "no resprouting buds". After the 2019–20 fires, most rainforest plants resprouted and seedlings came up in the burnt ground. Rainforest survives a single fire; it is fire that keeps coming back, or clearing, that turns it into eucalypt forest or weeds.

The koala vaccine (Chapters 12, 16 and 18)

The book said the University of the Sunshine Coast's chlamydia vaccine cut koala deaths substantially and that "there is a vaccine now". Since release the trial paper has been corrected, the journal has put its statistical analysis under investigation, and the university reports that the effect on deaths is no longer statistically significant and that the vaccine is not currently in use while a new batch is made to the regulator's standard. The book now says the vaccine reduced disease in wild trials and that its effect on deaths is under review.

Other corrections, by chapter

• Ch 2. The Australian plate moves at nearly twice the speed fingernails grow, not "about as fast", in the text and now in Figure 2.1. Trachyte is stiff like rhyolite but less rich in silica. Figure 2.2's key called its purple rock "the plugs", but nearly all of it is rhyolite far older than the Glass House Mountains.
• Ch 3. Mount Ninderry is far older rhyolite, not one of the volcanic plugs.
• Ch 4. Phosphorus does get a faint top-up from wind-blown dust; "not ever" is gone. The giant podzols' twenty-plus metres is the whole soil profile, not the bleached layer alone, and Figure 4.1 now marks it that way. Variety is no longer said to peak on Cooloola's oldest dunes, a pattern shown in Western Australia, not here. Figure 4.2's caption no longer calls the hinterland's topsoil near-neutral (at about pH 5 it is moderately acid) or the coast's near-pure sand.
• Ch 5. The Noosa River rises in the Cooloola sand country, not in the ranges.
• Ch 6. Grevilleas store their seed in the soil, not in fire-opened fruit. The fuel-hazard study had 81 sites, not "several thousand". The long-term burning experiment is at Beerwah and Cooloola, not Peachester, and its findings are now stated as published. David Bowman's 1998 view of Aboriginal burning, the 2020 K'gari fire's timing and extent, and the eucalypt-as-arsonist idea are each stated more carefully. Figure 6.2's caption said the dry eucalypt country burns again and again; the ten years of fire scars it maps show more of the wallum burned than of the eucalypt forest, and the most-burned patches are grazing land.
• Ch 7, 13, 14. The Maleny-to-Mooloolaba drive follows the Mooloolah, not the Maroochy. Part II climbs from the tide to the range and reaches the reef last; three sentences said "from the reef". Dune plants hold the sand with long runners and deep roots.
• Ch 7, 9, 10, 16. Acid water keeps out related frogs, and most of the pools the acid frogs breed in hold no fish. Nothing shows the acid keeps out the introduced mosquitofish, so the book no longer says so. The pH study describes where one frog species is found, not where each species can breed.
• Ch 8. Figure 8.2's key said saltmarsh and salt-pan; the satellite mapping it draws on leaves salt-pan out.
• Ch 10. No native waterlily is recorded in the Noosa Everglades; the blue lily there is a naturalised African species.
• Ch 11. The grey ironbark flowers in spring and early summer, not the cooler months. The understorey study was in northern New South Wales. The logging study covered 315 state-forest plots, not "nine million hectares". Mount Ninderry is 311 metres high, with 349 native plant species recorded in the council's flora assessments. The cycad has thrips and weevils as pollinators; the piccabeen palm is told from the Alexandra palm by its green leaflet undersides.
• Ch 12. The powerful owl takes gliders and possums from the branches, not out of the air.
• Ch 13. The rainforest is the oldest forest on the coast, not the tallest. The light falls to a fraction, not by half. The Bunya Mountains lie west, not north-west. The birdwing butterfly has a single native vine on this coast, and a second in the upland border ranges.
• Ch 15. Banksias do not partner with fungi; they mine phosphorus with cluster roots. Most figs have their own wasp, but some have several. Hyacinth orchids may still make some of their own food.
• Ch 16. Hendra virus reaches people only through infected horses. The rufous bettong does live on this coast, scarcely. The brush-turkey's citation is corrected.
• Ch 17. At Traveston, the lungfish lays among water-weed, the Mary River turtle nests on sandbanks and the cod is thought to spawn in hollow logs; none breeds on gravel. The cane toad was released over a scientist's warnings, not "with no caution at all". Kathleen McArthur's part in the Cooloola campaign is now cited, and the Traveston decision is cited to the Minister's own letter rather than to the press.
• Ch 18. The Richmond birdwing recovery did breed and release butterflies, about five hundred over a decade, alongside the replanting. The levy figures in Figure 18.2 now separate the 102 properties bought from the 15 donated, and its caption no longer has the reserves "marching down the gradient": the levy has bought lowland in every decade.

A second check

Once the revision was out, every chapter was checked again, claim by claim, against its own notes and the sources they cite: about a thousand specific statements. Most held. These did not, and the book now says what the sources say.

• Ch 1–3. Cooloola's dune fields are not "the flattest land there is"; its dunes stand up to about 320 metres. The Conondale Range's ancient basement is rugged high country, not low rolling hills. Storms reshape Cooloola's beaches and sandblows, not its high dunes, which are some 140,000 years old. Only the central volcanoes of eastern Australia get younger to the south.
• Ch 4 and 7. The oldest Cooloola sand holds up heath, not forest. The drive from Maleny to Mooloolaba crosses some two hundred million years of rock, not three hundred; the older basement lies just west of it.
• Ch 5, 9 and 16. Sour water keeps the acid frogs' close relatives out; nothing shows that it keeps out their predators or the mosquitofish, which get in where pools are joined up or made permanent. Banksias feed gliders and native rats at night, not pygmy-possums, which do not live on this coast. The Cooloola groundwater study is described as it reads.
• Ch 6. Paperbark swamps are not "too wet to burn in a normal year": by the book's own fire maps, more than a quarter of the paperbark burned in the last decade, more of it than of the eucalypt forest. Fuel does not keep building where fire is kept out; it climbs back within a few years of a burn.
• Ch 8. Mangrove leaf litter is one base of the estuary's food web, beside the algae on the mud and the seagrass, not "the base" of the catch. The oyster reefs were lost to silt and disease as well as to dredging and harvest.
• Ch 10. At Yandina Creek, the birdwatcher Greg Roberts had been campaigning for years before the floodgates were repaired in 2015, and Unitywater bought the site as a nutrient offset. About a third of the council area's freshwater swamp survives, not "fragments".
• Ch 11 and 12. Mount Ninderry was logged, cleared and cropped for a century, by its own management plan. A tree with small hollows may be only 160 years old; only those with big hollows go back to Cook's time. She-oaks bear cones again in about ten years; the big hollow trees take centuries. Fire, not smoke, sets the grass-trees flowering.
• Ch 13 and 14. The rainforest's nutrients cycle fast through the litter on rich soil, not "overhead". The stinging tree's sting flares for weeks; the months and the hospital cases belong to the gympie-gympie of the north. Wolf Rock's manta rays come from autumn into spring.
• Ch 15 and 16. Bat lyssavirus reaches people when a bat's saliva gets into a bite, a scratch or the eyes, nose or mouth, not only through a bite or a scratch. Some wattles' leaf-stalk nectar glands do draw pollinating birds.
• Ch 17 and 18. Black August helped end the koala-skin trade; possum seasons ran on to 1936. The Mary River's lungfish lives in several rivers; its cod and turtle live nowhere else. The Mary River turtle program now works across the whole catchment against foxes, wild dogs and feral pigs. Two figure captions no longer say the fertile lowlands were cleared first.
• Dozens of smaller statements now say no more than their sources do: an "only" or a "never" softened, a superlative dropped, a source given in full.

A third check

A panel of reviewers then read the whole book again, blind, and raised what they still doubted. Each point was checked against outside sources, and the book now says no more than they do.

• Ch 1–5. The Glass House Mountains do not sit on the longest hotspot track on Earth; they lie on a separate track near the coast, and the plate that made both did not keep an even pace. Figure 2.1 is redrawn as a map of both tracks. The range is the wettest ground on the coast, about 2,000 mm of rain a year at Maleny against 1,400 at Beerburrum, but rain alone does not explain its rainforest. Wallum water kills the tadpoles of ordinary frogs and harms many fish; it does not kill "most freshwater life".
• Ch 6 and 7. The study that found fuel hazard higher six to twelve years after a fire than after a century unburnt was done in the Namadgi high country near Canberra, and the book now says so. "Nine people in ten" is gone; it was never a statistic.
• Ch 8. Mangroves, saltmarsh and seagrass bury carbon far faster than rainforest, hectare for hectare; they do not all hold more of it. The godwit's journey is not "the longest commute on Earth": the Arctic tern's is longer. The eastern curlew is critically endangered nationally and endangered globally.
• Ch 9–12. That acid water keeps the acid frogs' rivals out is the likeliest explanation, not a settled fact. Christmas bells flower from late spring into early summer. Only some eucalypts, tallowwood and grey ironbark among them, regrow from a lignotuber; blackbutt and flooded gum have none. Flowering plants never gave up having their pollinators breed inside them: the fig does it. The greater glider here is the southern and central form, listed as Endangered under national law in 2022; genetic work has found no glider of the southern group in Queensland.
• Ch 13–16. A rainforest needs its animals to spread back onto cleared ground, not to regrow where it stands. Seagrass shows from above as dark patches in the pale shallows. The dugong's nearest relatives on land are the elephants. Foxes and cats, more than clearing, have driven Australia's mammal extinctions; the book had put it as more damage than "any amount of clearing".
• Ch 17–19. Queensland did not lift the federal ban on releasing cane toads; the Prime Minister did, in 1936, under pressure from Queensland. The council's levy reserves were mostly, not all, bought on the market. A grass-tree in flower does not always mean a recent fire.
• The Big Scrub is the rainforest near Lismore in New South Wales. The book now calls the Blackall Range rainforest by the settlers' plain word for it, "scrub".

Brought up to date

• The ex-HMAS Brisbane wreck was broken up by Cyclone Alfred in 2025, and the reserve is closed until early 2027.
• East-coast humpbacks numbered about 25,000 in 2015 and are now estimated at about 50,000; the book's "forty thousand" matched no source.
• Bribie Island's northern tip has broken through twice since 2022, so the Pumicestone Passage is no longer simply "sheltered".
• The field companion (Chapter 19) now gives snakebite and tick first aid, what to do for a bluebottle sting, swimming between the flags, and the permit and tide rules for beach driving. The field guide keeps these notes current.

Tightened and filled in

Repeated passages now live in one chapter, with a pointer from the others, and the space they freed went on new, sourced material. Even with the new material and three new figures in, the chapters come out about 1,200 words shorter than the August edition.

• Ch 7, the chapter the whole book turns on, now says what its rule left out. The ground decides what can grow, but on the foothills' better soils it is fire that decides between eucalypt forest and rainforest, so the sharpest line on the gradient is drawn by fire, and it moves when the fires change. The chapter no longer re-teaches Part I.
• Ch 12 and 16 stop telling the same three animals twice. Chapter 12 has the gum forest's animals as a place, gliders and all; Chapter 16 makes the argument about specialists.
• Ch 17 tells the campaign that saved Cooloola from sand mining, from published sources: Kathleen McArthur, her 1953 walk up Mount Tinbeerwah with Judith Wright, the 100,000 protest cards, and the national park gazetted in December 1975. "The coast fills up" now has its numbers: 27,339 people in 1947, a quarter of a million by 2001, and about half the coast's native vegetation left.
• Ch 18 names some of the people doing the work: Barung Landcare's nursery at Maleny, South Maroochy RiverCare, and the Mary River turtle nest program.
• Ch 19 names real places to see each kind of country: Mount Ninderry, Yandina Creek Wetland, Mooloolah River National Park and the mangrove boardwalk at Bli Bli.
• Three chapters that had no figure now have one: the sand country from beach to wallum (Chapter 9), an old hollow-bearing tree beside young regrowth (Chapter 12), and the four ways a plant lives on poor sand (Chapter 15). Chapter 7 now opens with a map of its drive, from Mary Cairncross down to the mouth of the Mooloolah.
• The glossary has seven new terms. The species checklist now lists the species the chapters actually name. The notes read as notes rather than as a fact-checker's log.

Edited line by line

Last, every chapter was edited sentence by sentence, for the reader rather than the facts. Long sentences that asked you to hold three ideas at once are broken up. Points made twice, and sentences that only announced what the next one would say, are gone. The chapters are about 2,700 words shorter for it, and the paperback is ten pages thinner.

Nothing the book claims has changed. Every number, date, name, species, quotation and figure reference, and every "about" and "perhaps", was checked against the earlier text, and the notes are untouched.

The figures, redrawn for the page

Readers told us the figures were hard to follow, and they were right. Each had been drawn as a poster and shrunk onto the page, so its labels printed at two to four points, smaller than the notes. Every figure has now been redrawn for the book.

• Every label prints at six points or more. The posters' titles and credit lines, which the captions and the list of figures already carry, are gone from the images, so each drawing prints larger. The build now fails if any label in any figure drops below six points.
• Figure 2.2, the rock, is sorted the way Chapter 2 tells it: older rock, the sandstone laid over it, the young basalt and plugs, the sand and the river flats, each named on the map.
• Figure 8.2 shows two estuaries close up, Tin Can Inlet and the Pumicestone Passage, so the bands of seagrass, flat, mangrove and saltmarsh can be seen; on the regional map they were slivers.
• Figure 18.2 is the map of the levy reserves alone, at twice the size; its totals are in the caption.
• Two maps have left the book and stay among the site's downloads: the gamma-ray map that was Figure 2.3, whose colour code a reader could not decode, and the reef-to-range map that was Figure 7.4, whose sea floor printed as a flat wash.

The editions themselves

• The book is now free to share: copy it, pass it on and print it for your own use, whole and unaltered.
• Every chapter links to its notes and back again, in both the EPUB and the PDF.
• Both editions show the book's five parts, each with its own opening page, and the contents list each chapter under its part.
• A new list of figures gives every map and diagram with what it was drawn from. Five figure captions now match the titles printed on their images, and Chapter 7 no longer shows the rainfall map twice. The text now points to each figure by number, and in the EPUB and PDF the reference is a link.
• Every figure has a description of what it shows, read by screen readers in place of the image, as well as its caption.
• An index of the book's places, plants, animals, people and ideas: page numbers in the PDF, chapter numbers in the EPUB, every one a link. In the PDF, each chapter's notes now say whose they are at the head of the page.
• The list of sidebars links to each sidebar in the EPUB and gives its page in the PDF. It, and the field companion's safety notes, had been printing as one run-on paragraph; both are lists again.
• In the PDF, the contents come straight after the Acknowledgement of Country, and the notes before Further reading.
• The free PDF opens on its cover, is tagged so screen readers can follow it, and keeps its maps sharp when you zoom in. Searching it finds words that were split across lines.
• In both PDFs, far fewer pages end in a large gap: figures move a paragraph or two to fill the space, and sidebars may run on to the next page.
• In the EPUB, the Acknowledgement of Country and the Preface have their own place in the contents, sidebars and epigraphs are marked as what they are for screen readers, and the store description is a description again.