Tasmanian Odonata. By Piers Allbrook

Fauna of Tasmania Handbook No. 1, 84 pp., 107 figs., 27 maps inch Fauna of Tasmania Office, University of Tasmania (Box 352 C, G.P.O.), Hobart, 1979. Price: A $2.00. Biogeographers and odonatologists will welcome the University of Tasmania’s initiative in producing a series of inexpensive handbooks on the Tasmanian fauna, beginning with this one on Odonata. Although only 26 species of Odonata have been reliably recorded from Tasmania (as compared with almost 300 from the Australian mainland), this fauna is the outcome of changing climate and fluctuating sea-level associated with the Pleistocene glaciations, during which Bass Strait disappeared and Tasmania from time to time became a broad peninsula attached to the south-eastern coastline of Australia. The last of these land connections was probably not completely broken until about 10,000- 15.000 years ago.