terra australis 34 22 Palaeoecology as a means of auditing wetland condition Peter Gell Centre for Environmental Management, University of Ballarat, Ballarat, Victoria p.gell@ballarat.edu.au Te line it is drawn, the curse it is cast Te slow one now, will later be fast As the present now, will later be past Te order is rapidly fadin’ And the frst one now will later be last For the times they are a changin’ Bob Dylan Introduction One could line up a suite of palaeoecological research papers published about Australian sites and, while they would not extend from Lake Wangoom to Lynch’s Crater, they would fll much of the pollen microscope laboratory at Monash University. In one way, that, in fact, would be the best place to start to assemble the bibliography, as many of the papers have emanated from Peter Kershaw and the long list of honours and postgraduate students he has supervised, his post-doctoral fellows and the palaeoecological diaspora that is the legacy of this legend from Littleborough. Of course, all of these students would suggest it be assembled elsewhere, as they know too well that it would take many years to fnd all of the papers in Peter’s ofce. If this list was separated into those with a long-term focus and those with a direct management focus, there would be a clear bias to the former. While Peter’s supervisor patiently examined detailed records of change in fne temporal (and spatial) resolution (Walker et al. 2000), and frst coined the term ‘fne-resolution pollen analysis’, his student’s focus was clearly on the ecological response of vegetation communities to Milankovich-scale climatic fuctuations. Te pollen record from Lynch’s Crater is progressively developed in an ever increasing number of publications (Kershaw 1978, 1986, 1993; Turney et al. 2006; Kershaw et