[Agadjano]

Сообщение от Xenon

http://www.treeland.ru/article/home/..._avctralii.htm

In 1948 Miller was only four years out of his PhD and working for the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. Using derris root, or rotenone, to collect fish by poisoning small water bodies, he quickly became popular with the local Aboriginal communities because unwanted fish could be eaten.

Arnhem Land exposed him to a more mesic environment than he had encountered in his earlier study of the deserts of the American southwest. He was impressed by the diversity of the rainforest fishes, which were a stark contrast to the more depauperate desert ichthyofauna. The Australian experience may well have motivated him to study the freshwater fishes of Mexico on which he became the leading international expert. He wrote Freshwater fishes of México (2005), the definitive book on that large faunal region and also completed intricate studies on fishes in the arid regions of the US.

The influence of the Arnhem Land Expedition was not limited to his professional life. It also rippled through his family, especially his two oldest children, Frances and Gifford, both of whom became scientists. Tokens of Australia were conspicuously displayed in the Miller household until Robert's death in 2003, and stories of the Expedition were common fare around the dinner table. As a result, both Frances and Gifford travelled extensively throughout Australia. Miller's granddaughter, Mollie Cashner, after accompanying her grandfather to the 50th Arnhem Land Reunion, was inspired to study ichthyology and is now finishing her PhD.

Gifford has visited Australia most years since the late 1980s. Although a geologist by training, he developed an ambitious research program that sought to unravel the footprints of human colonisation on the Australian continent, in particular to explain the demise of the Australian megafauna, a topic that bridges his father's biological background and close association with Aboriginal groups during the Arnhem Land Expedition, with the classical methods of geological investigation. In this research he continues the core thread of the scientific questions that motivated the original Arnhem Land Expedition: how did Aboriginal groups extract a living from the Australian landscape, and in the process how did the landscape respond to that activity. These questions remain alive in the contemporary world as we ponder how humans everywhere fit into their landscape and how we can manage a sustainable future.

Источник: nma.gov.au