Dreamtime Spine: A Continental Restoration Synthesis
Summary Australia is not naturally a desert continent. It is a continent whose internal water redistribution system was progressively broken — by tectonic uplift redirecting river flows, by 15 million years of aridification, and finally by the megafauna collapse that removed the biological machinery sustaining what remained. The continent has been trying to restore itself ever since. It lacks only the missing components. The Dreamtime Spine is the gravity-fed component of that restoration. Not by imposing something foreign on the landscape — but by completing what the continent’s own geology began and what Aboriginal land management sustained for 60,000 years. Every intervention in this document works with existing gradients. No pumping. No mountain crossings. Water redirected where the terrain already permits it, captured where river systems already concentrate it, and anchored in managed lakes that make permanent water viable in an arid interior for the first time since Paleolake Dieri. ...