Yan Yean revisited—a Bicentennial window on Australian freshwater algae

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Abstract
As the tall ships race to Sydney for the burlesque of white Australia's Bicentennial, two phycologists reflect on the freshwater flora after 200 years of vigorous exploitation of a continent. For most areas it is impossible to gauge the change. There were few early studies, and most sampling sites are now destroyed. One, Yan Yean, a taxonomic classic in its own right, stands much as built, protected and cared for as a city's water source, with an algal flora almost unchanged in 80 years. Other sites, temperate and tropical, now protected with World Heritage status, conserve a rich algal flora with a distinctively Australian endemic element. Elsewhere, the hand of man destroys the wetlands, but creates new habitats over vast areas of a continent scarcely tenanted by algae. With this, after a long lull since Playfair's days, comes a burst of phycological discovery.