More than a century ago, long before the second-floor room at the South Australian Museum became the office of the director of the Museum of South Australia - Tim Flannery's office - it was used as an armory. It was there that the corpses of Australia's two most famous doomed explorers, Robert O'Hara Burke and William Wills, were kept before their journey back to Melbourne for burial.
Perfect symmetry. Burke and Wills died of ignorance. Now the room in which their bodies were temporarily stored is the workspace of the man who, more than any other, has imprinted onto the national consciousness the idea that we remain ignorant about the realities of this continent and will pay a high price for continued ignorance.
Ten years ago, at the age of 38, Dr Tim Flannery changed Australia's national conversation with the publication of The Future Eaters, which argued that the arrival of humans had a profound and invidious impact, leading to rapid or "blitzkrieg" mass extinction of species, and a subsequent drying out of much of the continent. The book is still selling - well over 100,000 copies so far - and remains on the reading lists of numerous university courses.
In those 10 years, Flannery has become a publishing phenomenon, averaging a book a year he has either written or introduced. No fewer than 11 Flannery titles are in the SA Museum's bookstore. His admirers include Sir David Attenborough and two state premiers - Bob Carr and Mike Rann. Hilary McPhee singled him out this year as perhaps the only Australian intellectual who has been able to capture the public's imagination about science. He is the only true polymath among Australia's public intellectuals, with degrees in English, geology and zoology and contributions to science, the ecology and history. He's a likeable bloke, a good talker, and the media loves his ability to generate stories. On May 19, he made the front page again when he warned the Sydney Futures forum that Australia was about to see devastating environmental change and possibly ghost cities.
There are, however, plenty in the academic community loudly unwilling to participate in the beatification of St Timothy. "Just because a guy is well known does not mean he knows what he is talking about," Dr Stephen Wroe, a palaeontologist at the University of Sydney, says. "I've got a fairly cynical view of Tim. He's an opportunist. He knows climate change is a buzzword, but a few months' work does not make him an expert."
Dr Judith Field, an archaeologist at the University of Sydney, doesn't hold back, either: "Tim doesn't let the facts get in the way of a good story. He does a lot of broadbrush stuff, with broad consequences, and some of it is just plain wrong."
And another archaeologist, Jim Allen, of La Trobe University, made the observation a while ago: "I wish I could be as sure of anything as Tim is of everything".
Flannery does not resile from his overall thesis about the past in The Future Eaters - that the arrival of humans in Australia had a profound impact on the environment. Nor does he resile from his grim warning about our future: "I remain optimistic that we can turn things around, but I think we've got much less time than I thought to ensure our survival."
We could go over the cliff?
"We could go over the cliff. You would hope not. You would hope that people see what needs to be done. It's not rocket science. It's not difficult. It's not even all that costly. It's actually about the way you think about the world."
Last year, in Quarterly Essay 9, entitled "Beautiful Lies", Flannery raised the temperature even further: "As I look back on those old paintings of proclamations made by men in top hats," he wrote, "Federation looks more and more like a game in which colonial Europeans re-arrange the deckchairs on a Titanic full of self-satisfied fools, unable to see the icebergs that their whole ocean liner of complacency is inexorably sliding towards . . .
"If we are to take Australia's environmental crisis seriously and . . . fight it as if we are fighting a war, we must base our action plan on the best science we have, rather than prejudices and assertions. This issue is particularly important because the woolliness extends to the heads of some of those who lead the Australian environmental movement."
Oh, Flannery is facing a war, all right. And much of the fire directed at him lately has come from his own regiment. When we talked in Adelaide, he looked worn, as if more than three years had passed since we last met. He was suffering from food poisoning and lack of sleep, which may have been why his usually sunny face was showing more than its 48 years.
Last month he received another blast of academic grapeshot, and another front-page story, with the publication of a paper by Wroe and two other scientists in the Proceedings of the Royal Society entitled, "On the rarity of big, fierce carnivores . . .", which attacked the underpinning of The Future Eaters. Wroe summarised the attack: "A generation of Australians have been misinformed. Australians should no longer be taught that theirs is a biologically stunted land that produced diminished fauna."
Wroe was more brutal in conversation: "Our research effectively undermines the whole thesis that The Future Eaters is built on . . . He's saying his thesis is still standing, but it's not."
Flannery's response to the original article: "I think the tone gives you a sense there may be more than a scientific argument going on there."
He remains uninhibited about making big calls on where this society is going, which sounds as if it could be in the same direction as Burke and Wills. He is especially disturbing when he talks about Perth, with its one million people, as the leading candidate to become the world's first "metropolitan ghost town".
"I think the chances are that, in the next 50 years, Perth will face challenges it simply won't be able to overcome," he says. "You don't want to lead people to despair, and it's not too late, but there is a possibility Perth will become western civilisation's first ghost metropolis.
"A lot of things are against Perth. It is the most isolated large city on the planet. It has been profoundly affected by global climate change, well in advance of anywhere else. It's flat. It's salty. And the magic gate of 1976 treated it very, very badly."
Magic gate? It's all in his next book, the one he's trying to find time to write. "The world's climate changed in 1976. It was a phase shift, from one steady state to another. In 1976, there was a phase shift in Perth's rainfall, and Perth lost about 15 per cent of its rainfall. That had a very profound knock-on effect. Before 1976, Perth could rely on 340 gigalitres into its catchment every year. After 1976, it's only been getting 160 gigalitres.
"And as people have knocked over native vegetation, it's got worse and worse. The winter rainfall decreased to such an extent that in the marginal parts of the wheatbelt it is really difficult for farmers to get a crop. A lot of them have left the land. Those who remain might get a winter crop, but over summer those fields are laid fallow," he says.
"Once you get a big cyclonic event in summer, with all these bare fields, that water runs straight into the ground table and just pushes up the salt. So the one [negative] trend reinforces the other.
"Then the world went through another magic gate in 1998. There was a jump in sea-surface temperatures in the central Pacific, of about 0.5 degree celsius, which has persisted. It's had ramifications all around the world. After 1998, Perth started receiving around 111 gigalitres a year. So for the last six years it's gone down to a third of the water it was getting."
Perth has been drawing down its ground-water reserves to make up for the shortfall, which is unsustainable. And Flannery believes the problems of the south-west are shifting east.
"Since 1998, the declines we've seen in the west for nearly 30 years have expanded to eastern Australia as rain-bearing, low-pressure systems were driven to the south of the continent," he says. "The system had sat there, stable, for 22 years and then in 1998 began to spread eastwards. One of the reasons we've seen chronically low water levels in the Melbourne catchment and the Sydney catchment has been because the decrease that started in Perth has now spread with the high pressure system to eastern Australia."
How seriously should we take Flannery's comments about fields in which he is not trained? "It will be scary if he gets to hijack this subject," says Wroe. Flannery has also been savaged by John Benson, the senior plant ecologist at the Botanic Gardens Trust in Sydney, who wrote last year that "simplistic statements made by reputable authors such as Tim Flannery can be used to justify ongoing damage to the Australian landscape".
In a letter to Quarterly Essay 13, Benson dismissed the basic thesis on which The Future Eaters was based: "To the lay reader, this sounds like a plausible hypothesis - it is certainly ingenious in its scope. However, it is not supported by much scientific evidence and it is likely that the hypothesis is wrong."
Benson also questioned Flannery's approach to the land management, concluding: "This is not just an esoteric academic debate. It is about the way some loosely researched material in Tim Flannery's The Future Eaters and in his essay Beautiful Lies are taken as scientific fact and used by those intent on continuing the degradation of the Australian landscape for economic gain. Tim Flannery should check details more thoroughly when he pens articles for popular consumption."
Flannery responded in print: "John Benson accuses me of a plethora of shortcomings, from conducting loose and careless research to perpetuating inaccuracies and aiding land-clearers. Such a spray is more in the nature of attempted character assassination than scientific debate."
"I was struck by the tone," he says, "but I was more struck by the almost fossilised attitude. He was deeply concerned about some views I may have had on land clearing but he didn't acknowledged that, as part of the Wentworth Group of scientists, we'd helped get the single greatest reform of land clearing in Australia."
Of course, the Wentworth Group itself (11 scientists advising the Federal Government on soil and water depletion) was attacked from the right. Dr Alan Moran, of the Institute of Public Affairs, wrote last year: 'The Wentworth Group offers us little useful guidance for the future. With Rousseau-like nostalgia, the group harks back to an Arcadian Australia in the 45,000 years before European settlement. [But] the pre-modern environment was bitterly hostile to mankind, with starvation and massive floods punctuating great periods of drought."
In defence of The Future Eaters , Flannery says: "The book contained a number of different hypotheses. We don't deal with revealed truths in science, unfortunately. We have a hypothesis, which we put, and which we all know has a use-by date. Every hypothesis has a use-by date. What you hope to do by putting up a hypothesis is to move the debate along a bit."
He dismisses Wroe's claim that his main theory in The Future Eaters has fallen over, saying Wroe's paper looked only at a small part of his hypothesis. He cited a recent paper by Barry Brook and David Bowman, "The uncertain blitzkrieg of Pleistocene megafauna", which concluded: "In sum, human colonisation in the late Pleistocene [period] almost certainly triggered a 'blitzkrieg' of the 'megafauna', but the operational details remain elusive".
This prompted a blitzkrieg of a different kind, from Wroe: "I think the Brook-Bowman paper is a lot of baloney. It is a computer simulation. I could throw in a few variables and get a different outcome . . . Blitzkrieg theory is a hotly contested area. I do not believe in it."
Field, who has been contesting Flannery's theories for years, adds another whack: "Most of our hypotheses are tested with facts, and that underlies the work we do. But most of what Tim does is conceptually driven, and not based on data. And he has been selective in his use of data."
Flannery also took flak last year for his dispute with Professor Michael Archer, Dean of Science at the University of New South Wales and former director of the Australian Museum. At issue was the museum's response to the theft of a large number of specimens, some collected by Flannery himself. "I'm really saddened by the way the thefts were handled by Mike," he says. "An ICAC inquiry into the thefts made no findings against Archer, especially as the thefts took place before he was director. All that went missing during Archer's tenure were eight bat skulls and a parrot.
There was idle speculation that Flannery wanted Archer's job, but Flannery said he only applied for the directorship after Archer advised him he would not be seeking re-appointment. Flannery, who made his name while chief scientist at the museum, proposed to the museum board a $100-million upgrade, closing the museum for two years, targeting an increase in visitors from 300,000 a year to 1.5 million. "It became clear people were more concerned with survival than with growth," he says. "I didn't want to go in there on a survival-only basis."
So he stayed in Adelaide, where he has a very large footprint: director of the South Australian Museum; chairman of the Premier's sustainability round table; chairman of the state science council; director of the Australian Wildlife Conservancy. He is also on the advisory board of the National Geographic Society in Washington, DC. His ambitions? Finish his book on global climate change, make the museum a "green" showpiece, fight the sustainability cause in South Australia and beyond, and help Adelaide avoid a water crisis.
"We have a national salinisation problem, with large parts of the south-west [Western Australia] beyond help, but the big one is going to be the Murray River," he says. "If salinity levels in the Murray rise sufficiently, Adelaide is going to be deeply compromised. Two years ago there was a potential for algae bloom in the lower Murray. If that had happened, the water treatment plants of Adelaide wouldn't have been able to cope. It could happen any summer. It's all delicately balanced."
He stresses he is not all doom and gloom. "There has been a revolution in attitudes in rural Australia. Whenever I travel out in the country I see a lot of intelligent people who understand the issues and are trying to come to grips with very complex problems and showing great ingenuity in coming up with solutions to long-standing problems of sustainability."
"Even among the most unlikely people, like cotton growers, they understand the issue. It's their livelihood. I'm not saying self-interest is gone, it isn't, but we should be encouraged by the example set by rural Australia. I could ask people living in the cities, how many of you have got a solar panel on the roof? How many of you drive a hydrogen vehicle?"
Not many. Which is why all the scientists mentioned in this story are in agreement on one overarching point - that Australia is in trouble and ignorance abounds. Says Wroe: "I concur entirely with the ultimate thesis that this is a particularly fragile land and we have done a particularly good job of screwing it up."