Australia: Land Beyond Time

00:00:31 One of nature's masterworks

00:02:45 Primeval landscapes belie its rich resourceful life

00:04:33 has taken them through cool forests and fiery deserts

00:05:50 Africa South America and India were formed

00:06:53 and its moist rainforest all but disappeared

00:08:17 Once you could walk to Antarctica from here

00:10:00 and others learned to eat grass

00:11:10 She can even supply her babies

00:12:22 and nutrients from leaves that would be toxic to most other mammals

00:14:07 The closer we look the more we find that some of Australia's forest inhabitants

00:15:25 provide food for one of Australia's four thousand species of ants

00:16:50 The Thorny Devil has a sticky tongue and it's picky about what it eats

00:18:29 Sometimes though the King Brown is more than even a perentie can manage

00:20:46 Most of Australia's native plants and animals

00:21:51 Today it exists nowhere else on earth

00:23:10 Long periods without rain push all life to the limit

00:24:41 Surviving kangaroos will either move to new territory in search of food

00:26:44 They will build nests above the high water level

00:29:17 like seeds are waiting

00:30:44 Thousands of waterbirds join in a frenzy of feeding and breeding

00:32:56 the birds fly hundreds of miles to gather on the shores of newly filled desert lakes

00:35:36 Nearly a million square miles

00:37:24 the great flocks of pelicans become nomads once more

00:38:58 as it crept northward through the eons