AUSTRALIA Prichard 1826

Prichard (1829) used a mixture of terms, including “Terra Australis”, “New Holland” and
“Australia” to describe the continent. However, Swainson (1835) redefined Australia as including “... the vast island of New Holland, and those immediately adjoining, as New Guinea, New Zealand, and Van Diemen’s Lands, but likewise the whole of the oceanic clusters forming Polynesian division of some geographers” (Swainson, 1835: 114). Sclater (1858) classified his Regio Australiana in the same way. Schmarda (1853) and Tenison-Woods (1882), however, describe their “Australia” as the island continent, while Agassiz (1854) had a restricted Australian Realm which he divided into the Papuan and New Holland Fauna. We herein use a combination of both Prichard’s and Swainson’s diagnoses that is much closer to Agassiz’s Australian Realm, namely the Australian continent and the southern areas of New Guinea.
It was Tenison-Woods, however, who first proposed a regionalisation of zoogeographical areas of Australia. He defined Australia as a continent “as more than a province in the animal and vegetable kingdom” (Tenison- Woods 1882: 48), which was divided into seven sub-provinces. Tenison-Woods’ sub-provinces, however, were largely ignored by most zoogeographers. The next large scale regionalisation came from Hedley (1894), who borrowed floral regions from Tate (1889) to describe his three zoogeographical regions, separating the northern part of the Euronotian as the Papuan. Spencer (1896) however presented a new regionalisation, with new terms, essentially keeping Hedley’s regions the same. The wide usage of Spencer’s terms means that his 1896 names have preference, as the Papuan of Agassiz and the Euronotian of Tate may be confused with the earlier names of Hedley (1894).
The sub-regions of Sloane (1905, 1915) were the first to diagnose the Murray-Darling Basin (Riverina) as a terrestrial faunal area within the Eyrean region. The last major regionalisation, by Cracraft (1991) divided Australia into “endemic areas” based in bird and vegetation distributions. While these areas proved popular with botanists and zoologists, they are poorly defined (by Cracraft’s own admission) and mainly follow the Atlas of Australian Resources Vegetation provinces. As the vegetative areas help define the geography of bird distributions, they are accepted as biotic herein.