A Review of Tectonic Relief in Australia

Slissmilch and others have maintained for many years that tectonic scarps in eastern Australia, mainly fault scarps, are prominent in New South Wales, and more recently they have described the eastern ranges of Queensland as made up of elongated fault-block features. Alternative explanations recognize a prevalence of multicycle relief forms in New South Wales and attribute the features of the Queensland ranges to subsequent erosion on an ancient structure. In Victoria, South Australia, and parts of Western Australia, large block-faulted relief forms are recognized; but in the first-named state some scarps formerly regarded as tectonic have been more recently relegated to the fault-line scarp category. In Tasmania relief is dominated by fault scarps which are in a sense also structural escarpments; and survival of these in a single cycle from a Lower Miocene tectogenesis is claimed on the strength of paleo-botanical evidence.