Steve Hopper

And that question has preoccupied me ever since.

Well, it took me 30 years to think about it.

Yeah, yeah.

So in 2009, I published a new body of theory, which I called OCBIL theory, O-C-B-I-L.

And that stands, that's an acronym for Old Climatically Buffered and Infertile Landscapes.

what it appears to be is those three attributes of old, you know, I mean, landscapes that are millions of, tens of millions of years old, climatically buffered, because ocean on two sides for the best part of 90 million years or more, and in fertile soils, particularly low in phosphorus, when you combine those three factors together,

all of a sudden the places richest in plants and animals that don't move around much become evident.

And they're just like the little hill I'm looking at now, Mount Clarence, in the heart of Albany.

They're tiny little hills.

They're not big mountains where species richness is a feature.

You know, if you think of

the Andes or the Himalayas, they're traditionally regarded as the richest places on earth for plants and animals.

And extraordinarily, we've got this subdued plateau gently rising up from the sea in southwestern Australia.

And parts of it are just as rich as the Himalayas or parts of the Andes.

So they were the three attributes that I'd finally worked out after thinking about 30 years or so.

And the body of theory included devising ways of testing rigorously those ideas, and I've spent a lot of time now, almost two more decades, testing those ideas.

I was doing second year botany in my third year as an undergraduate.

And in those days there were field camps.

They'd take students out with staff for a week somewhere.

And the field camp when I was doing second year was at a place called Yanchip, just north of Perth.