By Epoch Warrior Rory Wray-McCann

My name is Rory Wray-McCann, I am a mineral prospector and I live on the West Coast of Tasmania. When I was first asked by Pony Express to submit an alternative nomenclature for the newly proposed Anthropocene Epoch, I went for a walk in our 15 hectare regrowth rainforest backyard so I could relax, clear my head and give the intriguing matter the earnest contemplation that it requires...I call it the office.

The office lies right opposite the middle of the West Coast Range, one of Australia’s most impressive inland landscapes, with eight 1000 metre or more, jagged, Cambro/Ordovician peaks, each named after the great 19th century English naturalists, Tyndall, Geike, Sedgewick, Lyell, Owen, Huxley, Jukes and Darwin...over 30 kilometres of philosophers.

As office vistas go, it is as good as a continent gets. All geologically mapped and intensely studied, from verdant regolith down to deep crystalline basement, by an incomparable array of some of the finest Australian earth scientists who ever licked a rock, including Carey, Leaman, Groves, Solomon, Davidson, Corbett, Twelvetrees et al, not to forget an international array of bold thinking, world leading edge geologists and geophysicists such as Boniwell, Sillitoe or Peters.

It was their studious accounts that gradually loosened the glaucoma slough that had long glued my not-so-prying eyes and mind shut to the strictly human pleasures of the earth sciences, thus allowing me to exploit the treasures of the earth, by first taking the extended time necessary to understand my own neighbouring geologic environment that vividly records, for future posterity, the 130 year old copper mining heritage of Mt. Lyell Queenstown.

From days not so long gone and not so sensitive, when the ages-old practice of mining was at its most environmentally insatiable.

One can see the bland orange glory-hole scar from the Mt. Lyell Mine up to a hundred kilometres elevation on Google Earth, looking like a rapidly spreading geomorphologic virus gone off in a colossal-sized petri dish.

Upwards of twenty square kilometres of pristine temperate rainforest, inexorably raised to bedrock by mining pioneers and nature both, leaving a proudly denuded lunar land, two wild rivers ruefully decimated, an estuarine tailings delta where once there was none, a poisoned community, like hell with the fires put out.

From my office standpoint, nothing new, as I know there are many thousands of similar back-to-bedrock blighted vistas found all over the world. I could now visualise, for the first time, my backyard vista as an industrial human tapestry of quite recent Pleistocene time, as well as a chronostratigraphic blueprint of earth time back to the Palaeozoic.

The eyes have it.

Which led me to remorsefully reflect: if only the great geologists knew that the indigenous west coast tribe, the Timgarick, who had continuously mined the western ranges for its valuable ochres and the famous Darwin glass (a meteorite impact silicate), that they would have all learned something special about the not-so-complex and intertwined nature of time and mankind.

Long considered the sharpest and most durable scalpel on earth, the glass was mined and traded for over 36,000 radio carbon dated years. The middens do not lie.

In super dreamtime reality, that’s what you call a monumental human impact and epoch starting point. The oldest continuous civilization on earth, remarkably in tune with the earth, and then 30 abominable genocidal years of us claiming the ancient mining land for ourselves, 1803-1834. Morally and socially determining whose time had come.

Clearly, it is not an easy exercise to determine the era of human time into a superlative, and clearly “Anthropocene”, a 30 year old concept, does not accurately summate, properly describe, or plausibly infer, in a superlative, the uniformly catastrophic impact of prolific and tumultuous humanity on our one and only blue planet.

There is no denying that ours is a peculiarly virulent species, self evidently toxic and indiscriminately ruinous to any environment and all other species of terrestrial life, so far causing the mass extinction of untold tens of thousands of species of all memorable kinds, of once living terra firma phenomena, in no real Pleistocene time at all.

Members of our species instinctively chop, burn, dig, remove and erase our worldly environment and all it’s treasures as though it is the innate homo sapiens’ birthright to perpetually pillage, plunder and profit from our once-perfect planet. Then move on to greener pastures and do it all again, the very next plucky generation, only ever faster and more orestruck, whoever the ravenous numbat homo sapien. The earth really is your oyster, you just got to know how to shuck it.

That is our enduring, warming planetary human legacy, best described with honesty, humility and superlative clarity, as the TERRAMETACENE epoch, that manifest terrabillus ignoramus era of malevolent mankind, post A.D. to the coming Graphene Quantum age.

In nondescript analytic closing, equally geomorphologically elucidated, as the Carbon Catastrophe Hiatus, the Physcozeroic, the Blithering Humanustrophe.


In deconstructing the TERRAMETACENE into an artwork I decided on an impact meteorite, designed by mineral, plant, fossil and human metaphor to symbolise both the fleeting existence of mankind and the extraordinary length of time that ever resilient life has existed on earth.

For my earth matrix I chose a slab of King Billy pine, retrieved from the long drowned Princess River saw mill in 1992, the rarest softwood in Australia, named after William Lanne, the last full blood indigenous palawa man, 1830-1864. It has a pink grain and is soft to the whittle. I left it raw and unpolished so that people could smell its aromatic lifeforce and still make out the densely packed growth rings that represent the King Billy shockwaves of this human calamity event.

I chose as my meteorite centrepiece an ancient fossil coral that I retrieved from the Proterozoic age Urquart Shales of the Mt. Isa mineral province, the host rock of the famous Mt. Isa mines. I dug it out from a boxcut batter immediately adjacent to the mine complex many years ago.

As fossils and meteorites go, it is white hot, older than the hills and has an incredibly intricate calcium structure as you have ever seen. It symbolises early life on earth, how long it was here and what it actually first looked like in the Proterozoic way before the Ediacaran by around a billion years.

I surrounded the little fella with shards of Darwin glass, a meteorite impact silicate that formed when Western Tasmania was blasted to hell and back by a large meteorite around 800,000 years ago. It impacted just down the road a little from here and was mined right through the Pleistocene by the palawa people.

The super heated debris was blasted high into the atmosphere and rapidly cooled as it rained back to terra firma, forming a consistent layer of glass globules, some green and opaque, some black, sometimes as big as a fist. It is found nowhere else in Australia and just 18in deep, over a wide area of temperate rainforest regolith, AKA Libyan glass, Moldaviaite.

At 99.98 silica content they make great cabochons, lucky charms, scalpels and petroglyphs. To symbolise the extraordinary terrestrial heat generated by such an earthly impact event I used crystals of crocoite, Tasmania’s mineral emblem, Pb/Cr, retrieved from the Dundas Extended crocoite mine. It is still producing ‘till this day.