Chapters cover the various sciences of Ocean: biology, climate, currents, fisheries, mineral resources, and it’s all Australia! I enjoyed the spaghetti diagrams (like the London Underground) of the ocean currents which determine our wind and weather, finding out the best place to throw a message in a bottle into the sea –  and where it would be found. But no! – read the chapter on marine pollution and you would be very reluctant to throw anything at all into the fouled oceans, least of all a bottle. Scary stuff, there.

Probably the most significant sections, at least from a human standpoint, are the chapters on climate. The oceans absorb disastrous quantities of human waste: sewage, bottles, plastics, fishing nets, toxins, but the most important human waste product is carbon dioxide: while the oceans can absorb enormous quantities of CO2, along with all the other detritus of civilisation, there must be a limit.

The authors of Oceans, as good scientists, have no doubt that human activities are affecting global climate. It’s one more fact in a volume of interesting, fascinating, occasionally worrying, facts.

So who is the intended reader of this fine production? I would say, anyone interested in Australia’s future. Send a copy to your local politician, your daughter, your son, your grandmother …