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took me inland to visit stream flow recording sites and to collect samples for water analysis. In the next two tropical wet seasons at Cairns, I collected a large set of data and saw the impacts of a tropical cyclone on the rivers. The huge rainfalls in such storms carry the bulk of all the sediment removed in a year. However, after examining all the data, I noticed something unexpected: instead of the steepest, highest parts of the river catchments having the highest sediment yield per square kilometre the lower, deforested, cultivated or grazed part of the catchment produced the most sediment per unit area. In 1966 that was one of the earliest quantitative indications of the extent of human impact on rates of land-forming processes. In 1965 I was offered a job at Hull University, linking geography to a new Centre for South East Asian Studies. The university suggested I went to Malaysia for six months in 1966 before joining them in September. This enabled me to study a river draining granite hills north-east of Kuala Lumpur, like those near Cairns. Both had rainforest cover, but the rainfall regimes were different: tropical cyclones do not hit the

World War II bomb damage. What struck me was that plants had already colonised the ruins. It was my first insight into urban ecology: nature in cities, a theme that became a major part of my academic work from the 1980s onwards. National service at Lüneburg and Nienburg in Germany brought further travel: playing rugby round the British zone, participating in the British Army Langlauf (cross-country) ski championships, and local leave to Nijmegen, Copenhagen and Vienna. However, horizons widened at Oxford, where I entered Balliol College in 1958. Ever keen on exploration, I joined the Oxford University Expedition to Cyrenaica in 1960, travelling by ex-army, three ton lorry to Marseilles, taking a ship to Tunis then driving round the Gulf of Sirte to the Gebel Akhdar. We were also taken to where BP were drilling for oil in the Sahara. At Oxford I studied geomorphology (the science of landform development and change) as a special subject, taught by Marjorie Sweeting, who had worked in such tropical areas as Jamaica and northern Australia. After completing the BA degree, I stayed at Oxford to find out whether limestone dissolved faster in polar regions than in humid tropical regions, learning quite a lot of chemistry in the process. A PhD scholarship to the Australian National University enabled me to take this further and to reach the humid tropics. In May 1963 I drove the 3,000km from Canberra to Cairns in north Queensland to begin my acquaintance with tropical rainforests. A local Queensland government stream-gauging office

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Right Top: The rainforests of the eastern edge of the Atherton Tableland, North Queensland Right Bottom: Sediment from construction work upstream on the edge of the River Kelang in the centre of Kuala Lumpur in 1983

The start of the journey in 1960 across the Calanshio Sand Sea to the BP drilling site