Description

The Last Continent is the twenty-second Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett. First published in 1998, it parodies Australian people and aspects of Australian culture, such as the Crocodile Dundee and Mad Max movies, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Vegemite, Flip-Flops, cork hats, the Peach Nellie, and the popular Australian song "Waltzing Matilda." It also mocks the concept of time travel, poking fun at the various paradoxes involved in traveling through time; preventing your own birth by killing your grandfather (the grandfather paradox), and the concept of altering time in the present by inadvertently changing the past as portrayed in the Ray Bradbury short story "A Sound of Thunder". The title comes from "The Lost Continent" which was a term used to describe the existence of a large continent in the South Pacific/Indian Ocean area, was disproved by Capt.James Cook's explorations but it lingered on in legend and myth and became a symbol associated with vanished worlds which were either the cradle of civilization or a high water mark in the development of mankind.