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Utilising a combination of SHRIMP U-Pb dating of single zircon grains and specially constructed ’expected’ zircon-age histograms the provenance or protosource areas for sediment samples have been determined and the percentage inputs from these areas established.

The ’expected’ histograms and accompanying text provide an up-to-date summary of the geochronologic development of major basement areas in Australia concentrating on crust-forming and high-level metamorphic events and their relative importance. These histograms may therefore be considered as the zircon ’fingerprints’ of major Australian basement terranes.

This method has been successfully applied to protosource determination in Quaternary sand samples from the Australian Continental Dunefields. In each of three examples protosource areas have been determined and in samples containing more than one protosource the relative inputs have been estimated. From the results of this study the following conclusions can be drawn regarding the formation of the Australian deserts. Firstly, each individual desert is composed of material from several different protosource areas, some of these are local while others are up to 850 km away. Secondly, most of these protosource areas no longer contribute sediments to the dunefields, suggesting substantial changes have occurred in climatic regime and sediment transport patterns in Australia. Finally, there appears to have been only a limited amount of long-distance aeolian transport within the Australian Continental Dunefield with most sand material apparently reworked from older fluvial and marine deposits.