From the Late Devonian to the Triassic, eastern Australia was part of eastern Gondwana, where an active, convergent plate margin was influenced by a west-dipping subduction system. This system terminated as the result of global plate reorganization in the Middle to Late Triassic. The southern New England orogen changed from a prowedge (P) mode (terminology of Beaumont et al., 1999) in the Devonian-Carboniferous to an uplifted plug (P-U) mode in the Permian to Triassic. In contrast, the northern New England orogen was dominated by the retrowedge (P-U-R) mode in both time periods. This led to the development, in the Permian–Triassic, of a major west-directed retroforeland thrust belt in northern New England, with the formation of a thick foreland-basin phase in the adjacent Bowen Basin to the west. Thick-skinned and thin-skinned processes operated simultaneously. In the orogen, the thrusts are dominantly thick-skinned and planar, cutting deep into the crust. The eastern part of the Bowen Basin, however, is dominated by thin-skinned thrusting that, in places, propagated a considerable distance into the basin, with the formation of an imbricate thrust fan. The thick-skinned and thin-skinned thrusts are hard-linked into a single thrust system by a major middle-crust detachment surface. Contractional events at the plate margin associated with the formation of the thrust system were also responsible for the propagation of far-field stresses and the reactivation of older extensional faults as thrusts. These reactivated faults are well inboard of, not physically attached to, and soft-linked to, the retroforeland thrust system. Contraction in the Denison Trough in the western Bowen Basin produced a variety of geometries, including reactivation of Early Permian extensional faults as thrusts and the growth of fault-propagation folds. These inversion structures often house commercial quantities of hydrocarbons.