Wilderness Journal issue #034

To celebrate Nature Book Week and 30 years of the Environment Award For Children's Literature, a special issue includes discussions on illustration, poetry and the clandestine machinations of the fossil fuel industry.
Above: Royce Kurmelovs photographed by Hugh Stewart

 
Bull kauri in the Cairns Botanical Gardens.

"It takes a very long time to make a picture book"


Illustrator Liz Anelli takes us on the journey of building a picture book, working in the field and how her book about the Daintree came to be.

Pictures and words by Liz Anelli in conversation with Rachel Knepfer

"It is vital to me to be ‘in’ the place, experience it with all my senses. Not just to paint the colours but to truly feel them. There is more to making pictures than the visual.

Bull kauri in the Cairns Botanical Gardens.


"I need to hear the sounds, feel the heat, maybe be a little scared of the wide-open spaces or the cramped overgrown jungle, smell the scents and yes, get soaked by the rain.

Liz Anelli at work.

"I study and draw from videos and images online, visit zoos and museums. I do get to watch a lot of David Attenborough programmes as work. But often these sources cannot tell me some of the details I need to know, such as: will this particular butterfly feed off that tree, or do these little marsupials come out at dawn, dusk or night-time?

"I track down specialists and natural historians. When it came to depicting how our Bull Kauri sets seeds, both Pamela Freeman [co-author] and I found that our tree is a shy and remote species, growing in hard to reach parts of the rainforest and that there are not many experts. It took a while to get the answers to our questions.

Daintree sketchbook.

"I visited the Daintree right in the middle of the Wet Season….the rain pours so hard at night that my rainforest hut sometimes felt claustrophobic. The air tasted of pot-pourri. On a night walk we came across fallen ylang ylang flowers that our guide told us are the key ingredient of Chanel No. 5—the intense fragrance from petals that had melted away by morning.

"Putting my hand next to Coscinocera hercules, the Hercules moth, as it rested on a tree trunk was special. Most creatures hide from humans, but we did see and hear cassowaries, their call a deep, rumbling oboe sound, straight out of the age of the dinosaurs.

"It was surprising to find that the Daintree is not just green. Light filters through creating sparkles and deep shadow and so many plants, leaves and ground litter are full of reds, browns, oranges even blue. Bugs are dazzlingly iridescent.

Daintree sketchbook.

"Once I find out the relative sizes of one creature to another, I make paper cut-outs of their shape and stick them up on my studio wall, creating my own ‘rainforest species diorama’.

"Words and pictures mix, I always think of them as ingredients in a cake."

"We want to create moods and story beats, that all important ‘page-turn’ tension. Picture books are amazing in that they can convey meaning equally through words and pictures. There is no other art form like them and no other tool so vital in teaching people how to, not just read, but to understand narrative and be able to make their own.

"Our ’style’ with these books is for double page spreads rather than single or ’spot’ illustrations. This allows the dual text of fact and story to weave through the scene and for the reader freedom to choose their own route of discovery.


"From research to handover of artwork for me takes typically one year. This Daintree book took longer.

"An added challenge to illustrating Seed To Sky was that I moved to England mid-way through. After the pandemic it became clear to my husband and I that we needed to be nearer to our families. So shortly after my research trip to the Top End I flew around the world. The artwork was completed as far from the Daintree as it is possible to be. But I had all my research, my sketchbooks, drawings, photos and best of all my imagination. I played ‘rainforest’ sounds on my laptop as I worked.

Studio desk.

"I liken my illustrating style to being a conductor of an orchestra, who also plays all the instruments.

"My pages are composed from sketchbook studies, painted backgrounds and separate elements, rubbings, textures, pieces of collage. These are all scanned and then ‘played with’ on screen in Photoshop, like jigsaw pieces finding their right fit.

"It is the most incredibly absorbing pastime, and I do forget to make dinners.

"I miss Australia, obviously my friends, but its sounds and smells too; the flutey call of magpie, sad tone of crows, fizz of cicadas, the intense eucalyptus scent that drifts into even inner Sydney

"Love of nature is Earth-wide, and children are frequently the most active, most passionate in protecting and celebrating what we have."

Thank you to Liz Anelli for opening up her sketchbooks & describing the making of her newest book
Seed to Sky—Life in The Daintree by Liz Annelli and Pamela Freeman, Walker Books.

 

Connected with some sort of love

Yankunytjatjara poet Ali Cobby Eckermann is a member of the stolen generation. Raised by adoptive parents on Ngadjuri Country in South Australia’s mid-north. Her award-winning poetry has themes of connection to nature, to family, and to self.

She talked to us about her 2024 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Book of the Year She is the Earth.

Ali Cobby Eckermann interviewed by Lily Weinberg; portraits by Michael Jalaru Torres

“The small verses of She Is The Earth are like footsteps, measures of time. The book is a metaphor of rebuilding oneself, without people, embracing all the beauty and meaning that nature has to offer. The original Yankunytjatjara / Aboriginal literature was embedded in Country. I wanted to show the emotional legacy of this.”

Ali is inspired by the invisible strength of nature and how to put that into writing. She wanted to write something “that was just filled with love for myself that I could share. It was about sharing love and that absolute love always takes me back to nature.

"A painting of mine from the late 1990s, Love Lives Here."—Ali Cobby Eckermann.


“What is that feeling when we get up early and go and sit and watch the sun rise, or in the evening watching the sunset. What is that doing to us?

“I listen all day to birdsong. You begin to notice after a while that if all the birds chirp, an eagle is close by; I love being a small part of that and being able to read that. And I guess that's a metaphor for my mind. It’s always really busy, and so I have to sift through it but then when there's a bit of gold—I really listen for that. Drop everything and pause.

“I've still got my caravan that I was living in when I won the Windham Campbell Prize sitting in my yard. I think it's really important, even in a busy life, to have a place that you can go to. So my favorite poetry books are in there, little treasures that I've picked up from around the world in my travels. It is like a little TARDIS, this little, little cubicle. It's the caravan of imagination. When I go in there, I'll slow my breathing down. I can think a little bit deeper, because this is like a poetry church in a caravan.


"From inside the caravan, which was my humble home when I won the Windham Campbell Prize for Poetry from Yale University." Photograph by Ali Cobby Eckermann.

Ali and her dog go for walks together to break the modern busy lifestyle “I like having someone who's just as curious about what's under the bushes as I am. I like being led by his alertness.

“The white faced owl—that's my grandmother's dreaming—quite recently moved into town here, so I get to hang out with them a little bit. And some nights we go for a walk, and they will fly around my head. I just accept the blessing of that, that we're together. I never got to meet my grandmother, but it's sort of like the presence of her. She's reminding me the presence of her is never too far away.

Ali shared that after she finally got to camp on her mother’s traditional country, the owls came to her town a short time after that.

“I see these old trees as books, knowledge holders guarding ancient waterholes. If you sit quietly it's like an audio book listening to the outer and inner voice.” Photograph by Ali Cobby Eckermann.

“There's something very poetic about how trees are connected and how they, you know, they retained memory, and they helped each other, and this other whole network that's not seen, I'm quite fascinated with that, because I think, before colonization, Aboriginal people had a knowledge of that.

“And there's the risk that we've become so busy that we've lost that unforeseen way of nurturing each other. And I wanted to put that connection back into the writing of She is The Earth.

"There is a story to be witnessed on country." Photograph by Ali Cobby Eckemann.

Like trees they’re separate but still connected. “Even if we don’t know about nature, we can trust that it’s connected with some sort of love. There’s the little trees that have purpose. There’s big trees—it takes 200 years to make a decent hollow for an owl to nest in.”

In telling about her process for writing and combating this ever-moving train of busyness we’re on, Ali shared a writing exercise she sometimes sets for herself. Choose six words at random and put them on the top of a page. And then write a poem.

Or here are some to get you started:
Owl
Connection
Hollow
Imagination
Footsteps
Knowledge

Ali also recommends the following books to celebrate Nature Book Week :

Ninu: Grandmother's Law, the autobiography of Nura Nungalka Ward published by Magabala Books. Aunty's story is a true account of when my people lived closer to nature and were immersed in the knowledge of that.

This Country anytime anywhere published in 2010 by IAD Press. Again this anthology contains stories and poetry written across the Northern Territory and translated to original languages. I spent almost thirty years in the NT and this is where my writing began.

The Woman Who Fell From The Sky by Joy Harjo. As a senior Muscogee poet Joy also intertwines the natural world with the now, inviting history and honesty to also entwine.

Eckermann’s poetry has been shortlisted and won several literary awards. In 2017, she won the international Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Poetry. She is a two-time winner of the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Book of the Year (2013, 2024), the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry (2013) and Indigenous Writers' Prize (2024).

Thank you to Ali Cobby Eckermann for such generosity, providing Wilderness Journal with these photographs and making time for this illuminating conversation.

 

Slick

Author and journalist Royce Kurmelovs talks with Fern Cadman, the Wilderness Society's Fossil Fuel Industry Campaigner about his new book Slick: Australia's toxic relationship with Big Oil, and much more.

Photographs by Hugh Stewart for Wilderness Journal.

Fern: Before we dive into talking about your book, can you tell us about what you like to read? Are there any nature books that have had a big impact on your thinking and writing?

Royce: I tend to hoover up everything. The problem at the moment is that most of what I read is for research and so I tend to read for information, rather than to lose myself in story. Which is a shame because, I think, what you read is your mental diet. Growing up, my mother taught us to read young and the best stories always seemed to involve anthropomorphised animals—Wind and the Willows, Peter Rabbit, the Moomin Trolls and my favourite, the Redwall series.

Later there was young adult stories like Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet, which I loved. I think they taught me the importance of place in narrative, which is very much a feature of my work.

Fern: Slick is as fascinating as it is alarming. You’ve gone to some serious lengths to understand what, in your words, the oil men (and later women) knew about climate change, when they knew it, and how they built political influence in Australia. What motivated you to write this book?

From the collections of the State Library of Western Australia and reproduced with the permission of the Library Board of Western Australia.

Royce: Thank you. At the time I was reporting on these issues, on all these new reports coming out about climate change and the need to phase out fossil fuels, when I went to an oil and gas industry conference as a freelancer just to see what they were saying. As I wandered around, I found this absurd little world where everyone was clinging onto an entirely different reality.

Then I started thinking about how there are all these terms and ideas being throwing around—“state capture”, “the revolving door”—but one of the many questions I had was how this stuff actually works. So I set out to find out.

Fern: Throughout the book you present vivid little mini-stories about both the “characters” of the oil industry and the real people on the frontline of both opposition to the industry and in the direct path of climate impacts.

I had never heard the story of the Yungngora First Nations community stand to protect Noonkanbah station in Kimberly from oil drilling, and although I’m familiar with climate activist Coco, I loved the insights into her story that you weaved into this book.

How did you go about finding these stories and what motivated you to tell them?

Royce: I’m a bit of an introvert, but I like people. I’ve also got a pretty good eye for detail, and these sorts of character sketches have always been a feature of my longform work. This time around, the focus of the project was a little different, as it was fundamentally investigative.

From the beginning, however, I thought it important to ground all this documentary evidence I was finding in the human story of someone who lived through a climate disaster. I wanted to be absolutely crystal clear about what the stakes are before exploring the subject, which is why the book opens with a profile of Kate Stroud who survived the Lismore flood.

Climate change and corporate accountability are subjects that can quickly become very dry and very wonky, when they are really are the biggest True Crime story going—if you can bring it to life.

Finding these sorts of stories isn’t hard—it takes research to know who to talk to, and when you talk to enough people, they bring the stories to you. Everyone’s lived a life, and if you listen for a while, they will tell you the most extraordinary things.

Minutes of evidence from Senate Select Committee on Air Pollution Hearings (1969) supplied by Dr Jeremy Walker.

Fern: I grew up in a mountain valley in Lutruwita / Tasmania, surrounded by big mountains, tall trees, yellow-tailed black cockatoos and many wallabies. I love working at the Wilderness Society, and the opportunity it gives me to help protect special places from the impacts of climate change. What insights did your research for Slick give you into how the oil industry has influenced thinking in Australia about nature and ecosystems?

Royce: Where you grew up sounds glorious. I grew up on the Adelaide plains, a pretty flat expanse that is famously short on water and which can be quite difficult in the dry heat of summer. Humanity has been chipping away at the mangroves and wetlands over by the coast, and Adelaide keeps sprawling out rather than up, which means habitat is increasingly being paved over. At one point, it meant these individual flocks of little corellas formed super-flocks that terrorised the northern suburbs—a story I had lot of fun reporting on.

I never really thought about the interaction between these sorts of dynamics until recently, just as I hadn’t really been aware of just how far Australia’s fossil fuel producers had gone to secure influence—I use “oil companies” in the book to refer to both oil and gas producers, as they’re often the same beast.

These people, and their industry organisations, very much understood the difference between influence and power. They understood that if they wanted to get their way, they needed to shape how people thought about the issues, what possible futures would be presented to the public, and what kind of outcomes people thought “realistic”.

A central part of this was the effort to neutralise public anger over environmental concerns. Way back in the seventies, for example, there was this attempt to drill the Great Barrier Reef around the time the first major oil spills happened.

This freaked out the oil and gas producers so much they formed this group, the Petroleum Industry Environmental Conservation Executive (PIECE), who ran around giving lectures in every capital city about how there was no risk and they had it all in hand.

You also had these efforts, with different levels of organisation and coordination, to get into schools and universities, to sponsor sports, arts and community groups, to nurture good relations with the media—all things that made it very difficult to criticise them and be taken seriously. The goal was always to make sure that no one could imagine a world without oil, gas and even coal.

Fern: Slick gives special mention to oil company Exxon for its role in burying and misleading the climate impacts of burning fossil fuels. The Wilderness Society is currently working to get Exxon to clean up its decaying rigs in the Bass Strait between Victoria and Tasmania.

There have been three toxic spills from these rigs in the past six months alone. As a climate and nature campaigner, one question I ponder is the role individuals have in shaping the "culture" of a company like Exxon.

After all, Exxon is a name, a corporate entity, not actually a person. You spent a lot of time doing research for this book inside industry archives and events. How do you think this culture developed and continues to thrive today?

Royce: This is a very good question. I do summarise Exxon’s, involvement in this story, but there’s actually a great book specifically about the culture at the company for anyone who wants to know more—Private Empire by Steve Coll. The extremely Sparks Notes version of the story is Exxon was built to be highly organised, vaguely militaristic, very top-down and, thanks to the Texan influence, defiant when confronted by outsiders in the media or the U.S. Federal government.

With time, during the 1980s, the corporate culture changed when a new leadership took over. These guys believed, hand-over-heart, in the duty of the corporation to maximise shareholder value at all costs. Exxon was the biggest private oil company in the world that represented the best of the global industry.

Its practices, ideology and culture in turn informed how other companies thought and acted—that’s why it was fascinating for me to find an early speech from 1970 by the executive of an Exxon subsidiary here in Australia that set the tone for how industry here would talk about environmental issues going forward.

In many ways, I suspect the company is still influential. For example, Woodside CEO and the current chair of Australian Energy Producers, Meg O’Neill, cut her teeth at ExxonMobil.

Fern: Your research for this book must have taken you down some unexpected rabbit holes. Where is the strangest place you found material and what is the wildest thing you found out?

Honestly, I’m surprised companies still have some of the records they do. Why do you think companies and industry bodies haven’t disappeared the most damning evidence?

Royce: My favourite was finding a picture of Tony Abbott reading the Big Book of Oil and Gas at its launch in Canberra. This was a children’s book that was basically oil and gas propaganda, but in the photo, Abbott, surrounded by bored children, looks somewhat confused by what he was reading.

But then there was also other stuff—like the way information about climate change was censored from public documents by bureaucrats, the hiring of researchers to report back to the industry on the early Indigenous land rights movement and the policy briefs they published as part of the broader effort to spread doubt about the science of climate change in the early 90s.

I think the most remarkable document, for me, is a short item published in the industry association’s newsletter. This very candid policy brief explicitly lays out how the Australian oil and gas industry, ahead of Kyoto, and arguably until today, sought to play for time.

What they wanted was to run out the clock in order to run their operations into the ground and extract as much money as possible from them. Many in the environment or corporate accountability space will know this, but it is one thing to know something, and another to have direct evidence for it.

Fern: One final question. Your book ends with what I am construing as a call to action that (and I’m paraphrasing so I don’t spoil the ending of your book) we don’t let the people of the oil industry get richer while the planet burns. What is one thing you think any Australian can do to reduce the influence the oil and gas industry holds in this country?

Royce: I’m a journalist. My job is to find things and report back, so I can’t tell people how to do their business. What I can say is that I have had the privilege of covering all kinds of social movements and the most successful use every tactic available to them.

I think, right now, those seeking fossil fuel divestment and disassociation—that is, not taking their money and not inviting them to dinner parties—are having a great effect, which is why industry is now working so hard to push back.

Slick: Australia's toxic relationship with Big Oil is available at all good bookshops.

Thank you to Hugh Stewart for photographing Royce Kurmelovs for Wilderness Journal.

Read more about the work to stop new fossil fuel exploration impacting Australia's ocean wonders and unique landscapes.

 

By Marc Martin from The River.

30 years of nature book illustrations

For the past 30 years, the Wilderness Society's Environment Award for Children’s Literature has recognised books that grow a love of nature in young people.

To celebrate the award’s 30th anniversary, we’ve partnered with The Wheeler Centre in Naarm / Melbourne to host an exhibition of select illustrations from books shortlisted over the three decades—including works by much-loved author-illustrators Alison Lester, Jeannie Baker, Oliver Jeffers, Renee Treml and more!

All the prints are available for sale, to raise vital funds for our work to protect nature. Peruse the catalogue of beautiful prints, and bid for your favourites!

The artworks will be on display from 3-30 October across three locations: The Wheeler Centre, the Moat and Readings State Library Victoria

Find more Nature Book Week events near you.


 

"Nature books commingling. Just that. Plucked from various shelves. Feels like a conversation.”—image Lisa, Jason & Mavis aka The Wagner-Holley Family

Favourite books

For this completely unscientific survey, we asked contributors and friends of the Journal: What is your favourite book about Nature?

Please let us know if you have a favourite nature book? Email us with the subject line 'Favourite nature book', or post your favourite book on Instagram with the hashtag #NatureBookWeek

We hope you might find something for yourself in the books highlighted here.

Danielle Clode

A bit of a tough call but this is the one that has inspired me for the longest! I've had it since I was 10 years old and still use it regularly. It's in surprisingly good condition considering it's 46 yrs old and spent several years on a boat! The southern ocean shells are from my childhood collection—which went hand in hand with the book!

Of all my childhood books it is William Dakin's Australian Seashores that always draws me back, a deep immersive dive into the stories of our uniquely distinctive coastlines.

Chris De Rosa

There are too many really, first to mind is easily The Sea Around Us, Rachel Carson, 1953 hardback edition. I thought this would be a popular one so my go-to is Seaweeds of South Australia, 1947.

Andrew Cowen

Landmarks—Robert Macfarlane

Hannah Scott-Stevenson

Lift-the-flap Bugs & Butterflies. This book is important to our family because it brings us together in such a meaningful way. I’ve learnt just as much about bugs as my two boys! We even gave a tired bee some sugar water recently at the book's suggestion... and it worked!

Genevieve French, Wilderness Society


A recent Australian novel I read was The Desert Knows Her Name by Lia Hills. This beautiful book transported me to the Wimmera region of Victoria, a place I have not yet been but have such a great sense of after reading this book. A story of evocative prose, regeneration, and recognition of First Nations history in this country.
Also The Arbonaut—a memoir from Meg Lowman, the world's first tree-top scientist.

Ingvar Kenne

The Peregrine by J.A. Baker

Many years ago, as a young teenager, I saw my first Peregrine Falcon. The imprint on me was monumental and it became the start of a life gravitation, bordering on obsession.

Along the way I had four peregrines tattooed across my torso, symbolising the nuclear family I was once part of. It is my totem.

Over the years I have travelled 70 odd countries and seen the peregrine fly and soar at every corner of this world.

It is very rare, though geographically widespread. Top of the food chain, it records the highest speed in the animal kingdom of up to 300 km/h when it stoops for prey.

And it mates for life.

About ten years ago I came across a novel by J.A. Baker called The Peregrine. For the life of me I can't understand it took the book that long to find me. It felt like it talked to an inner world I was already part of.

It was conceived and written around the time I was born and published not long after in 1967.

It is part biography, part poetry, part novel of a lone office worker who is tracking birds of prey and in particular the Peregrine, writing journals of what he experience, in the South of England.

The decade leading up to its publication was the culmination of years of heavy use of DDT and other pesticides and was later known as the Silent Spring. The whole ecosystem was in a state of collapse.

Obviously something we are experience now as well.

For me the book is about obsession. And the preoccupation of an ever increasing absence of that obsession. At one point you can almost feel the author became the peregrine itself. They act like one.

It has informed many aspects on my life but in particular my work as a photographer. The compulsion resonates deeply. And the need to operate in solitude, often in places devoid of other humans.

Matteo Dal Vera

Takashi Homma: Symphony—mushrooms from the forest.

This book is important to me because it reminds me of when I would go mushroom picking with my nonna in the Italian Alps, some of my fondest memories.

Hunter Forbes

Great question, and an easy answer from me! My Family and Other Animals is my all-time favourite book, so charming and endlessly re-readable.

Jen Martin

It’s almost impossible to pick just one favourite nature book, but one that is very special to me is called ‘Animals Make Us Human’. This book was a fundraiser in response to the devastating 2019—2020 Australian bushfires and brings together a diverse and wonderful group of writers and photographers to explore their connection with animals and nature.

As varied as nature itself, the stories in the book share the wonder, awe, fragility, and beauty of nature in all sorts of compelling ways. I feel very honoured to have had the opportunity to contribute my own little story to the book – the tale of the night back in 2013 when my Dad, my son and I went on an adventure to find the endangered Martin’s Toadlet (Uperoleia martini), the species of frog named after my Dad. We found one—and only one—individual and seeing my Dad holding “his” tiny frog was incredibly special. I couldn’t agree more with my son, then 5 and now way taller than me who said: ‘That’s one of the best things that’s ever happened to me.’

Gerry Wedd

John Williams' Butcher's Crossing. Not a nature book as such, but one where although the tale is about hunting the last buffalo herd, the narrative is framed and controlled by weather and terrain.

Michele Lockwood

I was just recently reflecting on how my journey into ecology and working with Indigenous communities began and a great part of it was sparked by reading this beloved book, Dark Emu. I first started reading Dark Emu while having a hot soak in the bath one arvo, I really did not know what I was in for and became so totally consumed that I didn’t notice when the bath had gone cold and the pages of the book were wet and curling from my water-soaked grip. Through this book, Bruce Pascoe completely resets the timeline of Aboriginal occupation on this continent and repaints the white narrative of black savage that has been indoctrinated through the history books. What we come to know is that First Nations peoples throughout Australia were a thriving and sophisticated population of farmers, economists, town planners, boat builders, architects, tailors, multi-linguists, deep sea divers and acute land managers who farmed crops, built silos, practiced aquaculture and held a spiritual communication with the land, the animals and each other through the application of fire on Country.

If there is anyone reading this who has not read this book, please for the sake of your own identity and for the sake of truth-telling, reconciliation, and all that is good in this world- please draw a hot bath and carefully lower yourself in with a copy of Dark Emu in hand.

Thank you for letting me share this.

Garima—Mish

Antonia Pesenti

This was a good thing to think about... Mine are about seasons…

A picture book Seasons by Blex Bolex

and 2 David Hockney books (I'm obsessed)

Spring cannot be cancelled

and the companion book of the digital paintings he made

The Arrival of Spring in Normandy 2020

Hilary Bell

Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post Human Landscape by Scottish author Cal Flyn is on the surface pretty horrifying. It looks at various parts of the world—Chernobyl; the toxic Passaic River—that have been destroyed completely by human activity. But in each place, nature has reasserted itself. It’s far from pristine; in some cases it’s mutated. But it’s a reminder that we humans are no match for nature, and that ultimately it will triumph, with or without us: an ambivalent kind of hope.

Renata Atkin

As a child I adored Enid Blyton’s “The Children of Cherry Tree Farm” and “The Children of Willow Tree Farm”. The children were allowed to roam in the woods and befriended a wild man called Tammylan who knew everything about the plants, the birds and the animals. I so wanted to become a Tammylan.

Danae Coots

My favourite book about nature is The Slater Field Guide to Australian Birds. Growing up we always had a copy of this in the car, and now I have a copy in my car! It’s great to be able to grab it out when I see a bird I’d like to identify when I’m out with the family on Wadawurrung Dja (Country).

Lisa, Jason & Mavis aka The Wagner-Holley Family (see image top)

Nature books comingling. Just that. Plucked from various shelves. Feels like a conversation.

From the good people at Books At Manic - distributors of our very own Wilderness Journal books

Seed—from Indian publisher Tara Books, this one is hand-made (every page hand-printed)

Chromatic Herbarium—an exploration of the colours found in nature, a treasure trove of colour combinations for the nature-loving artist

Albarran Cabrera: On Listening to Trees—a beautiful collection of nature (tree) photography

Des Oiseaux by Leila Jeffreys

Kylie Soanes

"My favourite book about nature as a kid was Shy the Platypus. I remember being completely engrossed in the world of this baby platypus finding its way in the world, and 100% decided that at one point I was going to be a platypus 'when I grew up’.

Matthew Martin

My favourite books start out blank and finish up filled with drawings that record what was in front of me when I needed to escape from the ridiculous pressure I put on myself to come up with cartoons. I have boxes of drawing books and thousands of drawings of the ocean and the sky and hills and rocks and trees and creeks, not to mention people on buses, in cafes and walking on the street. Sometimes I drive or hike to places just to draw what I find there. I love how silly it is that with charcoal and paper I try to make an accurate impression of water and air. I can recommend getting a blank book and some pencils and getting out in the countryside where you can escape into great joy.

 

From the archives

Tim Winton on the 30th anniversary of the Environment Award For Children's Literature.

"It was an honour to win this award, but to me the biggest thrill has always been the knowledge that a prize like this exists at all. Our physical and emotional lives are deeply entwined with the health and prospects of our organic estate.


"There is no artistic subject matter more fundamental, complex, or compelling than the natural environment, and the health of a culture depends on the degree to which it concerns itself, artistically and politically, with the fate of our planet. 30 years of an award like this is a legacy to treasure and celebrate."


Tim Winton was the winner of the inaugural EACL Fiction prize for Lockie Leonard Scumbuster in 1994— check out the other winners
. His new book Juice is out now and explores a world ravaged by the effects of climate crisis.
 

We thank all the artists, photographers, writers, scientists and poets who've given their work to this edition. If you have anything from your own archive to share, get in touch.

If you haven't signed up for the Journal you can do so here. And take a look at past issues of the Journal below.

We recognise First Nations as the custodians of land and water across the continent of Australia and pay our respects to Elders past and present. We acknowledge sovereignty was never ceded.

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