News
Australian Geographic’s new issue has a story I wrote about the world’s longest continental chain of volcanoes - and it’s stretched leisurely across 14 luscious, lovely pages.
This story was quite something - it took a year and half from when Don Fuchs the photographer (a volcano aficionado) suggested we do the story together to when it appeared in print. I used up nearly an entire notebook over the two field trips we did, one to Hanging Rock in Victoria and one to the Peak Range National Park in Queensland. (It’s SO extraordinary to walk into a pub in an outback mining town and realise you are A: the only one not wearing hi-vis and B: the only woman. It hasn’t often happened that a bar literally falls silent when I walk into it, but it happened so many times on this trip that I got used to it. Everyone was, however, perfectly nice.) And if I were to calculate the total number of hours this story took - which I actually can’t bear to do - I think my rate per hour would be embarrassingly low.
It took me so long to write because I’m not really a science writer, though I aspire to be, so had to really dig in to understand the mechanisms by which volcanoes form, and why this chain is so special. But I’m so glad I did it. AG is one of the few publications left that gives these stories the space and time they deserve, and I’m so grateful I get to work with them to create epics like this. These are difficult times for the media - if this sounds interesting, please buy the mag to read it!
Oddments
The Miles Franklin longlist is out! I have only read two of them, shamefully: Charlotte Wood’s The Weekend, which I can’t recommend more highly (it was book #87 of 2019) and Tara June Winch’s The Yield (book #97 of 2019) - I ripped through this one at a writing retreat while I was supposed to be (clue’s in the name) writing. It was so beautiful it made me cry and give up for the afternoon!
What I’m reading
I always feel a bit impatient when people post on social media about reading a book that’s mere months old and say apologetically, “I know, I’m so late to the party on this one.” Books do not have a expiry date. Yes, it’s lovely to join in a cultural conversation about a new book everyone is reading, but that book is not going anywhere. I firmly believe you should read whatever you like, whenever you get around to it - there’s no rush and no rules. (Also, I confess to being a bit mulish: if everyone tells me to read something, I probably won’t. This is not a trait I’m particularly proud of, but there it is.)
Even so, I’m slightly mystified as to why it’s taken me so long to read Alys Fowler’s Hidden Nature. Published in 2017, it’s a memoir about a difficult year in the author’s life which she worked through by taking refuge in nature. Sound familiar? It’s an increasingly popular formula, and one I’m very fond of in all its forms: Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk, Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun, Alice Vincent’s Rootbound (which I’ve written about before), Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path, and in Australia, Inga Simpson’s Understory - all among my favourite books (yes, I read mostly women). And of course Wild by Cheryl Strayed, the momma of them all. This is the book that encouraged me to immediately start off on my own ill-conceived solo hike in the wilderness, from which I was lucky to emerge unscathed (I spent Christmas on a trail in WA, carrying an 18kg backpack, with no snakebite kit or any clue about wilderness first aid. You’ve never known fear till you wake alone in a tent at 2am, pretty sure you just heard a slithering sound right by your head).
Fowler is a gardener and author who, at the start of the book, lives in Birmingham with her husband and is mostly happy with her life - until it’s suddenly up-ended when she falls in love. It’s a particularly destabilising experience because her new love is a woman. She takes to paddling through the city’s canals in a bright red inflatable packraft as she comes to terms with her new reality. As a gardening journalist and author of four previous books, she’s well-placed to write authoritatively and engagingly about the plant life she encounters on the canals, but she also proves adept at writing about the wildlife - and the occasional people - clinging to life amid the rubbish-strewn waters that quietly mark out the traces of Birmingham’s industrial past. It’s just the kind of rich broth I love, swirling intriguing snippets of history in with satisfying chunks of nature writing and real life. A jawdropping account of the life cycle of the eel sits happily alongside a description of a holiday in the Hebrides with her new girlfriend and a potted history of brickmaking in Birmingham. I realise, too, that I’m becoming more and more interested in urban nature, as it’s the only nature most of us have access to (bar the occasional week in the wilderness) and given our wholesale destruction of the natural world, might soon be all the nature that exists. Fowler writes about the confluences of humans and nature with joy and beauty and truth - there are rats and dead fish and other unpleasant encounters aplenty, along with personal epiphanies and healing and new love.
Hidden Nature was book #44 of 2020. Other books I’ve read in the past fortnight:
38: Patti Miller, The Joy of High Places
39: Alexandra Shulman, Clothes... and Other Things That Matter
40: Michael Holroyd, Facts and Fiction: a Book of Storytelling
41: Glynnis MacNicol, No One Tells You This
42: Polly Samson, A Theatre for Dreamers
43: James Bradley, Ghost Species
What are you reading?
See you in two weeks!