I dream of deserts, both desolate and blooming
Because I'm reading William Atkins' The Immeasurable World: Journeys in Desert Places
Hi! I’m Hannah James, journalist, writer and editor, and this is where I read and recommend nature books. Thanks for reading!
What I’m reading
A desert is a place for madmen and mystics; a sanctuary and a prison; a nexus of death and rebirth. As a concept, deserts are rich in myth and metaphor - but as places, they can be all too real. In The Immeasurable World: Journeys in Desert Places, William Atkins writes about his travels to seven deserts across Oman, Australia, China, Kazakhstan, the US and Egypt, combining the personal, the historic, the geographic and the mythic with uncanny beauty and skill.
Each desert has its own story. The Sonoran Desert, which spans the US-Mexican border, is a place of bureaucratic atrocities enacted on those who try to cross it, but also of acts of love by the community groups and not-for-profits attempting to help the migrants. (This one made me cry.) In Egypt’s Eastern Desert, Atkins meets austere monastics, and in the US’s Black Rock Desert he meets the ravers, hippies and tech execs who come together for Burning Man. (That one made me laugh.)
Most memorable for me was the chapter about the Maralinga nuclear test site in South Australia. Atkins tells the story, and describes his journey there, with an outsider’s observational powers. Many of the details were new to me, and shocking: I didn’t know the prime minister, Robert Menzies, sanctioned Britain’s request to test its new nuclear weapons in the Australian desert without even consulting his cabinet, let alone the people who voted him into power.
What wasn’t shocking was the total dismissal of the human rights of the Indigenous people whose homes and sacred sites the tests poisoned forever. I think in Australia we’re so used to these stories that they lose their power to horrify, so it’s salutary to read the reaction of someone to whom they are new, particularly when that someone is a seasoned traveller, a deep thinker and a supremely gifted writer. Of the seismic effects the destruction had on a people whose lives, both physical and spiritual, are intricately woven into the country they inhabit, he writes:
To destroy the land is not to deprive a person of their property; it is not a matter of ‘displacement’ or theft. It is to unpick the weft of their being.
Menzies and his ministers didn’t seek permission for the tests from Indigenous people (surprise), and brushed off any concerns that people who were travelling and could not be contacted to be warned of the impending tests would be killed or maimed by them. (They were.) They dismissed the spiritual significance of these sites, and denied that the tests would destroy the region’s fragile ecosystems and dazzling biodiversity. (Their environmental impact was, of course, catastrophic.) And these attitudes, as Atkins discovers, die hard.
(All this is among the many reasons I’m voting Yes to The Voice referendum on 14th October, by the way.)
Atkins is a delightful travel companion, erudite yet self-deprecating, possessed of an arresting turn of phrase and often very, very funny. I loves this book so much that just bought his other two to take on my upcoming holiday, and I might buy this one too (I read a library copy) for the pleasure of rereading it.
Also reading
This is great on travel writing.
A lovely review of a book about books and beauty and kindness. (And a glimpse behind the curtain at how the review was written.)
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