AustLit

'When a troubled Sarah Hutchinson returns to Australia from boarding school in England and time spent in Europe, she is sent to live with her eccentric Uncle Ferny on the family property, Ngangahook. With the sound of the ocean surrounding everything they do on the farm, Sarah and her uncle form an inspired bond hosting visiting field naturalists and holding soirees in which Sarah performs on a piano whose sound she has altered with items and objects from the bush and shore.

'As Sarah’s world is nourished by music and poetry, Ferny’s life is marked by Such is Life, a book he has read and reread, so much so that the volume is falling apart. Its saviour is Jones the Bookbinder of Moolap, who performs a miraculous act. To shock and surprise, Jones interleaves Ferny’s volume with a book he bought from an American sailor, a once obscure tale of whales and the sea. In art as in life nature seems supreme. Ngangahook and its environs are threatened, however, when members of the community ask the Hutchinsons to help ‘make a savage landscape sacred’ by financing the installation of a town bell. The fearless musician and her idealistic uncle refuse to buckle to local pressures, mounting their own defence of ‘the bell of the world’.

'Gregory Day’s new novel embodies a cultural reckoning in a breathtakingly beautiful and lyrical way. The Bell of the World is both a song to the natural wonders that are not yet gone and a luminous prehistory of contemporary climate change and its connection to colonialism. It is a book immersed in the early to mid-twentieth century but written very much for the hearts of the future.' (Publication summary)   

'BACK IN 2015, when we were getting the local language work going here at the Aireys Inlet Primary School in Mangowak, every Monday morning I’d try to fire up the whole-school assembly about Wadawurrung language. Each week the students learnt, and still do, new Wadawurrung words, and inevitably with those words came new ways of looking at the cultural history of their home landscape. On the first Monday of every month, and on other special occasions, they also sing the Mangowak Song, a boisterous yet melancholy and yearning piece written with some of the words they have learnt, the lyrics a mixture of English and Wadawurrung.' (Introduction)

Exquisite and challenging essays on the wonders of the natural world and the cultural complexities of writing landscape in Australia

A collection of beautiful and moving essays on the wonder of the natural world and the cultural complexities of writing landscape in Australia

'Words are Eagles collects in one place the essays of award-winning novelist and nature writer, Gregory Day. Grounded in the landscape of southwestern Victoria, and infused with the heightened sense of place and environmental literacy that have long been key to Day's work, these essays traverse landscape, language and histories.

'Day's attention is tuned both to beauty of the natural world, returning often to the motifs of ground and sky, ocean and owl, moth and river, and the history of place - whether lost, buried or personal.

'In a part a reading and celebration of the resurgent global nature writing movement, to which Day was an early contributor, this collection highlights the need for ecological care and value of Indigenous knowledge and practices.

'This is the kind of nature writing that gets to the heart of our urgent need for a more harmonious and regenerative relationship with the earth that sustains us.'  (Publication summary)

'My life was confusing, I felt tangled as the moonahs, nothing so organised and purposeful as a coherent essay would evince. And yet, the tangle of those trees right there, the copse of moonahs I was thinking of, and writing beside, was beautiful for all its tangle. Its weird and wonderful shapes and sinuosities.'  (Introduction)

'The English poet Mark Ford has been a champion of the poetry of John Ashbery for many years. He is the editor of Ashbery’s Collected Poems and has curated various archives and exhibitions of what many believe to be the most significant poetic voice to emerge from the US since World War II.' (Introduction)

'The proliferation goes on. The amount of new words being coined to name the reality and effects of our current era of natural and cultural crisis seems at times to be some kind of teeming linguistic correction to species extinction on a heating planet. I’ve listed them before in essays and reviews — anthropocene, capitalocene, ecocene, symbiocene, gynocene, chthulucene, etc. I’ve added moolacene, which employs the Wadawurrung word moola from my local region, meaning “shadow”. Moola is, of course, also the US-derived slang word for money, which many think is at the heart of the issue.' (Introduction)

'That poet John Kinsella is abrasive as a ­xanthorrhoea, electrically sensitive as a platypus bill and self-reflexively across all issues of the anthropocene is by now well integrated into his writing identity. With Open Door, the third of his Jam Tree Gully cycle, we find him returning to his family’s rural block on Ballardong Noongar land in Western Australia’s vast wheatbelt. In the place he loves and hates the most Kinsella immediately finds “a Dry as ­combustible as morality”, forcing him to fit his theme of homecoming and return through a penitential lens of empathy and rage, as he ­observes the ongoing effects of agricultural cauterisation of the landscape and the suffering of creatures in his midst. This is the poet as ­activist-crusader and student of animals, once again exhibiting his membership of a species increasingly tortured by its own culpability. As such, Open Door is ironically caged, not only by the obviousness of climate change, the bleeding obvious, but by how to write about it in the face of what amounts to a culturally arthritic denial.' (Publication summary)