Written and visual creativity
‘I’m a ballerina, a dancer, I’m an artist, I’m a writer and I studied the earth, same as David Attenborough.’
— David Gulpilil
Andrea Hanke, Editor of Think Australian, writes that it’s hard to find a theme more urgent in publishing today—and one that unites fiction and nonfiction—than climate change.
Australian independent publisher Black Inc. has been particularly active in publishing books about the environment and climate change—and its titles have been picked up by numerous publishers around the world. ‘Books about the environment—particularly books about human–nature connections and climate change—have been dominating the big-picture nonfiction sector for a couple of years,’ says Black Inc.’s rights and contracts manager Erin Sandiford. ‘Everyone wants the definitive book on the climate emergency.’
Since Australia’s Black Summer bushfires in 2019–20, Sandiford has noticed a surge in international interest in Australia’s experience of the climate emergency. ‘Those photographs of koalas caught in burning trees went global and really did come to reflect solastalgia,’ says Sandiford. ‘As Bronwyn Adcock, author of Currowan: The story of a fire and a community during Australia’s worst summer, which we’ve just sold to the UK, says, “Australia is (unfortunately) a poster child for what happens in a climate-changed world.”’
Black Inc. has three new titles that tackle climate change from different perspectives. Witnessing the Unthinkable: Notes from the front line of the climate crisis (September 2022) by Joëlle Gergis, the lead author of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, is pitched as ‘an insider’s account of what it’s like to be among a group of the world’s elite climate scientists trying to avert disaster at humanity’s eleventh hour’. Full Circle: A search for the world that comes next by former Australian Greens senator Scott Ludlam offers ideas for a more humane and sustainable world, collected from the author’s years of activism, study and travel. And designer Lucianne Tonti’s Sundressed: Natural fibres and dressing consciously in a world on fire (July 2022) taps into the growing trend for sustainable fashion—and offers an important contribution to climate change literature, with clothing responsible for almost 10 percent of global emissions.
Sandiford also reports that Black Inc. has had ‘great rights success’ with Andrew Wear’s ‘big-picture environment books’, Solved: How other countries have cracked the world’s biggest problems and we can too and Recovery: How we can create a better, brighter future after a crisis.
Scribe is well known for its incisive literary nonfiction (‘We publish books that matter’ is the company’s motto). In November it will publish Jeff Sparrow’s Crimes Against Nature: Capitalism and global heating, ‘a polemic about global warming and the environmental crisis’, which argues that ‘ordinary people have consistently opposed the destruction of nature and so provide an untapped constituency for climate action’. With examples from Australia and around the world, this title is bound to have international appeal.
Other recent and wide-ranging nonfiction titles that explore climate change include Summertime by philosopher Danielle Celermajer (PRH Australia), a collection of essays written in the shadow of Australia’s recent bushfires, which looks at our relationship with the planet’s living beings; Living with the Anthropocene (ed by Cameron Muir, Kirsten Wehner & Jenny Newell, NewSouth), in which some of Australia’s best-known writers and thinkers ‘reflect on what it is like to be alive during an ecological crisis’; Windfall: Unlocking a fossil-free future by Ketan Joshi (NewSouth), which investigates why Australia’s climate change efforts have failed—and how the rest of the world can learn from our mistakes; and Fire Country: How Indigenous fire management could help save Australia (Hardie Grant), a ‘powerful account from Indigenous land management expert Victor Steffensen’, with lessons for other countries.
New in fiction
While climate fiction has been around for many years (the term ‘cli-fi’ first gained popularity in the early 2010s), 2020 saw a surge in new Australian titles—a trend that has continued in 2021.
One of the cli-fi titles that kicked things off last year was Chris Flynn’s cult novel Mammoth (UQP)—a history of earth narrated by a 13,000-year-old extinct mammoth, which ‘scrutinises humanity’s role in the destruction of the natural world’. The buzz was considerable, with a cover quote from Elizabeth Gilbert.
Several impressive titles followed: Kate Mildenhall’s The Mother Fault (S&S), a literary thriller set in a climate crisis, which was nominated for several awards, and Robbie Arnott’s ‘eco fable’ The Rain Heron (Text), which has sold into North America, UK, France and Norway. The latter recently won the Age Book of the Year Award, with judge Gay Alcorn describing it as ‘hugely imaginative and lyrical, but also grounded in some deeper issues about the climate and what human beings do to [it]’.
This year, two of Australia’s most promising new writers—Miles Allinson and Briohny Doyle—have set their second novels against a backdrop of climate change. Allinson’s In Moonland (Scribe) offers a portrait of three generations grappling with their own mortality, from the wild idealism of the 70s to a climate-ravaged near future; Doyle’s Echolalia (Vintage Australia), meanwhile, concerns a family on the verge of disintegration in a time of climate crisis. ‘While Briohny Doyle’s second novel Echolalia is less overtly end-of-days than her first (The Island Will Sink, Brow Books), it still carries a sense of desolation that speaks to Doyle’s preoccupations with domestic unrest and climate catastrophe,’ writes reviewer Bec Kavanagh.
Also exploring the fallout from climate change is Clare Moleta’s debut Unsheltered (Scribner), which follows a woman’s search for her daughter against a background of social breakdown and destructive weather.
Read the rest of Think Australian, a Books And Publishing newsletter, here.
The first year of lockdowns didn’t harm Australian student learning levels all that much.
In fact, differences are very hard to discern.
Kids are learning online. It seems the main purpose of schools is to create jobs for unionized teachers.
The average impact of COVID school closures on literacy and numeracy in 2020 has been relatively small, and that’s according to the National Assessment Plan.
This was the first NAPLAN test since students moved to remote learning, covering 1.2 million students in years 3, 5, 7 and 9.
The results show literacy and numeracy levels have held up fairly well despite last year’s disruptions. There has been little change in 2021 results compared to 2019 in all states and territories, including Victoria, which had the longest period of remote schooling in 2020.
More from Phys Org
How did native Australian birds appear in medieval European paintings?
Andrea Mantegna’s “Madonna della Vittoria” was completed in Italy in 1496.Art work from © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY
“Madonna della Vittoria,” by the Renaissance painter Andrea Mantegna, must have looked imposing when it was first installed as an altarpiece in Santa Maria della Vittoria, a small chapel in the northern-Italian city of Mantua.
The painting, which was commissioned by the city’s ruler, Francesco II Gonzaga, was completed in 1496, and measures more than nine feet in height.
A worshipper’s eye likely lingered on its lower half—where the Virgin, seated on a marble pedestal, bestows a blessing on the kneeling, armored figure of Francesco—instead of straining to discern the intricacies of its upper half, which depicts a pergola bedecked with hanging ornaments and fruited vines. In the late eighteenth century, Napoleon’s forces looted the painting and transported it to the Louvre, where it now occupies a commanding spot in the Denon wing.
“If I hadn’t been in Australia, I wouldn’t have thought, That’s a bloody sulfur-crested cockatoo!”
When Heather Dalton, a British-born historian who lives in Melbourne, Australia, took a moment to examine the painting some years ago, during her first year of study for a doctorate at the University of Melbourne, she was not in Paris but at home, leafing through a book about Mantegna. Although the Madonna image had been reproduced at a fraction of its true size, Dalton noticed something that she well might have missed had she been peering up at the framed original: perched on the pergola, directly above a gem-encrusted crucifix on a staff, was a slender white bird with a black beak, an alert expression, and an impressive greenish-yellow crest.
Moreover, without the context of her own surroundings, Dalton might not have registered the bird’s incongruity.
By Rebecca Mead in the New Yorker
Deer can regrow their antlers, and humans can replace their livers. What else might be possible?
Manipulating the genome to regrow body parts? It may be much simpler than that. One scientist has regrown worm body parts by altering electric flows – reprogramming the bodily software.
Writing in the New Yorker, Mathew Justin explores the possibilities.
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