This book is a compendium of essays and articles taken from a variety of publications; notably Griffith Review, Meanjin, Island and The Monthly.
Twenty-four authors are featured, with some 'big names' like Tim Winton, Bruce Pascoe, James Valentine, Mark Tredinnick and Joelle Gergis, and not forgetting editor Dave Witty’s opening contribution (he was author of a delightful personal journey through the Australian floral scene in his book What the Trees See). On This Ground features nature writing in its broadest context ranging from actual field sightings, journeys and descriptions through to issues related to climate change and biodiversity loss, and then there are philosophical and contemplative sojourns around certain key natural areas, and man’s imperfect approach to understanding and recording the natural world.
Here's a select few examples:
Notes on a Disappearance (Connor Tomas O’Brien) and Shower your Love with Flowers (Bruce Pascoe)
These are very different essays about essentially the same area, the increasingly urbanised basalt grasslands of Melbourne’s north-western fringes. O’Brien highlights the disappearance of the Plains Wanderer, a reclusive bird that’s been pushed into threatened status by loss of grassland to urbanisation, plus predation by cats and foxes. Pascoe also writes of those same grasslands, describing how they once hosted masses of the sweet-scented orchid Diuris fragrantissima, but these were picked to near extinction by European settlers, than much of the land developed and built over.
Emily Mowatt
Emily Mowatt describes a year spent working on Macquarie Island, a place like nowhere else on the planet and guaranteed to imprint a lifelong impression. It’s a dangerous place set in the Furious Fifties band of gales and storms. Moving around anywhere on foot requires extreme caution. Eradication of feral rats and rabbits, in fact all exotic fauna, was a Macquarie Island success story but, despite its sub-Antarctic location, it’s beginning to experience deleterious effects of climate change on elements of its unique vegetation.
Joelle Gergis
Climate change dominates the life of climate scientist Joelle Gergis to an emotional degree that really comes through in her book Humanity’s Moment: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope. Her contribution to On This Ground titled A Season of Change highlights the emotional effects that the dire potential consequences of climate change are having on so many scientists, not to mention non-scientists.
Tim Winton
Finally, Tim Winton. Well if you’ve read his latest novel Juice set in north-west WA in a heat and fire-scorched future brought by climate change, you’ll grasp immediately where he’s coming from in Writing in Nature. Winton has in some respects a journalistic writing style, crisp, to the point, and with short sentences. This is an easy read like his novels but there’s a lot of depth and quite a bit of anger too.
And there are many many more great and readable contributions. It’s not often one can say a book is a 'can’t put down' but this one comes pretty close.
Reviewed by John Martyn
On This Ground: Best Australian Nature Writing
Editor: Dave Witty
Publisher: Monash University Publishing; paperback, 327 pp