Tim Low, award-winning author of Feral Future, in an eye-opening book on the unique nature of Australian birds and their role in ecology and global evolution.Renowned for its unusual mammals, Australia is a land of birds that are just as unusual, just as striking, a result of the continent's tens of millions of years of isolation. Compared with birds elsewhere, ours are more likely to be intelligent, aggressive and loud, to live in complex societies, and are long-lived. The...

Winner of the NIB Waverley Award for Literature.Forget about wilderness, Tim Low says, nature lives in our cities and gardens, exploiting everything we do. Many endangered species now live in industrial zones and cities. In our forests, native creatures have become pests. Fifteen years on, The New Nature continues to challenge the way we view the interactions between human beings and nature, and pushes us to review our relationship with Australia's wilderne...

An authoritative and entertaining exploration of Australia’s distinctive birds and their unheralded role in global evolution Renowned for its gallery of unusual mammals, Australia is also a land of extraordinary birds. But unlike the mammals, the birds of Australia flew beyond the continent’s boundaries and around the globe many millions of years ago. This eye-opening book tells the dynamic but little-known story of how Australia provided the world with songbirds and parro...

The internationally acclaimed author of The Weather Makers crafts a love letter to his native land and one of its most unique inhabitants: the kangaroo.Drawing on three decades of travel, research, and field work, Tim Flannery shows us how the destiny of the extraordinary kangaroo is inseparable from the environment that created it. Along the way he uses encounters with ancient aboriginal cultures, eccentric fossil hunters, farmers, scientists, kangaroo ad...

This ebook edition does not include illustrations.An awe-inspiring journey through the eons and across the globe, in search of visible traces of evolution in the living creatures which have survived from earlier times and whose stories speak to us of seminal events in the history of life.The history of life on Earth is far older – and far odder – than many of us realise. In ‘Survivors’, acclaimed author Richard Fortey traces this history not through fossil records, but in t...

Explodes the myth that pre-settlement Australia was an untamed wilderness revealing the complex, country-wide systems of land management used by Aboriginal people. Across Australia, early Europeans commented again and again that the land looked like a park. With extensive grassy patches and pathways, open woodlands and abundant wildlife, it evoked a country estate in England. Bill Gammage has discovered this was because Aboriginal people managed the land in a far more systematic and scient...

The action at Fromelles in July 1916 is Australia's most catastrophic military failure. The story has always appeared simple, but in truth history did not unfold in the way we have for so long been led to believe.Peter Barton has written an authoritative and revelatory book on Fromelles. He describes its long and surprising genesis, and offers an unexpected account of the fighting; he investigates the interrogation of Anglo-Australian prisoners, and the results of shrewd German pro...

Denis Gregory takes us on an unforgettable and hilarious journey through the history of Australia and what it means to be an Australian. Full of quirky observations and little-known facts, this book is a vivid commentary on the life and culture of ' the lucky country'.

**'Captivating. Will change the way you think about the natural world, and your place in it' Hugh Fearnley-WhittingstallIn Feral, George Monbiot, one of the world's most celebrated radical thinkers offers a riveting tale of possibility and travel in the wild**How many of us sometimes feel that we are scratching at the walls of this life, seeking to find our way into a wider space beyond? That our mild, polite existence sometimes seems to crush the breath out of us?...

**With fascinating essays on artists from Louis Armstrong to Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud to Franz Kafka and Beatrix Potter to Marcel Proust, Cultural Amnesia is one of the crowning achievements in Clive James's illustrious career as a critic.'One stupendous starburst of wild brilliance' – Simon Schama, historian and author of The Power of Art**A lifetime in the making and containing over one hundred essays, this is a definitive guide to twentieth-centur...

Winner of The Australian/Vogel's Literary Award 2015.'Masterfully controlled, lingers long in the memory.' Rohan Wilson, author of The Roving Party and To Name Those LostIn one way or another, isn't everyone on the run?A survivor of Victoria's Black Saturday bushfires takes asylum with old friends in the Dandenong Ranges. An editor-in-chief drives his sister halfway around the country to an east-coast rehabilitation clinic. A single mother...

Join QI's expedition into the animal kingdom to encounter 100 of its most remarkable subjects. Marvel at the elephants that walk on tiptoe, pigs that shine in the dark, and the woodlouse that drinks through its bottom.Albatrosses can fly non-stop for ten years without touching the ground. Box jellyfish have twenty-four eyes. Geese mourn their dead. Koalas don't drink. Monkeys pay to look at porn. Lobsters live for a century. Mice sing while having sex. Spiders can fly....