Harriet McKnight

After 3 years my neighbour (in remote and regional Australia) was still grieving the loss of her husband for whom she'd cared during a long illness with terminal brain cancer. As I was leaving after a recent visit, she quietly put this book in my hands. Ten years ago a massive bushfire swept through our district and I was among the 90 people who lost not only their houses and community but saw the wildlife they protected, decimated. For more than a decade our community has also been fighting oil and gas giant, Santos who bought enough Government favour to have its coal seam gas project approved despite of 29 thousand objections.

I do like a well presented, airy font so I was instantly at ease with whatever this book was about. At first, this was very familiar territory: a rapacious fossil fuel company, a woman struggling to look after a husband who was becoming a stranger and the difficulties and ironies of natural regeneration projects. It was so familiar that I wondered why I was reading about daily life when I usually look for something beyond the quotidian in a book.

Nevertheless, by the end of the book I was in tears. Perhaps because I made my neighbour stand in for Pina as I'd not only felt but seen her conflict and pain. The juxtaposition of Arianna's hair-tearing story was seamless and at times profoundly illuminating. This is a book that, while appearing local, even parochial, addresses nothing less the rough and uncomfortably human dimensions of a world facing extinction. It will stay with me for a long time.
… (mere)

The dementia sequence of this novel is absolutely brilliant, evocative and moving. I highly recommend it to anyone (and BTW that's most of us) who might come into contact with people suffering from this dreadful disease.
The second theme - of the university staff monitoring the release of cockatoos back into the wild - I found less successful. I don't know of any uni which would spare two full time staff to camp in the bush (wihtout so much as a composting toilet!) for four months (24 hours a day!) straight on such a project. No meetings to attend, no students to teach, no reports to write, no supervisors to pacify, no papers being written, no grad students to do the grunt work of data collection, no honours or masters or PhD or even undergrad papers to read and mark. I found that rather weird. Perhaps it happens - I know of uni staff visiting antarctica for weeks at a time - but I kept being interrupted by sneaking thoughts of 'how do they get to do this?', which rather interrupted the story's flow. On top of that, the poor woman was suffering horribly from a mental health disorder which was apparently undiagnosed, unrecognised, untreated in both work and social environments. Very sad.
That said, the confluence of birds, bushfire, and life-changing decisions was neatly rendered. I'll be looking for more of this author because I very much like the way she writes. If I'd never worked at a uni, I probably would have had no qualms at all.… (mere)