Mention Australia in many places around the world and the first image that’s likely to hop into people’s heads is the kangaroo. It is our most identifiable symbol, but just how much do we really know about this remarkable marsupial? For most of us, I suspect, very little. For us, then, Tim Flannery’s book Country, with its magnificent cover image of boxing kangaroos, will be a great leap forward.
Country is Flannery’s most personal and passionate book yet, a homage to the land, the people, the past and the most famous animal of Australia. It is also a personal odyssey that offers humorous and often intimate insights into the shaping of a controversial scientist whose work has changed profoundly the way we look at life on our continent. And it’s highly readable; Flannery presents a lot of scientific data, but the science never gets in the way of the story.
Director of the South Australian Museum in Adelaide and the author of numerous books including The Future Eaters, Flannery recently described Country as ‘sort of a patriotic book, but patriotism is a word that gets so befouled now … it’s a book about love of country, really. I do feel very intensely that this is my country. The message I wanted to get through was that you don’t have to go to exotic places to have real, amazing adventures.’
Flannery’s own adventure started in the Melbourne suburb of Sandringham, where he grew up little more than a stone’s throw from Port Phillip Bay, whose environment fired his imagination for the natural world. He dreamed of thylacines at a time when new kangaroo species were still being discovered just hours away in Gippsland.
In 1975, aged 18 and restless for adventure, he set out on his Moto Guzzi 750 sportster with a friend, Bill Ellis, on a cross-country motorcycle journey that began to open his eyes to the essence of his country. The year before he’d been given a job cleaning kangaroo fossils at the Museum of Victoria by his ‘true friend and mentor’ Tom Rich, and decided to collect the bones of any specimens that he found on his motorcycle trip for the museum.
In the South Australian outback he came across a recently killed male western grey, and got off his bike to take a closer look. Hugging the huge carcass against a rock while separating its neck muscles with a knife to retrieve