Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Inalienable vitality

Amitav Ghosh’s entangled sensibilities
by
May 2022, no. 442

The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a planet in crisis by Amitav Ghosh

John Murray, $32.99 pb, 339 pp

Inalienable vitality

Amitav Ghosh’s entangled sensibilities
by
May 2022, no. 442
Amitav Ghosh, 2019 (photograph by Marco Destefanis/Pacific Press/Alamy)
Amitav Ghosh, 2019 (photograph by Marco Destefanis/Pacific Press/Alamy)

Approximately 37,000 years ago, a volcano erupted in the south-east corner of the continent now known, in settler-colonial parlance, as Australia. His name is Budj Bim. As his lava spread and cooled, Budj Bim’s local relations, the Gunditjmara people, set about developing new ways of managing the changing landscape. They would engineer, most famously, a large and sophisticated aquaculture system, one dedicated in particular to the raising and harvesting of Kooyang, or eels. This infrastructure, explains Gunditjmara man Damein Bell, was instrumental in providing food to ‘one of the largest population settlements in Australia before Europeans arrived’.

Killian Quigley reviews 'The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a planet in crisis' by Amitav Ghosh

The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a planet in crisis

by Amitav Ghosh

John Murray, $32.99 pb, 339 pp

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.