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Tim Flannery

The Call of the Reed Warbler is a brutally honest book – an account of personal redemption following generations of sin. The only comparable work I know of is Rian Malan’s great saga of South Africa, My Traitor’s Heart (1990) – revolutionary, threatening, and the traducing efforts of an insider. Malan, a relative of the architect ...

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For me, writing is the beginning of so much. It’s how I methodise my thoughts. How I explore issues. My books really are co-explorations with my readers.

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This is an important and timely book – another gift to public understanding by Australian scientist and author Tim Flannery. Ten years ago he wrote The Weather Makers (2005), one of a handful of books which, together with Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth (2006), brought the climate crisis to a world audience. Now in Atmosphere of Hope, F ...

To complement the essays, commentaries, reviews, and photographic essay in this issue, we asked a group of leading environmentalists, scientists, commentators, and writers what they regard as the most urgent action needed for environmental reform.

Wayne Bergmann

There is an urgent need for widespread recognition of the interrelationship between the ...

Tim Flannery is an internationally acclaimed scientist, explorer, and conservationist. He has written over a dozen books, including Here On Earth; the award winning bestsellers 

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Literature has long provided a powerful outlet for the expression of our hopes and fears for an environmentally challenged future. In recent years, fictional depictions of the future have become increasingly dystopian, disturbed, and pessimistic – from Cormac McCarthy’s

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The Mystery of the Venus Island Fetish by Dido Butterworth, edited and introduced by Tim Flannery

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March 2015, no. 369

It is 1932 and as the SS Mokambo steams into Sydney Harbour with Archie Meek on board, the Australian Museum’s young anthropologist is about to discover that he has committed a terrible faux pas. After five years away in the Venus islands studying the customs and culture of its head-hunting inhabitants, Meek is eager to be reunited with Beatrice Goodenough, the beautiful but sheltered registrar of the museum’s anthropology department. In true island fashion, Meek has accompanied his request for her hand in marriage with the sincerest love token a man can proffer. Unfortunately, on receipt of his dried foreskin, lovingly posted, Goodenough fails to respond as a Venus Island maiden would. A younger, weedier Meek might have been ready to crumple at such rejection, but the hesitant stripling of nineteen is now a bronzed hunk of twenty-four, ready to claim Beatrice as his own despite the misfiring of his culturally specific courtship ritual.

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The Weather Makers by Tim Flannery & Living In The Hothouse by Ian Lowe

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December 2005–January 2006, no. 277

The former co-chair of scientific assessment for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Houghton, declared in 2003 that global warming is a weapon of mass destruction that is at least as dangerous as chemical, biological or nuclear weapons and, indeed, terrorism. It is therefore no small irony that two prominent members of the ‘coalition of the willing’ and the world’s two highest per capita carbon emitters – the US and Australia – should choose to devote so many resources to eradicating conventional WMDs, yet do so little to address global warming. Australia’s stance on climate change is logic-defying, unprincipled and lacking in remorse. The Howard government has refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol because of the short-term economic costs to Australia, but it claims that Australia will seek to meet its Kyoto target anyway. But Australia’s Kyoto target is so generous relative to other developed countries that it does not have to do much to meet it.

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In 1978 the writer John McPhee, accompanied some geologists on a field trip to the American West, and in order to express their insights into the vast processes that had formed the present landscape, he coined the evocative and durable term ‘deep time’. With a sharp Australian eye, Tim Flannery has now done the same for the entire continent in this remarkably ambitious yet highly readable book. As an active research palaeontologist, he has a profound sense of the history of his discipline, and has the ability vividly and sometimes whimsically to put himself and the reader into the places of discovery and into the mindsets of the often testy pioneers in this fossil game.

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The Birth of Sydney edited by Tim Flannery & Buried Alive, Sydney 1788-92 by Jack Egan

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April 2000, no. 219

List of essentials for a trip to Sydney in 2000: airline ticket, style-repellent, a buddy at SOCOG, rather a lot of money, and, uh-oh, excess baggage alert. I’m afraid these two big paperbacks are a must. With the Olympics looming, an outbreak of books about Sydney was inevitable. But fear not, discerning readers. Jack Egan and Tim Flannery’s tributes to Australia’s first city are not the quick-and-slick kind. Opportunistic they may be, but you can tell they’re done with love.

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