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Rosaleen Love

Over the past forty years, Rosaleen Love has published on Australian science and society, both in non-fiction, and in fiction. Her most recent books are Reefscape: Reflections on the Great Barrier Reef (2000), and The Traveling Tide (2005). She has commissioned book reviews for The Age, and for the journal Metascience.

Rosaleen Love reviews 'The Water Dreamers: The remarkable history of our dry continent' by Michael Cathcart

October 2009, no. 315 31 July 2010
A few years ago, I heard Michael Cathcart speak on ‘the myth of the inland sea’. It was one of the funniest takes on Australian history I have heard. He related how his initially confident search for statements of belief in an inland sea by early Australian colonists petered out in the face of lack of evidence. Certainly, the explorer Charles Sturt believed in an inland sea and in his divine m ... (read more)

‘Treasure Hunt’ by Rosaleen Love

May 2009, no. 311 01 May 2009
When my husband died a while back, I was left with my memories and a house full of books. Harold was so ill, and for so long, that what I felt in those first few days after his death was a dulled feeling, ‘It’s over’. Not relief, certainly not joy, not even sorrow, but a blank sense of inevitability: ‘All over’: the end to the terrible struggle of the past few years, the harder struggle ... (read more)

Rosaleen Love reviews 'Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding controversy, inaction and opportunity' by Mike Hulme and 'Quarry Vision: Coal, climate change and the end of the resources boom (Quarterly Essay 33)' by Guy Pearse

November 2009, no. 316 01 November 2009
Have you heard the latest joke about emissions trading? There was this factory in China that produced so much carbon dioxide from coal they had to get rid of it somehow. So they sold it to Coca-Cola. We shall burp away in the cause of carbon sequestration, imaginatively interpreted. Somewhere in the joke is a kernel of truth. If there’s a buck to be made from climate change, there’ll be someon ... (read more)

Rosaleen Love reviews 'The Best Australian Science Writing 2011' edited by Stephen Pincock

November 2011, no. 336 21 October 2011
It is a brave editor who compiles a paper-based anthology of science writing in the age of the Internet. Electronic publishing allows the skilful juxtaposition of text and image, with the added value of links that lead the viewer to instantly available extra information. With Stephen Pincock’s print anthology The Best Australian Science Writing 2011, I am nostalgically transported to the ninetee ... (read more)

Rosaleen Love reviews 'Feeling the Heat' by Jo Chandler

July–August 2011, no. 333 29 June 2011
In Feeling the Heat, journalist and science writer Jo Chandler voyages to Antarctica (mostly), where she meets and talks with scientists about the meaning of their work. She reminds me of the eighteenth-century philosophical travellers, the first anthropologists who travelled to strange lands (Australia included) to observe the language and customs of savage peoples, and to learn from them. From i ... (read more)