Amazon.com Review A few miles into the scorched, dusty interior of Australia along the Stuart Highway, naturalist Edward Kanze began counting carcasses. "Kangaroos stare blindly into headlights," he writes, "and the big rigs, drunk on momentum, smash them mile after bloody mile." Kanze, on what he compares at great length to Homer's Odyssey, treks around Australia in a 1980 Toyota Corolla with his wife, packing along a library of natural-history books and a predilection for avian, reptilian, and mammalian mating habits. The author of The World of John Burroughs, as well as of a nature guide to New Zealand, he visits every state in Australia in six months, meeting with park rangers, herpetologists, professional birders, and grumpy crocodile-hunter-types on a quest to intimately know the continent's bizarre wildlife. Kanze's list of finds is immense, with birds as diverse as orange-bellied parrots, the endangered glossy black cockatoo, crimson rosellas, and deadly Cassowaries, which Kanze describes as "an Emu with a stoop, dark, stocky, with a gaudy red necklace of exposed flesh," and that the Park Service warns has trampled several people. But Kanze's adventures are not limited to birdwatching; in fact, his true pursuit is finding the majority of Australia's 40 species of kangaroos. At first they appear in such scant numbers that he marvels at a single spotting. Soon enough though, the 'roos appear in such great abundance that he shifts his focus to the duck-billed platypus outside of Canberra, the mudskippers in the coastal rainforests near Brisbane, the pythons in Lake Barrine, and the "freshies" (freshwater crocodiles) at Edith Falls. Going beyond the Attenborough-toned walk in the field, Kanze touches on the realities of the Aboriginal plight, the invasion of the European settler, and the desecration of the Australian landscape. He even pays a visit to an asbestos mining town where passers-through are warned not to breathe the particulate-thick air. By the time Kanze and his wife are plenty full of each other, their broken-down Corolla, and the search for the rufous-banded honeyeaters, the pied herons, the hairy-nosed wombats, the white-browed crakes, the pratinoles, the cane toads, the tree kangaroos, the giant lizards, and the flying marsupials, they have sated their list, and the reader, with Australia's remarkable and often-elusive wildlife. --Lolly Merrell Product Description Recounts the author's nine-month journey through Australia in a station wagon with his wife, travelling from Melbourne to the Northern Territory, describing their experiences with wildlife and varying climate and terrain. From Booklist "This is a nature and adventure story, a book about how we roamed the world's oldest continent, bounding after kangaroos, waddling after wombats, and cruising among crocodiles." Caught up in both Homer's Odyssey and the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the author and his wife decided to spend nine months traversing Australia, communing with lotus-eaters in the form of wine-loving Australians and practicing Emerson's self-reliance while camping in the outback. Starting their journey in Melbourne, the couple made their way by bus, boat, train, but mostly by automobile around the entire continent, seeing each of the six states and two territories and all of the habitat types. As naturalists, their main goal was to see as many of Australia's unique animals as they could find. Kanze writes of encounters with a platypus diving for invertebrate prey and chewing it up on its return to the surface, of possums so tame that they climb into the soup, of chasing a wallaby to see how fast it can hop, and of campground wombats feeding on grassy fields in the dark. Mixed with the author's tales of the journey are quotations from Mark Twain, D. H. Lawrence, and Edward Abbey and a wealth of natural history, from descriptions of kangaroos from early English explorers to late-breaking discoveries from Australian scientists. An extrem
Kangaroo Dreaming: An Australian Wildlife Odyssey
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Author: Kanze, Edward
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN: 9780609607961
Details:
Author: Kanze, Edward
Edition: First Edition
Binding: Hardcover
Number Of Pages: 384
Release Date: 05-09-2000
Package Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.5 x 1.5 inches Languages: English
EAN: 9780609607961
