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Dave Witty

Dave Witty

Dave Witty is an Australian writer raised in the United Kingdom. He is the recipient of the 2021 Rosina Joy Buckman Award in The Nature Conservancy Nature Writing Prize, and his work appears in publications including Australian Book Review, Island, Griffith Review, and Meanjin. His first book is What the Trees See: A wander through millennia of natural history in Australia (Monash, 2023).

Dave Witty reviews ‘Voyagers: Our journey into the Anthropocene’ by Lauren Fuge

November 2024, no. 470 29 October 2024
It is rare to encounter spacecraft in nature writing. Indeed, most definitions of nature confine it to Earth’s boundaries. A few pages into Lauren Fuge’s book, we are treated to the image of two Voyager space probes, more than sixteen billion kilometres from the Earth and ‘driven by the most ecstatic imaginings of human exploration’. This is a mark of Fuge’s ambition. She is as comfortab ... (read more)

Dave Witty reviews ‘Forest Wars: The ugly truth about what’s happening in our tall forests’ by David Lindenmayer

June 2024, no. 465 27 May 2024
Shortly after Black Saturday, David Lindenmayer was giving a seminar on post-bushfire recovery when a member of the audience yelled out, ‘If it wasn’t for you greenies, none of this would have happened.’ Lindenmayer’s response was neither defence nor attack, but rather to rephrase the man’s words. ‘Your hypothesis,’ he said, ‘is that a fire in a forest that is logged and regenerate ... (read more)