Patrice Newell

It is too heavy to read in bed or on an aeroplane, too handsome to besmirch at the beach, would court disaster if tackled at the kitchen table, and there’s no room on my always-littered desk. It’s the sort of book that, in its size and splendour, is aimed at the coffee table. Yet volumes like this seem more at home on television, their contents rendered into documentaries introduced by David Attenborough. ... (read more)

Kangaroos, wallabies and wallaroos abound, literally, on our farm, as do platypuses, echidnas and wedge-tails. We’ve even been told by visiting bushwalkers that we’ve got a few koalas up the mountain. But we don’t have wombats.

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We demand difference and variety in our lives – in the food we eat, in our friends, in our distractions and aversions. And we know that diversity is desperately needed in the biological world. There is debate, however, on how much is enough, and where the balance lies, and it’s hard to judge because we remain ignorant about natural processes.

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