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Scorched

Acts of resistance and faith
by
March 2025, no. 473

On This Ground: Best Australian nature writing edited by Dave Witty

Monash University Publishing, $34.99 pb, 327 pp

Buy this book

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Scorched

Acts of resistance and faith
by
March 2025, no. 473

For a creature born to life as a small songbird, days and nights can be treacherous. At any moment, a goshawk, a cat, or a goanna may be lurking, waiting to turn the songbird into supper. So these pretty little prey objects – scrubwrens and lorikeets and honeyeaters and the like – have developed an astute group behaviour. One bird spots the predator and issues an alarm call. Others hear it and zip out from behind branch and leaf to surround the threat, all of them twitting and hissing and flitting about, a mixed-species hullabaloo that together harasses the predator into pitiful retreat. This behaviour, known as a ‘mobbing flock’, is an evolutionary survival response. It is beautiful in its ingenuity, and the conviction it displays in the power of the collective. It is, to draw a metaphor from the literary ecosystem, an anthological act, a communal relay of meaning born of a shared inner urgency.

On This Ground: Best Australian nature writing

On This Ground: Best Australian nature writing

edited by Dave Witty

Monash University Publishing, $34.99 pb, 327 pp

Buy this book

ABR receives a commission on items purchased through this link. All ABR reviews are fully independent.

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