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.
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)
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)
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)
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)