Amazing Australia: A Traveler's Guide to Common Plants and Animals
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About this ebook
Ideal for the nature-loving traveler, Amazing Australia is a handy pocket guide to the most unusual and the most common birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, insects, plants, and trees of Australia. This focused guide features over a hundred of the bizarre and the beautiful, the curious and the downright strange.
Written with a tr
Laine Cunningham
Laine Cunningham is a novelist and a three-time recipient of The Hackney Award. The Family Made of Dust, set in the Australian Outback, considers how Indigenous lives thrive despite oppression. Reparation is a contemporary novel of the American Great Plains. Her short prose has been published by Reed, Birmingham Arts Journal, Fiction Southeast, Wraparound South, and a forthcoming edition of Military Experience and the Arts. She is the senior editor and publisher of Sunspot Literary Journal, a multinational publication seeking to change the world.
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Amazing Australia - Laine Cunningham
Introduction
How very many things I used to be.
Recently I began looking toward the milestone of turning fifty years old. It would be poetic, I suppose, to claim that at milestones like birthdays and New Year’s I pause to take stock of what my life has been and what it might yet become…a pretty claim, yet one that would be false.
Instead, reflection is more frequently an ongoing process, one that arises in small glimpses snatched while we are busy at some chore that leads our minds idle in the midst of activity — doing the dishes, perhaps, or weeding the garden. Travel, of course, is one of those things, particularly when you leave your job, sell off everything you own, and fly halfway around the world to spend six months camping along in the rugged Australian Outback.
Some years ago I did just that. On nights spent in blessedly expansive solitude, I learned to play the didgeridoo. Every evening I cooked over an open fire and then huddled next to the embers for warmth while watching the Milky Way grow brighter. On the roads and in the bush, I saw animals and plants and birds that most travelers do not…unless they visit a zoo, where they find bored captives living in tiny cages.
I fled that same type of cage, of corporate boredom and stultifying sameness, for the experiences I would discover in the desert. Woman Alone, the memoir of that journey, touches on some of the ways those months changed me. And so even today I arise in the depths of night, after my body has rested and my mind has quieted the day’s chatter, to review some of the many things I no longer am.
The course of our years is blessedly long. During these decades, we live many lives as daughters and sisters, lovers and wives. We become parents than launch our children into the world or lose them to the next; we teach another’s child the wisdom we would give our own; we learn those lessons our parents were not equipped to provide.
Each of these steps makes us something different. We gain some things deliberately or accidentally; we shed others or use them in a process that only time or a different changeling can experience as something other than grief. Travel—even the most luxurious kind, even that which keeps us imprisoned on a bus for hours or allows us only minutes in a transcendent state—has the same impact. It makes us anew.
With each new person we become, we experience rebirth. Each rebirth is of necessity a death, a closing of some part of who we were that allows us to become. There is chaos and pain but if we release our expectations of the lives we have led up until that moment, we can discover joy. It hurts to leave behind the friends and things that no longer serve who we become; this pain is grief, and that grief honors the very special places people had held in our lives. When we finally part, we turn to the new self and begin a new life.
If we could see back into the lives of those left behind, we might discover that they too have been reborn, that our place in their lives was similarly complete. Travel allows us to do this, too, in a way. It shows us new people and places, and allows us to find the shining pieces of ourselves in these new places…like greeting old friends we have just now met.
My brother and I grew up on