Tony Birch

I mean, several things or several approaches.

I think centrally, I think there's a writer who's been committed, I think, her whole writing life to the issues of protecting country and having incredibly valuable and respectful relationships to place and country.

what she's doing here.

I think the stories that evoke so much excitement for me are the stories when, I suppose, the protagonist, the human characters in the story, not only value place and landscape, but they understand the authority and value of non-human species.

And I think the stories that work so effectively for me are those where

There's a realisation amongst the human characters about their acceptable humility in a place dominated by non-human species.

Two of my favourite stories being Blue Crane and Seawolf.

There's a wonderful moment in Blue Crane which we might...

think of as a sort of ending of magic realism, and I won't give it away, but where something happens that you sort of, again, grabs your attention, where an older woman decides that she wants to be something she's not.

And in Seawolf also, the attraction, the dignity of wolves.

and how a woman comes to feel so attached to the non-human.

Those stories in relationship to wildlife or to animals, I think is one of the keys.

The other one is, of course, is the relationship between people and country and the damage done to country.

So there are stories, for instance, that look at campaigns by eco-activists who are involved in quite overt sabotage of mining company machinery and mining country activity to protect Aboriginal country.

There's a story here which is a tribute to, I suppose, the photography that was produced around the campaign to save the Franklin River.

Yeah, and I think also, I think you say documenting, I think that one of the things that people involved in what we might call the environmental movement, in other words, the environmental activist political movement, is in fact for people who don't have access to places of nature and beauty to make sure that we get an insight and engagement with those and often that's through photography and film.

And again, everyone knows that the Franklin River campaign was successful

one of those campaigns that so much visual imagery of the beauty of that landscape was reproduced for people on mainland Australia.

In the book, we're talking about a story that looks at, I don't know if people are aware of this, but what we call the flooding of Lake Pedder, which is a very unique waterway in Tasmania, which was flooded for a hydroelectric scheme.

And over the decades, there have been