A Long Walk in the Australian Bush

by William J. Lines and William J. Lires

Book Overview

One wet and blooming spring William J. Lines and an American companion undertook a 400-mile walk of the Bibbulmun trail of southwestern Australia. In this fascinating chronicle of the journey Lines draws on conservationist philosophy and his own observations to explore human interaction -- Aboriginal and white, farming and industrial, private and government -- with the Australian environment. The lessons that arise in the course of the book have universal application. A Long Walk in the Australian Bush reveals at dose range the devastation of the great temperate eucalypt forests while interweaving stories about forestry, mining, science, economics, conservation, and language, converging on the themes of nature, reality, objectivity, and understanding. A century of exploitation by politicians, loggers, and developers is described alongside personal experience and a strong sense of place. Lines contrasts the knowledge, wisdom, myths, and superstitions of the ancients -- including the Greeks and the Nyungar, the original inhabitants of the western Australian forest -- with contemporary human values. Extrapolating from his first-hand observations of ecological damage, he condemns the prevailing policies of extracting the maximum resource from nature, regardless of the cost. These policies are not unique to Australia. In fact, Lines writes, the approach to forestry that prevails in Western Australia has been borrowed from the United States Forest Service. With passion and immediacy, A Long Walk in the Australian Bush draws connections between the history, use, and abuse of Western Australia's forests and the use and abuse of the planet.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0820320552
• ISBN13: 9780820320557
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Length: 202 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.2" x 7.7"

Customer Reviews

The Rape of the Forests

Australia does not have the strong tradition of Nature writing that America does. One exception to this is Western Australian writer William Lines. This book, the title of which pays its respects to an Eric Newby classic, is the story of his walk he did along a previous version of Western Australia Bibbulman Track which runs south from Perth. Lines deftly describes the every day aspects of the walk but intertwines his descriptions with an account of the history, a rather sad one, of Western Australian forests as a result of greed, ignorance and stupidity. An Australian environmental classic.