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    Amazing Australia: A Traveler's Guide to Common Plants and Animals
    Amazing Australia: A Traveler's Guide to Common Plants and Animals
    Amazing Australia: A Traveler's Guide to Common Plants and Animals
    Ebook56 pages43 minutes

    Amazing Australia: A Traveler's Guide to Common Plants and Animals

    By Laine Cunningham

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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 traveler’s eye for the wonderful weirdness the world can offer, Amazing Australia gets right to the heart of the natural miracles that define Australia’s coasts and deserts. Discover the danger lurking in a lovely rainforest plant that can leave hikers with pain that last for eighteen months. Learn how to avoid the redback, a venomous spider that panicked an entire country.

    The origins of evocative names like “blood gum” are explained. Information explains how echidnas and ants survive in such a harsh environment. Invasive species like the cane toad and the cane beetle are discussed. The uniqueness of the country’s most beloved creatures like the kangaroo and the koala takes center stage in Amazing Australia.

    Packed with information that comes from being in the country for an extended time, Amazing Australia will entertain as well as inform. Details about how Aboriginal tribes used different plants, animals, and trees are included. Settler’s histories are touched on for the most common species.

    This compact introduction to Australia’s astonishing animals and plants makes an excellent addition to the classroom for curricular units in social studies and biology.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLaine Cunningham
    Release dateAug 23, 2018
    ISBN9781946732804
    Amazing Australia: A Traveler's Guide to Common Plants and Animals
    Author

    Laine Cunningham

    Laine Cunningham is a three-time recipient of The Hackney Award with prior publications in Pangyrus, Reed, Birmingham Arts, Fiction Southeast, Wraparound South, As You Were, Pensive, Borrowed Solace, Keeping Room, and Garfield Lake Review. She is the editor of Sunspot Literary Journal, an international arts and literature publication dedicated to speaking truth through every voice.

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      Book preview

      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

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