What have you been working on at SUP?

Iā€™ve been working on a variety of wonderful activities: writing alt text, typesetting in InDesign, planning marketing calendars and social media posts, crafting nonfiction indexes, to name a few. They offered to let me dip my fingers into every pot and I have taken full advantage of that opportunity!

What has been the best part of the role? How about the most challenging?

The best part of the role has been working with the incredible team at SUP, as well as the wider library and university staff; there is such a positive, productive atmosphere within their space that I felt immediately welcomed and appreciated, even as a newcomer. The most challenging part has been realising I will have to stop working with them all!

Has anything surprised you about SUP/scholarly publishing?

Yes, actually - I was shocked by how much slower the pace of scholarly publishing is compared to trade publishing! After multiple semesters learning about demanding expectations of profit and efficiency in commercial publishing, it was a relief to find that those are not the only options out there for graduates. Iā€™ve never been enamored with corporate economics and I was so glad to discover publishers like SUP who value their books over their ROI.

What skills have you used most during your internship?

Dr Agata would be so happy to hear that the technical skills I learned in the classroom were immensely helpful during the internship, even indispensable; being not only familiar with InDesign but confident with it is not just a massive leg-up, but several legs! Having the tech theory already lodged in my mind before applying it practically left me feeling well-prepared to hit the ground running.

What was your dream job when you were twelve? What is your dream job now?

When I was twelve, I wanted to be Monet, living in a gorgeous cottage in France and painting the same bridge over and over again. As an adult, my dream job is less a specific position than a general desire to do something that allows me to help artists bring their vision into the world without sacrificing that incredible post-covid work-life balance we all dream about. Books are my favorite artistic medium, so book publishing is my chosen avenue towards that goal.

You have to take a week-long road trip with a fictional or historical character. Who do you choose and why?

I will cheat slightly and choose two historical characters, as I would love to take a week-long road trip with Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud; together they radically altered how we view human consciousness, and I would thoroughly enjoy hearing their original ideas debated within the confines of a car, without the trappings of twenty-first century psychoanalysis. I (personally) find Jung brilliant and Freud batshit, so it would be awesome to argue with them both!

What are you planning to do next?

Now that Iā€™ve finished my degree, I plan on taking it as slow as I can - I moved to Sydney three years ago and only now feel settled enough to branch out of my home suburb. I hope to find a job doing editorial work, but Iā€™m in no rush to leave my current gig playing with babies in a gym creche; living in Australia is itself a joy and an immense privilege!

Katy Maas is a nearly graduated Master of Publishing student living in Sydney with her partner and two cats.

By Agata Mrva-Montoya

Congratulations! After years of doing research and writing, you finally joined the ranks of freshly minted PhDs. You even have an endorsement from your examiners ā€“ ā€˜this work is brilliant and should be publishedā€™. So, you send it in to a publisher, then another one or two. And your proposal gets knocked back, time after time. Why?Ģż

Publishers rarely consider unrevised PhD theses. (And if they approach you and offer to publish it as is, you should carefully check the publisherā€™s credentials!) A dissertation in the humanities and social sciences is written with a different intent and structure to a book, and for a different audience. Your thesis may indeed be brilliant ā€“ well researched, well referenced and well organised ā€“ but what the publisher sees is a manuscript that is too long, with tedious and predictable structure, full of jargon and repetitious announcements of intent, and so many quotes and references that it reads like compilations of facts and regurgitated opinions.

So before you send your dissertation to another publisher, you need to restructure it, revise it and turn it into something that someone, apart from your long-suffering supervisors and briefly accosted examiners, might actually want to read.

Seriously though, your manuscript needs to be capable of reaching a broader audience. Book publishing is a resource-intensive enterprise and the reality is that the book has to be commercially feasible ā€“ if not making heaps of money, then at least breaking even. Apart from the sales potential, publishers look for manuscripts that fulfill their mission of disseminating research results and communicating great ideas to readers in a broad range of disciplines, and the general public. Dissertations on obscure topics, with unclear arguments and a bias against readability fail on both accounts.

If the subject matter of your thesis is awfully narrow, there are other ways of making your research available to scholars ā€“ you can upload it into your universityā€™s digital repository, make it open access, and publish a handful of journal articles to disseminate your findings and join the discussion in your discipline. And consider writing an entirely new book on a different topic.

If you believe that your PhD thesis has the potential to be a book that would interest readers beyond the circle of your close family and friends, then itā€™s time to turn it into a publishable manuscript. Here are some ideas you may consider:

1. Decide what type of audience you want to reach with your book. While you could potentially write a scholarly book with mass-market appeal, the reality is that these two markets are rarely compatible. They require different approaches, different styles of writing and attract different publishers. Nevertheless, it is a good idea to write with a broad readership in mind using straightforward English to produce a scholarly, sophisticated and intellectually challenging work, which is accessible to scholars in other disciplines and the interested general public.
2. Identify what are the most interesting or important issues or themes. Think of your audience ā€“ what aspects of your research would potential readers find intriguing? It is unlikely to be the literature review or methodology (these are best entirely removed or just briefly mentioned in the book). Do you need to broaden the subject area, look at your topic in a wider context or from a new perspective?
3. Review the structure of the manuscript focusing on the important themes and paying attention to the narrative drive. You need to reorganise the material to make it interesting and accessible, promising readers an intellectual adventure. If you need help, check Developmental editing: a handbook for freelancers, authors, and publishers by Scott Norton (The University of Chicago æģĆØŹÓʵ, 2009). Norton offers detailed advice, illustrated by a variety of case studies, on how to identify leading themes and topics, how to restructure the manuscript to reveal its greatest potential and how to come up with a great table of contents and a winning title.
4. As soon as you have the structure in place and a clear vision for the book, start approaching publishers. Investigate the publisher before you send the proposal off. Most academic publishers and university presses specialise in a specific area of scholarship and particular types of books and audiences, and you should try to find a reasonable match. Check the publisherā€™s submission requirements, fill in the form, make sure your proposal sounds interesting, is error-free, and send it off. You may need to include a couple of sample chapters with your proposal. Ideally, you will find a publisher that will be as excited about your research and your manuscript as you are, and your published book will be intellectually stimulating and highly readable.
5. Rewrite the manuscript in your own voice. Readers want to know what you, the bookā€™s author, think about the issue, so there is no need to hide behind authorities, excessive number of footnotes or blocks of quoted material. Rewrite, engage and express your view. Make sure there are no gaps, mistakes and inconsistencies in the text or the argument. Ideally you would secure a contract before you start rewriting the manuscript, but you can start working on it while you are waiting to hear from publishers.
6. Make sure you follow the publisherā€™s author guidelines. You may need to follow specific spelling conventions depending on whether the publisher is based in Australia, the UK or the USA. And importantly, format your references consistently, and on brief. Ideally, you should use Endnote or other referencing software to help you wrangle the reference list. It will save you heaps of time.
7. Revise the writing style. Remove unduly complicated constructions, unnecessary jargon and passive voice. You should aim for clarity of expression and writing in plain English without relinquishing intellectual strength or scholarly authority. There are plenty of books that can help from George Orwellā€™s ā€˜ā€™ to William Strunkā€™s The elements of style (Pearson, 1999) to Mark Tredinnickā€™s The little red writing book (UNSW æģĆØŹÓʵ, 2006). Make sure that the structure of the book and of each chapter is coherent, that every paragraph flows logically, that every sentence is where it needs to be, and every word is necessary.
8. Check your facts, grammar, spelling and punctuation before you submit your manuscript. While copy-editors will help you to polish the work, you want to come across as a professional writer. If you need help with grammar or punctuation, Mark Tredinnickā€™s The little green grammar book (UNSW æģĆØŹÓʵ, 2008) is a delight to read (please keep in mind it follows the Australian style). Confirm that all your references are in place. (Your exhaustive bibliography needs to be trimmed to a reasonable size.)

Almost there? Not yet. Submitting the manuscript is a huge step toward getting a book published, but of course this is just the beginning of a long(ish), collaborative process as the manuscript undergoes peer review, copyediting, typesetting and so on. Your can differ significantly among publishers, so you need to make sure you understand the expectations particular to your publisher early on to avoid delays and unnecessary stress. ĢżYou need to work closely with the publisher, and give the process and your book, your best shot. Good luck!

This is a (heavily) revised version of a post originally published on the PhD2Published blog in 2011. Image by Pixabay.

Your book opens with a very intriguing, very moving account of your meeting with ā€œBoldā€, a young dingo you met on a Kā€™gari (Fraser Island) beach. (Readers can find an extract .) What did you know about dingoes before that trip? What had sparked your interest in them? Did your encounter with Bold change how you thought about dingoes, or what questions you wanted to ask about them?

Before I met Bold or started writing about dingoes, I was interested in my dog Zefaā€™s perceptions and consciousness. She was a kelpie cattle dog who was a much-loved and really co-operative member of our family. Writing about dingoes was a way of thinking about Zefaā€™s family history.

By the time I met Bold on the beach on Kā€™gari I knew dingoes were considered pests across much of Australia and I knew about the campaigns to eradicate them. Over the years Iā€™d had some fleeting encounters with dingoes when I was camping ā€“ hearing them howl at night, lying in a tent and watching a dingo walk by. Iā€™d grown up with the Azaria Chamberlain case ā€“ and the jokes, which, with hindsight, were so insensitive to what the Chamberlain family were going through. There were probably several reasons for the jokes and the public vilification of Lindy Chamberlain (including a misogynistic and bigoted legal profession and media), but I also think the jokes were a mechanism for people to try and deal with something that was truly mysterious and awe-full. Making jokes might have been a way of trying to take control and put some distance between ourselves and our ignorance ā€“ about this country and its inhabitants, including Aboriginal people and their knowledge of dingoes.

When I was growing up my family had blue cattle dogs, who are related to dingoes. At that time cattle dogs had a bit of a reputation for being vicious but we didnā€™t think our dogs were vicious ā€“ to us they were loyal and affectionate. They were individuals, intelligent with different interests ā€“ one could jump unbelievable heights, another liked nuzzling the sweet flesh off watermelon rinds. Our dog Possum gave birth to a couple of litters of pups when I was about 11 or 12. Around that time I read a book written by Frank Dalby Davison in the 1940s called Dusty, about a dingo-kelpie cross. Early in the story Dustyā€™s dingo mother and all his siblings are killed by a man. I found that scene incredibly sad, and, looking back now, I was outraged by this terrible one-sided violence. The woman who bred Possum also bred dingoes, which was a daring and unconventional thing to do in the 1970s on the outskirts of Sydney because dingoes were classified as a noxious animal in NSW then and you couldnā€™t keep one as a pet (that legislation has since changed in NSW). So dingoes were enigmatic, and also illicit. I think one of the things about them that appeals to some people and appalls others is how they are impervious to human control.

Meeting Bold.

I was excited and scared when I met Bold on the beach. The fear was a really involuntary, primal feeling, partly related, probably, to the sense of control humans are used to having. Bold had so much agency. He decided to approach me; he decided when to leave. He was clearly young, only 10 months old, but I could see his jaws were big and powerful. Our encounter was uneventful but it did complicate the situation for me. How would you visit Kā€™gari with young children? How could rangers keep dingoes away from people? How do you ā€˜manageā€™ people and dingoes?

The year 2020 was difficult for Kā€™gari, with catastrophic bushfires as well as the pandemic. What are the biggest challenges facing dingoes and their human supporters in 2021?

Yes, catastrophic fires burnt the northern half of Kā€™gari from mid October to mid December 2020. Now the challenge for dingoes, and other animals and plants on the island, is to survive. Animals that escaped the fires ā€“ itā€™s much harder to escape on a long, narrow island like Kā€™gari ā€“ face possible injuries and hunger. Now only 50 per cent of the island provides habitat and food for all the surviving animals ā€“ including invertebrates and herbivorous insects as well as larger animals such as echidnas, wallabies and dingoes.

The immediate challenge for the Queensland governmentā€™s review of the effectiveness of preparedness activities and the response to the fire, due by 31 March 2021, is to provide answers about the failure to contain the fire, which was only extinguished with the help of rain. Accommodation providers welcomed the quick reopening of the island to tourists, and tourism bodies and Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service claimed that the island would bounce back, that it was already starting to regenerate and that its main drawcards (Lake McKenzie and Central Station) had not been affected, but the islandā€™s ecology has been devastated by the fires.

So the ongoing challenge is to assess priorities for Kā€™gari, which is many things: a unique island with a World Heritage listing because of the geological and biological processes that take place there, a tourist resort, a home to dingoes and other animals, and the traditional country of the Butchulla Aboriginal people. What are the limits for industries such as tourism? Can we humans think non-anthropocentrically about the places we share with other animals and plants? How do we enact Butchulla Law, which says ā€˜whatā€™s good for the land comes firstā€™?

The way the presence and actions of humans are affecting plantsā€™ and animalsā€™ habitats in a negative way on Kā€™gari is a microcosm of what is happening across Australia and worldwide. No one wants to hear it, or think about it, but 2020 is a harbinger of the new normal: catastrophic wildfires (and other severe weather) and the spread of zoonotic diseases, which may be more contagious and lethal than Covid-19. The challenges that Kā€™gari faces are also global and national challenges. So US President Joe Bidenā€™s Executive Order Tackling the Climate Crisis, is a positive move. He has put environmental justice and protection of the environment, including conservation of lands, waters and biodiversity, at the centre of his administrationā€™s policy agenda. The goal is to conserve at least 30 per cent of lands and waters by 2030.

In Australia, Graeme Samuelā€™s 2020 review of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act recommends that a new set of national environmental standards should be adopted and implemented to overcome the failures of the current piecemeal approach to environmental protections. Under the current EPBC Act, Samuel found, Australiaā€™s animals, plants and habitats are in unsustainable decline. But I doubt his recommendation to set up an Office of Compliance and Enforcement, which would have ā€˜regulatory powers and toolsā€™, within the Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment will result in good outcomes for Australiaā€™s animals, plants and biodiversity. Australia is a world leader in land clearing, and the majority of it has been cleared for agriculture. Habitat loss and land clearing are the biggest threats to threatened species. Though I despair at politiciansā€™ failure to put a stop to Australiaā€™s terrible environmental degradation and tackle the climate catastrophe, we must keep putting pressure on parliamentarians to legislate responsibly for this country and future generations.

While the challenges on Kā€™gari are global and national, the island is also unique. In addition to Queensland state legislation, which classifies dingoes in most of the state as pests, the dingoes on Kā€™gari fall under the jurisdiction of the Fraser Island Dingo Conservation and Risk Management Strategy (FIDCRMS). This strategy aims to be scientific but a couple of the prominent architects of the plan, who continue to advise the islandā€™s managers, gained their expertise as dingo eradicators whose research is driven by agricultural interests. Although the most recent review of the FIDCRMS in 2012 did not recommend any major changes, dingo supporters managed to convince authorities to restrict the practice of ear tagging to dingoes who are over 10 kg in weight. All these steps toward more humane relations with dingoes are important. Public calls for accountability, openness and policy honesty around dingoes are vital.

Your book weaves together extensive research with personal experiences and memoir. Itā€™s a delicate balance to get right but when it works (as it does in your book) it gives the reader a wonderful combination of first-person insight and a broader historical view. Did you set out knowing how to strike this balance, or does the right mix emerge as you write?

When Iā€™m reading non-fiction, I often find myself sitting up and taking more interest when I hit the first ā€˜Iā€™ ā€“ as though a piece starts there, now the writer has some skin in the game. When I was writing Dingo Bold the balance between first-person insight and a broader historical view emerged slowly through drafting and redrafting and cutting and redrafting. I wrote this book as part of a doctorate of creative arts and I was really lucky to have Debra Adelaide as my main supervisor. While I was following my interests down another rabbit-hole or into bigger picture history or reflections on science, she would ask, ā€˜Whatā€™s the story you are telling? Whatā€™s the emotional truth of this piece of writing?ā€™ If the material I had included was not part of the story it either had to go (and so far Iā€™ve never regretted anything Iā€™ve cut) or be reworked so it was part of the story ā€“ even if its relationship to the whole emerges later in the narrative. But the writing process itself involved my fanatically following the threads of historical events and scientific arguments and then asking myself, whatā€™s important here? Where is the emotional energy? And, why is that important to me?

You are an experienced editor as well as an author. Do you think having been an editor affects how you approach writing a book? Do you edit as you write, or do you write first and edit later?

I do both, that is, edit as I write and write and come back and edit later. Allowing some time, some breathing space, between drafts really helps me to see how a thread might develop and how one thing relates to another. Sometimes being an editor can be a distraction because you can always be rephrasing things in an effort to make the writing more succinct or more elegant, or whatever it is youā€™re going for, and sometimes youā€™re better off to just get it down and by getting it down youā€™re working out what you think. Although I do believe that form and content are in some ways inseparable. When I take off my editorā€™s hat (it comes off pretty easily in the right context), I enjoy writing for myself, without consequences or expectations, or the notion of an audience. I write longhand in my diary, I scribble notes ā€“ these forms feel more unmediated. On the whole, though, I value my editing experience because itā€™s given me the opportunity to read lots of texts and to learn how to articulate my responses to them. These skills have been really useful in research and non-fiction writing because Iā€™m articulating responses not just to texts but to interviews, events, animals, landscapes, and so on.

We have loved seeing Dingo Bold travelling around Australia and the world via your Instagram account (). Do you have any social media tips for writers? Do you think social media is changing how we find and engage with books?

Iā€™m glad youā€™ve enjoyed seeing Dingo Boldā€™s travels. I still have so much to learn regarding social media! My social media tip for writers (of my generation) is to ask the younger people in your life for ideas about content and how to put it out there. Social media is great, and it does change how we find and engage with books, because youā€™re not bound by national borders or the tyranny of distance. I can be in touch instantaneously with friends who donā€™t live in Australia or in Sydney. I can find out about amazing books, and read online reviews, essays and stories from all sorts of places. I find out about things on social media that I wouldnā€™t know about otherwise. So far my social media strategy for Dingo Bold is to enjoy posting and to keep it simple so that I can keep on posting.

How has the pandemic affected your researching and writing life? What are you looking forward to in 2021?

I miss going places to research. I miss live events. I find it hard to concentrate on Zoom ā€“ my diary turns into a miasma. Luckily I can still read and write, when I can concentrate. Iā€™m grateful for the companionship of my family (though that mightnā€™t always be evident to them). Our dog Zefa died just after Christmas 2019 so 2020 was dog-less, which was a very strange way to be. Iā€™m looking forward to a puppy coming into our lives at some stage. Looking forward to continuing to talk about Dingo Bold with anyone who will listen. Looking forward to working on my next book ...

What have you read and loved recently (or not so recently)? For readers looking for their next book, what would you recommend?

Iā€™m so glad you asked because I want to tell everyone about a novel by Olga Tokarczuk, a Polish writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2018, called Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, which is Ģżā€“ despite the title ā€“ a funny book with a brilliant narratorial voice. For something shorter by her, sheā€™s got an excellent essay in a recent Paris Review, ā€˜ā€™.

Barry Lopezā€™s magisterial book Of Wolves and Men was a big inspiration for me when I started researching dingoes. Lopez died on Christmas Day 2020. I recommend also his beautiful essay ā€˜Apologiaā€™, about animals killed on the road.

Laura Jean McKayā€™s novel The Animals in that Country, which recently won the 2021 Victorian Prize for Literature and the Victorian Premierā€™s Literary Award for Fiction, is, presciently, about a pandemic and one of its main characters is a dingo called Sue. It had me dreaming about dingoes.

Ģżby Susan Murray

So you want to publish a book! There are lots of reasons why you might want to bring together everything you know about a particular topic into a handy, portable object known as a book.

Here is a list of questions you should ask yourself before you embark on your endeavour.

1. Audience

Who is the book aimed at?

How many people do you think will be interested in the book?

Where is your audience located - locally, within Australia, throughout the world?

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2. Project

Who will manage the publishing project?

How much time do you have for the project?

Is there a specific event or release date?

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3. Content

What will be included in the book - text, images, photographs, diagrams, tables, lists, index?

Who will write the content?

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4. Rights and permissions

Do you have permission to include the content and the images in the book?

Does the book qualify for a University ISBN, or do you need to purchase one?

Who do you need to acknowledge on the cover or inside the book?

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5. Editorial

Who will check the work?

Who can check for accuracy, correct grammar, writing clarity?

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6. Design

What will the cover look like?

Who will design the cover?

Will there be a blurb on the back cover describing the book? Who will write this? Who will endorse the book?

What will the internal pages look like?

How big should the margins be?

Where should images be positioned on the page?

What fonts and headings will be used?

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7. Production

How many copies are you planning to print?

What size will the book be?

Will the book be black and white, or include colour?

What kind of paper do you want to use?

What kind of cover do you want?

Ģż

8. Ebooks

Do you want an ebook edition?

What devices should the ebook work on?

Is there any enhanced functionality you would like to include, such as embedded video/audio?

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9. Budget

How are you going to pay for your time, other people's time, third party permissions, print costs?

Will the book be for sale or a giveaway?

Do you need to cover your costs or generate a profit?

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10. Release

What is legal deposit and where do you need to send copies?

Who needs to know about the book?

How will you contact potential readers?

Where will you store the archived files after release?

Where will you store the printed books?

Ģż

As you can see from the length of this list of questions, there can be a lot of time and effort involved in producing a book.Ģż But it can be very rewarding when you get the finished book in your hands.

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My novel is about many things. Iā€™ve called it ā€˜a novel in twelve storiesā€™ for a reason.

To give you the simplest framework:

Itā€™s made up of 12 related stories. Each story describes an encounter with a different species of bird. Some are constantly in our lives, like kookaburras in our garden or magpies who swoop us on our way to work. Others are on the verge of extinction, like the Gouldā€™s petrel whose breeding ground is limited to one small island off the coast of central NSW. Some birds become part of our family, like a pet budgie. Others are incorporated in more literal and violent ways, like a factory-farmed chicken on our plate at dinner.

On the other side of the encounter is a human at various stages of his life: a boy, a young man, a parent, a widower ā€“ but not necessarily in that order. Heā€™s trying to piece together his life and his relationship with his daughter and his relationship with the world around him.

In a recent review of the work, Alex Lockwood described the relationship between the human and the birds in the book as an ā€˜intertwinementā€™ (Lockwood 2019, 220). He was drawing upon the work of AndrĆ© Krebber and Mieke Roscher in Animal Biography: Reframing Animal Lives who ask us to reimagine the interactions between human and nonhuman animals as an ā€˜intertwinementā€™ of multiple agencies (Krebber and Roscher 2018, 7).

Intertwinement is one of many words that have been used to describe the complexity of the world we live in right now. Timothy Morton is responsible for the word ā€˜enmeshedā€™, which is frequently used by environmental humanities scholars to describe our relationship with the planet (Morton 2010). Before him, James Lovelock gives us the image of us as part of Gaia, a complex system of interconnectedness that sustains a living, self-regulating planet (Lovelock 1982). We are entangled in ecosystems and networks and internets ā€“ of things, of data, of lives. All of these complexities are central to both the form of my novel and the stories inhabiting it.

The book was sparked by an intertwinement of ideas, of lives and of place.

The place is: the highway bridge near my house in North Wollongong. Whatā€™s officially called ā€˜the North Wollongong interchangeā€™, itā€™s a six-lane bridge that has Officeworks and a collection of fast-food joints on one side, and, on the other: Toyota, Hyundai, Mercedes Benz caryards interspersed with Dan Murphyā€™s and First Choice Liquor and the North Gong hotel. Surveying the interchange is Mount Keira: called grandmother mountain by the local Dharawal people, sheā€™s also the older sister of the five islands; she has a sandstone scar on her southern side from a recent rock fall. The mountain is the home of red cedar and ferns; of cabbage tree palms and lantana and giant stinging trees; of cat birds and bush turkeys; echidnas, cicadas, deer and dogwalkers. Under the interchange run 20-wagon coal trains and commuter carriages, the wide lanes of the Northern Distributor; under these trickles the remnant of a creek, now encased in cement, tentacled with graffiti.

The lives are: the people in the cars and the utes and the delivery vans. Going to work, coming back from work, sneaking in a quick surf before work; worrying about their children, whatā€™s for dinner, the electricity bill, the election; laughing at some idiot on the radio, absorbed in a podcast about serial killers; checking their phones, wondering if thereā€™s an RBT hiding round the corner on Lysaght St. There are also the people on the platform of North Gong station: texting or micronapping or staring into space; schoolkids pinching and shoving each other, nearly falling onto the track; uni students lumbering their backpacks over the pedestrian bridge to catch the UOW prison-blue shuttle bus.

And another life: me. Doggedly stomping my way to the local ocean pool, wondering if the ocean temperature has dropped yet. And tentacled with the wondering, a jumble of worries: about emails and work crises and long-term fears about the future: economic, political, ecological. And thoughts about what I might cook for dinner. And my dogs. And Westworld.Ģż ĢżĢż

And there are other lives, gliding above me. Three black cockatoos silhouetted against a vibrant blue sky. As I plod along, the cockatoos waft down from the open sky and hover at eye level. Theyā€™re so close I can reach out and touch them. As I watch them, suspended in the air, I can see their charcoal wings, the dirty-yellow smudge on the side of their faces, the glinting beaks, the black eyes ringed with silver.

Then, one by one, the cockatoos drop lower, under the bridge, and fly away.Ģż

The ideas are intertwined with this encounter on the bridge.

The first idea is the desire to see what birds see, to engage with what the cultural geographer Steve Hinchliffe calls ā€˜making oneself available ... to the world of the bird ... ā€™ (Hinchcliffe 2010, 34). How might it be possible to inhabit the other side of the encounter? In this, Iā€™m following the provocation by Philip Armstrong to attend ā€˜not just to what animals mean to humans, but what they mean themselves; that is, to the ways in which animals might have significances, intentions and effects quite beyond the designs of human beingsā€™ (Armstrong 2008, 2).

The second makes a correlation between the particular and the planetary. How might the bridge and the cars and the crumbling escarpment, the coal mines and the expanse of the Pacific reflect the global events that are affecting the world around us? This is the space of Catherine McKinnonā€™s Storyland, whose imaginings of the Illawarraā€™s history ā€“ and future ā€“ makes it clear that the issue of climate change is intertwined with this place. Itā€™s also the centre of the multi-authored book Iā€™ve recently been part of, 100 Atmospheres, written by members of MECO, the Material Ecologies Research Network. Among other things, the book draws out the planetary ways we might read the escarpment, the local weather, the hulk of the Oceanlinx wave generator at Port Kembla, soil and trees and suburban lawns.

The third idea is about storytelling. What does my story about me and the black cockatoos do to the birds? How does it change the way I navigate the space, my fears, the other lives around me? How does me telling you this story change your relationship with birds, humans and the planet ā€“ or even just the way youā€™ll travel over North Wollongong bridge?Ģż

All of these intertwinings ā€“ between species; between deep history, memory and the here-and-now; between whatā€™s on the ground and whatā€™s in the air; between complex web of ideas ā€“ are crucial to the stories in The Flight of Birds.

In one story, Further to Fly, I make the connection between a ā€˜localā€™ incident and the way we engage with our environment on a global scale. A man drives home from work through a nature reserve and accidentally hits a rosella with his car. As he watches the bird in the grille struggle to stay alive, he does what many of us do when faced with the enormity of climate change:

He got into his car and drove home. He parked in the garage and pulled the roller door shut. The next morning, a crisp and cheery Saturday, he took his car to the detailing place attached to the local shopping centre. When he came back from the supermarket, the car was gleaming wet and clean. When he drove to work on Monday, he stayed on the highway, following clear lines of sight. (Lobb 2019, 98)

What other ways might we care for all the lives that are being threatened by our current ecological crisis?

In another story, Six Stories about Birds, with Seven Questions, the man is entangled within a network of what Freya Mathews calls our ā€˜intimate commensal relationshipsā€™ with birds (Mathews 1997, 4): he tells and retells stories of birds ā€“ in fairy tales, in poetry, in history books ā€“ to think through the ambiguity he feels towards his daughterā€™s pet budgie, Charlotte, whom he has accidentally let out of her cage.

Is Charlotte part of the family or a possession?Ģż

Ģż

In a third, The Pecking Order, I make links between many different forms of violence, among them: the trauma of grief, and the violence humans inflict on the animals we kill to eat. Like Further to Fly, the story plays on our ability (and our willingness) to disassociate our violent acts from our ā€˜normalā€™ lives. ĢżIn this, it is drawing directly on to Carol J. Adamsā€™ conceptualisation of factory-farmed animals as ā€˜absent referentsā€™ (Adams 2006, 2010). When we kill animals to eat, a life becomes ā€˜meatā€™. We ā€˜translateā€™ the murder of animals into culinary language. The slaughtered cow is turned into ā€˜beefā€™, the dead pig becomes ā€˜porkā€™. Itā€™s a process ā€˜to keep something from being seen as having been ²õ“Ē³¾±š“Ē²Ō±šā€™ (Adams 2006, 595). In the case of birds, the original name is often kept (ā€˜duckā€™, ā€˜turkeyā€™, ā€˜chickenā€™), but the activity Adams describes still takes place. When we say ā€˜Chicken tonightā€™, weā€™re not actually referring to real chicken.

We were shivering in the meat section, my daughter and I, mapping out the weekā€™s dinners. Above us was a cardboard mobile, suspended from the darkened ceiling, of a red barn and cows and chickens, and the words Old MacDonaldā€™s Farm. After she got bored with jumping up to try and grab one of the black-and-white cows, my daughter dashed over to a big red button on the wall between the eggs and the meat fridges. She wouldnā€™t stop banging the button. Next to it was a childlike drawing of a white hen; between bangs, my daughter would trace the elongated S of the birdā€™s back, from beak to tail. When she banged the button an artificial, strangulated B-caaw would burst out of a speaker in the wall. I tried not to acknowledge the flicked irritated looks from the other shoppers. In an effort to distract her, I asked my daughter to fetch one of the punnets from the meat-display shelves. Carting it back, she scrutinised the pink glistening pillow underneath the plastic film. She traced the words on the sticky label. She stared at the silhouette of the bird, next to the button on the wall: sleek body; beak, comb and fluffy feathers.

At school, sheā€™d been learning about homonyms. Around the rim of the classroom, the class had hung up rectangles of cardboard, with a different definition written in capital letters on each side. ā€˜Thereā€™s bark like a dog,ā€™ sheā€™d told me, ā€˜and bark of a tree.ā€™ Thereā€™s left and left, pen and pen. Up to this moment ā€“ the moment poised between the eggs and the freezers, holding a plastic tub of flesh ā€“ I think my daughter thought that chicken was also a homonym. ā€˜Thereā€™s a chicken in the farmyard, Daddy,ā€™ she might have said, ā€˜and thereā€™s chicken you eat.ā€™ The cardboard rectangle spinning slowly in the air. (Lobb 2019, 101ā€“102)

The girlā€™s moment in the supermarket is placed alongside several other stories. As her father watches his daughter make her discovery, he remembers moments from his own childhood, including his primary-school experience being bullied and the death of his mother. The fatherā€™s relationship with meat is tangled up with his sense of belonging. His mother dies when he is in his early teens and he recalls his neighboursā€™ response to the motherless family:

There was a stack of chicken casseroles in the fridge supplied by other well-meaning neighbours, another stack in the freezer, ready to go when we needed them. In the afternoons after school, Iā€™d have to open the front door and take the casserole from the neighbour across the road, or down the street. Sheā€™d occupy the doorstep, waiting for me to force the words ā€˜Thank youā€™ from my mouth. Theyā€™d fall out, dry and hollow, meaning something different to the dictionary definition (Lobb 2019, 107).

The character sees the casseroles as symbols of his disconnection from the social normality of family, what he calls ā€˜being on the outside, looking in.ā€™ And, without articulating it, comes to see meat-eating as a way of belonging to a community, even if this means always having an unspoken violence running underneath. He learns to suppress the painful knowledge of his motherā€™s death by using the same strategies we use to suppress our knowledge of killing animals: ā€˜When my father served up dinner, the plate clanking down on the marble table, I ate what was put in front of meā€™ (Lobb 2019, 107).

Other stories tell of more hopeful encounters with birds. In February this year I was in Armidale at the Grounding Story conference, hosted by the ANZ Association for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture. I had the great privilege of attending a session called ā€˜Remembering Deborah Bird Roseā€™, the extraordinary writer and thinker who asked difficult and necessary questions about multispecies lives and the planet.

One of the presenters cited a statement made by Deborah Rose about another extraordinary thinker and writer, Val Plumwood. Rose said: ā€˜Where one person or speciesā€™ knowledge stops, someone elseā€™s knowledge picks up the storyā€™ (Rose 2013) Although the relationship is presented as a causal link ā€“ a baton being passed on ā€“ Rose is not advocating a linear process: you lead, and I follow;Ģż or I lead, pulling you along, or worse, replacing you. Rather, itā€™s an interchange, or, better yet, a conversation between different perspectives, experiences, lives. In the ā€˜picking upā€™ of the story, the knowledge does not actually stop, but is extended and challenged, but also respected and conserved. In this, Roseā€™s process is a bit like the Drama exercise in another story, Flocking:

The group ā€“ five or six students to begin, but the whole class by the end of term ā€“ has to move around the space together, learning to work as one. They start in the centre of the room. Facing the same direction, in a staggered formation, like an arrowhead. The tip of the arrow leads and the rest follow, imperceptibly slow, inching their way forward. When the students are really concentrating, the group can weave through the space, changing direction when the flock allows. Itā€™s not easy. The trick, Miss tells them, is for there never to be a leader, really. We should never know whoā€™s leading, whoā€™s following. Let go of your own thoughts. Breathe as one. Theyā€™re poised, waiting for the impulse to move. Carefully, elegantly, they curve to the left. The leader now follows. There is no leader. They breathe as one. (Lobb 2019, 50)

Roseā€™s statement articulates precisely the work Iā€™ve been trying to do in the book. Part of what Iā€™ve been trying to do is work out where human knowledge stops and how ā€˜bird knowledgesā€™ might pick up different kinds of stories. One story, ā€˜Call and Responseā€™, recounts a humanā€™s reaction to the irritating four-in-the-morning call of the koel. But how might the call sound to the koel? Another collects all the tales we tell of magpies swooping: but might there be another way to understand this interaction? Another part of what Iā€™ve been trying to do is to show how necessary it is for human and bird stories to be brought together. The stories of chickens ā€“ and other animals ā€“ in factory farms are a secret part of our stories. The stories of the extinction of the passenger pigeon and the dodo are more than stories: theyā€™re also lives. Thom van Dooren argues that ā€˜telling stories has consequences: one of which is that we will inevitably be drawn into new connections, and with them, new accountabilities and obligationsā€™ (van Dooren 2014a, 10). The second-last story, ā€˜Aves Admittantā€™, tells of one potential conversation that takes place between humans, across species lines and around the planet. The central character for this story is an island ecologist, working with the endangered Gouldā€™s petrel on Cabbage Tree island, just off Port Stephens. ĢżAfter the death of her mother, sheā€™s invited her grieving father to help her with her work. Part of their task is to note any fledglings in the nests. Theyā€™ve marked the nests with metal stakes and plastic labels.

Weā€™ll head west, up the mossy slope. Weā€™ll squeeze our way through a teepee of knotted vines. Dad will direct me to another metal stake. A yellow cattle-tag: Y271. The nest will be in a natural rock cavity, held within the lazy curve of a figtree trunk. A ragged-mouthed portal. Iā€™ll reach my hand inside.

My fingertips will brush against downy feathers.

ā€˜Dad,ā€™ Iā€™ll say. Heā€™ll be standing between two tall cabbage-tree trunks, holding the data sheet against his chest like a security blanket.

ā€˜Dad,ā€™ Iā€™ll say again, ā€˜youā€™ll want to see this.ā€™ As gently as I possibly can, Iā€™ll draw out the creature. The chick will wriggle, fluff its wings. Grey and soft and fragile. It will look like those clumps of lint we used to scrape out of the door of the dryer. Iā€™ll cradle it between my hands.

Heā€™ll edge his way closer. Heā€™ll steady himself, his palm pushing into the rough bark. His mouth will open and close. The bird will twitch its dodo-curved beak. Heā€™ll teeter back. ā€˜I canā€™t,ā€™ heā€™ll say.

ā€˜Please, Dad,ā€™ Iā€™ll say. The body will feel warm and alive in my hands. Iā€™ll hold the bird out in front of me, like an offering. The golden-green light of the forest will make the feathers glow and hum. ā€˜Please, Dad.ā€™ I wonā€™t know why itā€™ll seem so vital for him to touch the downy creature. Iā€™ll know exactly why. This bird will fledge and fly and transcend. It will follow the rim of the Pacific: scoop down and follow the currents of the Tasman Sea, hairpin along the coasts of South America, trace the scent of fish along the line of the equator. It will sleep and soar and dive and drift. And then it will return. It will circle the island and fly down through the canopy and land, right here, right on the spine of this figtree root. It will be part of a flock of a thousand birds, or two hundred, or ten. It doesnā€™t matter. It will return. (Lobb 2019, 194ā€“195)

Writing about crows, van Dooren notes: ā€˜It is not enough for two such beings to have lived alongside each other, in proximity to one another; rather, they must also in some way have become at stake in each other, bound up with what matters to each otherā€™ (van Dooren 2014b, 283). The Gouldā€™s Petrel in flight becomes part of the conversation that takes place between daughter and father: part of a broader story that humans are entangled in.

Ģż

And this is why I describe The Flight of Birds as ā€˜a novel in twelve storiesā€™. The novel picks up the isolated stories and allows them to interact and intersect with each other: they become part of a broader conversation that we need to have with our planet. The black cockatoos on the North Wollongong interchange navigate the road and the railway posts and the human figures, weaving spatial ā€˜storiesā€™ through the air; the human, meeting the silvery gaze of the birds, replies with his own stories. Stories arenā€™t just recounting of events but manifestations of convergence and divergence: between subjects, across species, through ideas.

References

• Adams, Carol J. (2014). The War on Compassion. In John Sorenson, ed. Critical Animal Studies: thinking the unthinkable 18-29. Toronto: Canadian Scholarsā€™ æģĆØŹÓʵ Inc.
• Adams, Carol J. (2010). The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. Twentieth Anniversary Edition. New York and London: Continuum.
• Armstrong, Philip (2008). What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity. Abingdon: Routledge.
• Hinchliffe, Steve (2010). Where Species Meet. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28 (1): 34-35.
• Krebber, AndrĆ© and Mieke Roscher (2018). Animal Biography: Reframing Animal Lives. London: Palgrave-McMillan.
• Lobb, Joshua (2019). The Flight of Birds. Sydney: æģĆØŹÓʵ
• Lockwood, Alex, (2019). [Review] Joshua Lobb, The Flight of Birds.ĢżAnimal Studies Journal, 8 (1): 218-223.
• Lovelock, James (1982 [1979]). Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford and New York: Oxford University æģĆØŹÓʵ.
• McKinnon, Catherine (2017). Storyland. Sydney: Harper Collins.
• MECO (2019). 100 Atmospheres: Studies in Scale and Wonder. London: Open Humanities æģĆØŹÓʵ.
• Morton, Timothy. (2010). The Ecological Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University æģĆØŹÓʵ.
• Plumwood, Val (2002). ĢżEnvironmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. New York: Routledge.
• Rose, Deborah Bird (2013). Val Plumwoodā€™s Philosophical Animism: Attentive Inter-Actions in the Sentient World. Environmental Humanities 3: 93-109.
• van Dooren, Thom (2014a). Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction. New York: Columbia University æģĆØŹÓʵ.Ģż
• van Dooren, Thom (2014b). Mourning Crows: Grief and Extinction in a Shared World. In McHugh, Susan and Garry Marvin, eds. The Handbook of Human-Animal Studies. London and New York: Routledge. 275-289.

Ģż

Joshua Lobb teaches creative writing and literary studies at the University of Wollongong. His award-winning stories have appeared in The Bridport Anthology, Best Australian Stories, Animal Studies Journal, Text and Southerly.

Amy Kersey is a Sydney artist who works mainly with ink, water and cotton paper. Her ā€˜Inklingsā€™Ģżof magpies, flying foxes and other native fauna have been exhibited at theĢż Sheffer Gallery in Darlington, with the Royal Botanic GardensĢżWild Thing ExhibitionĢżandĢżon the walls of the new gallery in the Bobbin Head Visitor Centre In Ku-Ring-Gai National Park. You can find her work on and Instagram: