Can Purinina survive without her mother? Will she survive the challenges of the Tasmanian wilderness? Follow the lives of the purinina (Tasmanian devils) and discover the issues facing this iconic species. With captivating illustrations and lyrical text, this new rendition brings the award-winning story of Purinina: A Devil’s Tale to a new generation. You can even learn how to speak 'purinina'! Reading level varies from child to child, but we recommend this book for ages 5 to 9.
This book is a collection of speculative judgments that, along with accompanying commentaries, pursue a novel enquiry into how judges might respond to the formidable and planetary-scaled challenges of the Anthropocene. The book’s contributors –from Australia, Asia, Europe, and the United Kingdom –take up a range of issues: including multispecies justice, the challenges of intergenerational justice, dimensions of postcolonial justice, the potential contribution of AI platforms to the judgment process, and the future of judging and law in and beyond the Anthropocene. The project takes its inspiration from existing critical judgment projects. It is, however, thoroughly interdisciplinary. In anticipating future scenarios, and designing or adapting legal principles to respond to them, the book’s contributors have been assisted by climate scientists with expertise in future modelling; they have benefitted from the experience of fiction writers in future worldbuilding; and they have incorporated elements of the future worlds depicted in various texts of speculative fiction and artworks. The judgments are, of necessity, speculative and hypothetical in their subject matter. Thus, taken together, they constitute a collaborative experiment in creating the inclusive and radical imaginaries of the future common law. The Anthropocene Judgments Project will appeal to critical and sociolegal academics, scholars in the environmental humanities, environmental lawyers, students, and others with interests in the pressing issues of ecology, multispecies justice, climate change, the intersection of AI platforms and the law, and the future of law in the Anthropocene.
Predators with Pouches provides a unique synthesis of current knowledge of the world’s carnivorous marsupials—from Patagonia to New Guinea and North America to Tasmania. Written by 63 experts in each field, the book covers a comprehensive range of disciplines including evolution and systematics, reproductive biology, physiology, ecology, behaviour and conservation. Predators with Pouches reveals the relationships between the American didelphids and the Australian dasyurids, and explores the role of the marsupial fauna in the mammal community. It introduces the geologically oldest marsupials, from the Americas, and examines the fall from former diversity of the larger marsupial carnivores and their convergent evolution with placental forms. The book covers all aspects of carnivorous marsupials, including interesting features of life history, their unique reproduction, the physiological basis for early senescence in semelparous dasyurids, sex ratio variation and juvenile dispersal. It looks at gradients in nutrition—from omnivory to insectivory to carnivory—as well as distributional ecology, social structure and conservation dilemmas.
High in the Australian Alps, Possum needs to find enough food and shelter to survive the harsh alpine winter. She will spend months hibernating under a blanket of snow. Will she last through the year to successfully raise a new family? The mountain pygmy-possum is small in size but huge in appeal! Once thought to be extinct, there are now around 2500 of these tiny survivors in the wild. They need snow and bogong moths to survive, and also the support of great conservation work. Reading level varies from child to child, but we recommend this book for ages 6 to 9.
The Eastern Barred Bandicoot is one of Australia's most threatened species. When their existence came under extreme threat from habitat loss, predators and human development, Eastern Barred Bandicoots found refuge in the most unlikely of places – a rubbish tip. This captivating true story details the plight these small, nocturnal marsupials faced, and the outstanding efforts that ensured their protection. Written by Rohan Cleave and illustrated by Coral Tulloch, Bouncing Back shows that even on the brink of extinction, there is hope for the survival of our most vulnerable species. Rohan Cleave and Coral Tulloch's first book, Phasmid: Saving the Lord Howe Island Stick Insect, won a Whitley Award for Children's Natural History Book and was an Honour Book in the Children's Book Council of Australia Book Awards (Eve Pownall Information Book category). Bouncing Back is perfect for primary aged readers.
It presents a large collection of highly valuable source-material of first rate importance on the freedom movement in Punjab and Haryana during 1858 to 1947.
On the evening of 26 August 2009, the last known pipistrelle emerges from its day-time shelter on Christmas Island. Scientists, desperate about its conservation, set up a maze of netting to try to catch it. It is a forlorn and futile exercise – even if captured, there is little future in just one bat. But the bat evades the trap easily, and continues foraging. It is not recorded again that night, and not at all the next night. The bat is never again recorded. The scientists search all nearby areas over the following nights. It has gone. There are no more bats. Its corpse is not, will never be, found. It is the silent, unobtrusive death of the last individual. It is extinction. This book is about that bat, about those scientists, about that island. But mostly it is an attempt to understand that extinction; an unusual extinction, because it was predicted, witnessed and its timing is precise. A Bat's End is a compelling forensic examination of the circumstances and players surrounding the extinction of the Christmas Island pipistrelle. A must-read for environmental scientists, policy-makers, and organisations and individuals with an interest in conservation.
Desert Channels is a book that combines art, science and history to explore the ‘impulse to conserve’ in the distinctive Desert Channels country of south-western Queensland. The region is the source of Australia’s major inland-flowing desert rivers. Some of Australia’s most interesting new conservation initiatives are in this region, including partnerships between private landholders, non-government conservation organisations that buy and manage land (including Bush Heritage Australia and the Australian Wildlife Conservancy) and community-based natural resource management groups such as Desert Channels Queensland. Conservation biology in this place has a distinguished scientific history, and includes two decades of ecological work by scientific editor Chris Dickman. Chris is one of Australia’s leading terrestrial ecologists and mammalogists. He is an outstanding writer and is passionate about communicating the scientific basis for concern about biodiversity in this region to the broadest possible audience. Libby Robin, historian and award-winning writer, has co-ordinated the writings of the 46 contributors whose voices collectively portray the Desert Channels in all its facets. The emphasis of the book is on partnerships that conserve landscapes and communities together. Short textboxes add local and technical commentary where relevant. Art and science combine with history and local knowledge to richly inform the writing and visual understanding of the country. Conservation here is portrayed in four dimensions: place, landscape, biodiversity and livelihood. These four parts each carry four chapters. The ‘4x4’ structure was conceived by acclaimed artist, Mandy Martin, who has produced suites of artworks over three seasons in this format with commentaries, which make the interludes between parts. Martin’s work offers an aesthetic framework of place, which shapes how we see the region. Desert Channels explores the impulse to protect the varied biodiversity of the region, and its Aboriginal, pastoral and prehistoric heritage, including some of Australia’s most important dinosaur sites. The work of Alice Duncan-Kemp, the region’s most significant literary figure, is highlighted. Even the sounds of the landscape are not forgotten: the book's webpage has an audio interview by Alaskan radio journalist Richard Nelson talking to ecologist Steve Morton at Ocean Bore in the Simpson Desert country. The twitter of zebra finches accompanies the interview. Conservation can be accomplished in various ways and Desert Channels combines many distinguished voices. The impulse to conserve is shared by local landholders, conservation enthusiasts (from the community and from national and international organisations), Indigenous owners, professional biologists, artists and historians.
Many present-day Australians see the dingo as a threat and a pest to human production systems. An alternative viewpoint, which is more in tune with Indigenous culture, allows others to see the dingo as a means to improve human civilisation. The dingo has thus become trapped between the status of pest animal and totemic creature. This book helps readers to recognise this dichotomy, as a deeper understanding of dingo behaviour is now possible through new technologies which have made it easier to monitor their daily lives. Recent research on genetic structure has indicated that dingo ‘purity’ may be a human construct and the genetic relatedness of wild dingo packs has been analysed for the first time. GPS telemetry and passive camera traps are new technologies that provide unique ways to monitor movements of dingoes, and analyses of their diet indicate that dietary shifts occur during the different biological seasons of dingoes, showing that they have a functional role in Australian landscapes. Dingo brings together more than 50 years of observations to provide a comprehensive portrayal of the life of a dingo. Throughout this book dingoes are compared with other hypercarnivores, such as wolves and African wild dogs, highlighting the similarities between dingoes and other large canid species around the world.
Dictionary of Australian and New Guinean Mammals is the first unified guide to the mammals of both Australia and New Guinea. Based on Ronald Strahan’s first dictionary of Australian mammals, published in 1981, it includes all species, both native and introduced. For each species and genus, it provides a clear guide to pronunciation, the derivation and significance of the component parts of the name, and the citation that identifies its earliest valid description. This unique work includes biographical notes on fifty-one zoologists who, over the past three centuries, have named Australian and New Guinean mammals. The book also includes an account of the principles and practices of zoological nomenclature, together with a comprehensive bibliography and an index of common names. Dictionary of Australian and New Guinean Mammals is an invaluable reference for mammal researchers and students, as well as anyone interested in natural history.
