Country : A Continent, a Scientist & Kangaroo

Country is a panoramic book about a scientist and a continent. In this, his most thrilling and personal book yet, Tim Flannery writes a love letter to our great land, drawing on three decades of extensive travel, research and field work to reveal its unique nature.

As he describes his own passionate encounters with the land and its people, Flannery pays particular attention to the evolution of Australia's most distinctive animal, the kangaroo. He shows us how the destiny of this extraordinary creature is inseparable from the environment which created it. The kangaroo may seem as familiar to us as the eucalypt or the desert, a symbol on a road sign or the tail of a passenger plane, but readers of Country will never see our national emblem in the same way again.

Tim Flannery's Country teaches us how this vast continent is not at all 'a ghastly blank', but a land of subtlety and complexity that becomes comprehensible to those who take the time to learn its hidden and ancient languages.

Praise for Country:

'Flannery is a playful Antipodean Stephen Jay Gould and Country an intellectually infectious recruiting pamphlet for the next generation of ecologists and paleontologists.'

Sydney Morning Herald

'Flannery is perhaps the most gifted describer of the natural sciences writing today.'

Weekend Australian

'A born scientist, Flannery brings a lover's eye to creatures of the past and present.'

Bulletin

'Evolution is the grand theme of Country, which is a triple-pronged book. It is autobiographical travel, an account of the evolution of kangaroos, and offers new information in defence of Flannery's hypothesis that it was people, rather than climate change, that caused the extinction of our megafauna.'

Age