John Blay walks a vast circuit through the forests of south-eastern Australia, from the country around Canberra to the coast and south towards Wilsons Promontory.

The journey gives the book its shape, but this is not simply travel writing or bush memoir. Blay reads the landscape as a blend of geology and ecology, Aboriginal custodianship, settler incursion, forestry, conservation campaigns and the long political battle over what forests are for. 

Blay has spent decades walking and researching this country, and the book’s authority comes from that accumulated attention rather than grand pronouncement. He is especially good on the “forest wars,” showing how bureaucratic language such as yield, waste and resource disguises a much more violent struggle over land. Part natural history, part political history and part record of physical passage, Wild Nature is for readers of Australian landscape writing who want something more grounded than pastoral reverence: a book about beauty, certainly, but also ownership, extraction and the stories that determine which places are allowed to survive. 

First edition, first printing. NewSouth Publishing, 2020 paperback. Very good condition with light shelf wear and minor rubbing to the cover edges.