Evelyn Juers

Born in 1890, the second youngest of eight children, Alexander Hugh Chisholm grew up in Maryborough in the goldfields region north-west of Melbourne. He was unhappy at school and often cut classes, to follow, as he put it, the lure of the bush. At first he had no books and no adequate language for the charm of birds, their colours and shapes, their vocal range, nests and eggs, and he invented his own names for them.

Transpose creeping desert sands with peaty Yorkshire moors. Overlay Shelley’s antiquity with Brontë’s more recent times. Juggle Ozymandias and Heathcliff, two male mononymities, purveyors of colossal wreckage who sneer, life-like even in death. And ask: what is Ozymandian Heathcliff mocking with such disdain? WHAT IS his problem?

‘It doesn’t matter that Wulf’s The Invention of Nature is a bit breathless in keeping up with its dazzling hero, and a bit coy about his relationships, because above all the book is intelligent, an optimistic history, well researched, well written, and an ecological cri de coeur.’

I traversed this colossal biography for weeks, tearing along with Parker, who seemed to leave no stone unturned (including his subject’s kidney stones). Its emphasis on Brecht’s genius and illnesses, its build-up of a multitude of medical, sexual, psychological, literary, intellectual, political and historical stories, produces a kind of Gulliverian perspective: Parker’s Brecht is like a huge Swiftian creature taking prodigious strides through monstrous times.

In earlier times, the sciences were studied in close relation to one another. Although we have been assiduously separating scientific fields… their links are more important now than ever before. And those who observe these links – Rachel Carson and Penny Olsen, the Cayleys, Mueller and the botanical artists of his time – are becoming as interesting to us as the birds and plants and environmental issues that have focussed their attention. What draws them and us to nature?

In a recent interview, de Kretser said, ‘I like three-dimensional novels that are like walking down a corridor and you find a niche in the wall or a door might be open and you can go into a room or peer in, and sometimes the door is closed but you know there is a space in there.’ Reading her work is an experience just like that.