Nick McKenzie is one of the nation’s most decorated investigative journalists, having been named Australian Journalist of the Year on four occasions and awarded the Walkley a record fourteen times. His investigative reports into Ben Roberts-Smith were central to a defamation trial brought against Fairfax media. Last month the Federal Court found that Nick McKenzie’s account of Roberts-Smith’s criminal actions in Afghanistan was substantially true and that these actions could be said to amount to war crimes. Hachette will release his new book, Crossing the Line, this month.

If you could go anywhere tomorrow, where would it be, and why?

Anywhere but a courtroom!

What’s your idea of hell?

Long airport lines.

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

Good looks.

What’s your favourite film?

La Haine or The Big Lebowski.

And your favourite book?

Catcher in the Rye.

Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine.

Christopher Hitchens, Barack Obama, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Which word do you most dislike, and which one would you like to see back in public usage?

‘Nice’, and ‘Blackguard’.

Who is your favourite author?

Cormac McCarthy.

And your favourite literary hero or heroine?

Atticus Finch.

Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire – or vice versa.

Tim Winton: I used to struggle with his books in my teens. Now he’s my favourite Australian writer.

Which quality do you most admire in a writer?

Ability to evoke place and character.

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

Lord of the Flies.

Do you have a favourite podcast?

The Daily.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

The internet.

What qualities do you look for in critics, and which ones do you enjoy reading?

Acerbic honesty. Norman Mailer on Tom Wolfe.

How do you find working with editors?

If they can put up with me, great.

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

Affirmation that people still love books.

Are artists valued in our society?

Not as much as they should be.

What are you working on now?

Crossing the Line – my book about Ben Roberts-Smith. 

In Peter Wohlleben’s newest book, trees are characters, not commodities. In making his compelling case for a fresh approach to forestry, which values old-growth forests for their climate-cooling capacities, the acclaimed German forester treats trees as individuals with feelings, abilities, memories, and families. We are sometimes left to wonder what it means to say a tree feels emotions such as worry, surprise, and consideration for others, but this unapologetic anthropomorphism nevertheless invites empathy on the part of readers. It is easy to feel an affectionate second-hand embarrassment for the chestnut tree which ‘panicked’ in response to sudden rain by unfurling its blossoms too soon, or indignant on behalf of multi-centenarian beeches threatened by encroaching excavators. Seeing trees as sensate characters also provides a contrast with the unfeeling utilitarianism attributed to mainstream foresters; their industry comes off badly bruised.

By now we are familiar with the idea that trees can help to offset human-caused climate change by absorbing carbon dioxide. Protests against deforestation, especially in the Amazon, are often framed in these terms: we must protect the globe’s ‘green lungs’. Trees’ contribution to managing climate change goes further. Thanks to the process of transpiration, even a single tree outside a suburban house has a cooling effect on those around it. This effect is magnified in large forests, which draw huge volumes of water from the ground and release it to the atmosphere, changing global temperatures and even affecting rainfall on distant continents through the creation of aerial rivers.

She and Her Pretty Friend is a collation of stories about lesbians in Australian history, ranging from the convict women of the ‘flash mob’ in Hobart’s Cascades prison to the lesbian separatists of the 1983 Pine Gap Peace Camp. Along the way, the reader meets a couple who farmed together in the 1840s, another couple who taught swimming and started the first women-only gym in Melbourne in 1879, as well as one of the first women doctors and her lifelong companion, who both served at the Scottish Women’s Hospital in Serbia in 1916. There are other figures, like poet Lesbia Harford and her muse, Katie Lush, or suffragist Cecilia John, who rode on horseback, dressed in suffrage colours, at the head of a march of more than 4,000 women and children (Danielle Scrimshsaw credits her with ‘queering the suffrage movement’). A chapter on Eve Langley and other ‘passing women’ prompts questions about whether they would have seen themselves as transgender, in today’s parlance.

Scrimshaw’s motive for writing this book was ‘because I am a queer woman who craves queer history and researching the past helps me navigate my identity in the present’. So it is ‘both a history and a self-reflection’. The author herself is present, offering anecdotes about her own life, or judgements and speculations about her subjects and their chroniclers. She undertakes a historical rescue operation, building on the work of other historians to make visible some of the many queer women who have been written out of history, or are acknowledged only as ‘spinsters’ or their lifelong relationships as ‘close friendships’.

The image of a solitary goldfish aimlessly circling in a glass bowl recurs in cartoons and children’s books, a metaphor for a crowded and over-scrutinised life. John Simons’s account of the mid-nineteenth-century aquarium craze reveals the rather horrifying historical reality of this mostly symbolic image. At the height of the craze for aquariums, not only were resilient goldfish kept in bowls, but a wide range of wild-caught marine and estuarine life were dredged from the British coastline and plunged into buckets, bowls, tubs, pots, as well as glass aquariums of various sizes, with precious little consideration given to the complex needs of maintaining aquatic ecosystems in captivity. The death toll, not to mention the smell, must have been horrifying. As Simons points out, the British seaside has never truly recovered from this mass decimation.

At one time or another, many of us have participated in our own version of this craze: sacrificing the lives of small fish in the name of education or entertainment or collecting shells on a beach. Despite being an enthusiastic shell collector in my youth, before reading Simons’s book I had never really placed these semi-scientific activities of childhood in any kind of historical context.