Iain McCalman (Lachlan McCalman/UNSW Press)Iain McCalman was born in Nyasaland in 1947, and educated in Zimbabwe and Australia. He writes British, European, and Australian histories of popular science, politics, conservation, and literary cultures. His books include The Reef: A passionate history (2013) and Delia Akeley and the Monkey (2022). His new book is John Büsst: Bohemian artist and saviour of reef and rainforest (NewSouth, 2024). He is a former President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and was Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Sydney [University] Environment Institute (2011-21). He was awarded Officer of the Order of Australia in 2007 for ‘services to history and the humanities’.

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

I would dash with my partner, Kate Fullagar, to Sorrento on the Amalfi Coast to repeat a sublime holiday of twenty years ago, drinking Campania wine and eating Caprese salad.

Shortly after Black Saturday, David Lindenmayer was giving a seminar on post-bushfire recovery when a member of the audience yelled out, ‘If it wasn’t for you greenies, none of this would have happened.’ Lindenmayer’s response was neither defence nor attack, but rather to rephrase the man’s words. ‘Your hypothesis,’ he said, ‘is that a fire in a forest that is logged and regenerated will be less severe than a fire in an intact forest.’ Many years of research followed this heckle. The result? A counter-intuitive finding that fire severity increases in logged forests.

This anecdote, recounted in Lindenmayer’s latest book, goes to the heart of his character: a philomath inspired to ask questions; a tireless ecologist who has explored and worked in the same forests for more than forty years. But there is a second Lindenmayer, a more recent creation: an accidental celebrity who has become increasingly outspoken as his detractors have escalated their attacks. It would, as he once said in an interview for the Wonderground journal, be morally irresponsible if he did not communicate what he has learned.

For those researching Lindenmayer online, it can be hard to sift through the rubble of brickbats and sensational headlines and find the scientific work that makes Lindenmayer one of the world’s most oft-cited scientists. For this reason, The Forest Wars is a necessary compendium, a summation of four decades’ worth of research against the backdrop of a rapidly changing industry. Indeed, the timing of this book could not be more opportune. Shortly after Lindenmayer finished the first draft, the Victorian government announced that the cessation of native logging was to be brought forward from 2030 to 2024.

The ‘Bastard of Bingil Bay’ features on no banknote or coin, nor is he listed in any roll-call of ‘important Australians’, and yet, if it were not for John Büsst, it is likely that twenty-odd national parks and rainforest reserves on the far north-east coast of Queensland would not be so designated and might in fact have been obliterated. It is also probable that, without Büsst, today’s fight for the Great Barrier Reef would have already been lost, the vast ecosystem fragmented into a slew of cement quarries and cheap limestone pits. Considering the extent to which this vast coral labyrinth has shaped the identity of modern Australia, the relative absence of Büsst’s influence from the historical record is doubtless representative of the many such travesties historians seek to rectify.

It could be said that correcting such omissions is simply part of the job for historians – but for Iain McCalman, one of Australia’s most public-spirited and accomplished humanities scholars, the absence of John Büsst from the pages of Australian history made him uneasy. McCalman, author of The Reef: A passionate history (2013), a fascinating history of the Great Barrier Reef told in twelve tales, had featured Büsst as an important figure alongside Judith Wright and forest ecologist Len Webb in the exhaustive campaign to protect the Reef from being drilled for oil, dredged for fertiliser, and quarried for cement in the 1960s and early 1970s. McCalman named them ‘the poet, the painter and the forester’, and deftly portrayed their friendship as a kind of enlightenment in which the arts and sciences came together, sparking the social movement that led to the Great Barrier Reef marine park. But had he, McCalman worried, emphasised the painter’s role in what was effectively the initiation of environmental policy in this country? Had he conveyed the significance of this incisive, energetic man? After all, hadn’t Wright herself said that Büsst had masterminded the campaign? After one tactical victory, Wright wrote to him: ‘Good on you, mate!’ – adding that their success was ‘All because of YOU.’

Identity is a hard thing to define. What makes us who we are? We have social identities, shaped by our affinities and proximities to social groups, cultural identities informed by values, languages, rituals, traditions, and a whole multitude of different phenomena that combine to make us who we are.

In Roslyn Orlando’s literary début, Ekhō, identity is linked to voice and agency; I am who I am because of what I say and my ability to say it. In Audrey Molloy’s second collection of poetry, The Blue Cocktail, identity is linked to place; I am who I am because of the places I inhabit. Both books have more complex theses and focuses than can be summed up in a few snappy opening paragraphs. For example, Orlando condemns technology as a simple echo of knowledge, and Molloy raises questions of belonging. Identity links these two works and provides a key to understanding their intricacies.