Reviews for A sailor's garland

The average rating for A sailor's garland based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-03-17 00:00:00 Rodney Baron There's a lot more you could go into in the history of Victoria's Central Highlands tall forests, particularly the politics of vested interests behind the last few decades of battles over logging, an increasingly desperate politics since the 2009 Black Saturday fires. But this book was written well before that, and the conservationists vs loggers battles were not yet so intense in the Central Highlands when it was written, as I recall. What it does cover, it does so beautifully. Despite having read a fair bit about these forests before, I didn't understand the subtleties of their ecology described in the section on David Lindenmayer's work. Nor did I know the brutal history of betrayals that the Indigenous community suffered as they were shunted from one backwoods block to another. History that deserves to be told to a wider audience.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-01-22 00:00:00 Robert Cappock Written during World War II, and focusing mainly on our culture's troubled relationship with nature, this is an extraordinary book that gives a wealth of insight into the origins of the economic, cultural and ecological crisis we currently find ourselves in. This is not an easy or quick read; the text is dense and makes frequent references to poetry, philosophy and historical sources as Massingham traces the gradual sell-out of Western culture, including institutionalised religion, to the gods of finance. At one and the same time terrifying, sad and yet oddly hopeful. The book is out of print and not available in electronic form, but copies can still be found through the usual second-hand channels. This is a book I will not be parting with.