Awards

• Short-listed for ACT Book of the Year 2020 (Australia)
• Short-listed for Douglas Stewart Prize for Nonfiction, NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2020 (Australia)
• Short-listed for Non-Fiction, Prime Minister's Literary Award 2020 (Australia)

Overview

The fascinating story of a much-maligned and little-understood native Australian rodent. The long-haired rat breeds and spreads prodigiously after big rains. Its irruptions were plagues to European colonists, who feared and loathed all rats, but times of feasting for Aboriginal people. Tim Bonyhady explores the place of the long-haired rat in Aboriginal culture. He recounts how settler Australians responded to it, learned about it and, occasionally, came to recognise the wonder of it. And he reconstructs its changing, shrinking landscape—once filled with bilbies, letter-winged kites and inland taipans, but now increasingly the domain of feral cats. An astonishing history, The Enchantment of the Long-haired Rat illuminates a species, a continent, its climate and its people like never before.

Full Product Details

9781925773934

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Reviews

`A book of surprises, with one yarn after another about an amazing Australian mammal.' * Tim Low *

'A marvellous story about one of the world's most enigmatic creatures.' * Tim Flannery * `A book of surprises, with one yarn after another about an amazing Australian mammal.' * Tim Low *

Author Information

Professor Tim Bonyhady is one of Australia’s foremost environmental and cultural historians. His many books include Images in Opposition: Australian Landscape Painting 1801-1890, Burke and Wills: From Melbourne to Myth, Places Worth Keeping: Conservationists, Politics and Law and award winning The Colonial Earth.

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