Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Rosaleen Love

It is a brave editor who compiles a paper-based anthology of science writing in the age of the Internet. Electronic publishing allows the skilful juxtaposition of text and image, with the added value of links that lead the viewer to instantly available extra information. With Stephen Pincock’s print anthology The Best Australian Science Writing 2011, I am nostalgically transported to the nineteenth century, where Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley brought their science to the people in discursive essay form.

... (read more)

In Feeling the Heat, journalist and science writer Jo Chandler voyages to Antarctica (mostly), where she meets and talks with scientists about the meaning of their work. She reminds me of the eighteenth-century philosophical travellers, the first anthropologists who travelled to strange lands (Australia included) to observe the language and customs of savage peoples, and to learn from them. From ice field and coral reef, Chandler reports on the latest in climate science, as if meeting the inhabitants of a distant country where they do things differently.

... (read more)