Walking is the quintessence of human travelling. No other means so involves us in the place through which we move or makes us so aware of our bodies’ presence in it. Early in his book, John Blay writes: ‘walking has become thought. I feel I am in dialogue with nature, I understand it is telling me what I need to know.’ We can stretch Blay’s ‘nature’ to include any environment in which ... (read more)
Robert Kenny
Robert Kenny's latest book is Gardens of Fire: An investigative memoir (2013). His previous book, The Lamb Enters the Dreaming (2007), won the 2008 Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Research Institute, Deakin University, and has published in the fields of religious, environmental, and science history, as well as poetry, fiction, and cultural criticism.
Fire, more than any other thing, challenges the divide between the cultural and the natural, between being human and the non-human world. We make a pact, if not with a devil, at least with terrible danger when we use fire; and it is a pact, despite how it might seem in our urban modernity, over which we have no choice. We need fire. It doesn’t need us. If it truly had character, as it so often s ... (read more)