The Vanishing Wild
Justine Hausheer
‘I’m listening for a ghost. Bright green and yellow, with a tail striped like a bumble-bee, it crouches in wait as the sun sinks below the escarpment. On dark, it will whistle out into the night before taking wing. For this ghost is a bird. A bird more myth than real, a legend lost in Australia’s vast arid interior. Lost, and then found again not far from where I sit on a rocky rise, staring south over a sea of spinifex. The night parrot …’
Australia’s wildlife is weird, wonderful and sometimes deadly. It is also crisis. In the last 200 years Australia has lost more biodiversity than any other nation.
Science journalist Justine Hausheer travels across the continent to meet some of these incredible native animals – and the innovative scientists who are working to give them a better future. She encounters the pygmy possums who live in high in the Snowy Mountains, hears the booming calls of bitterns from their adopted home in the Riverina’s rice fields, crouches after dark in the spinifex grasslands listening for the elusive night parrot, and meets the adorable fat-tailed dunnarts who might hold the answers to reviving the Tasmanian tiger.
The Vanishing Wild shows us the harsh reality of the extinction crisis – as well as the future of conservation and what can be done to save Australia’s native species.
- Release
- May-2026
- ISBN
- 9781761170393
- RRP (AUD)
- $34.99
- Pages
- 256
- Format
- Paperback & ebook
Justine Hausheet is a science writer for The Nature Conservancy. Her favourite stories take her into the field, where she’s followed logging elephants through Myanmar, surveyed for sea cucumbers in Manus, and waded into outback waterholes.
NewSouth Publishing
NewSouth Publishing is the publishing division of UNSW Press Ltd, a leading Australian university press.
- Rights
-
World excluding ANZ
- Contact
-
Joumana Awad
- Website