AustLit

'Since pre-colonial days in northern Australia, cultural practices, material objects and living things have been exchanged and transformed across the sea. Biologists and archaeologists believe that Australia’s dingo was introduced by Asian seafarers around 4,000 years ago. It adapted and spread across the continent and was incorporated within Aboriginal cosmologies. From at least 1700, Makassar fishermen harvested trepang (or sea-cucumber) on an annual basis in Australia, with China also participating in this trade. Anthropologists in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, Alfred Cort Haddon and Donald Thomson, noted the interweaving of cultural traditions among Indigenous populations spread across the Arafura Sea.' (Introduction)

'While walking has spawned much literature, cycling's literary offerings appear few. Here Saskia  Beudel adds her contemplation of cycling. writing and urban landscapes.' (Introduction)

'After a period of loss, and much change, Saskia Beudel began walking. Within eighteen months she had walked in the Snowy Mountains, twice along the south coast of Tasmania, the MacDonnell Ranges west of Alice Springs, the Arnhem Land plateau in Kakadu, the Wollemi National Park in New South Wales, and in Ladakh in the Himalayas. Throughout the course of her journeys, she experienced passages of reverie, of forgetfulness, of absorption in her surroundings, of an immense but simple pleasure, and of rhythm. A rhythm that began to integrate into thoughts, words, language.

'A Country in Mind is a narrative memoir of one woman's reflections on home, family and belonging while traversing remote and ancient landscapes.' (Publisher's blurb)