Call of the Reed Warbler – Review

Australia is biogeographically unique: an ancient, infertile, predominantly arid and long-isolated island continent, with specially adapted animals and plants that occur nowhere else.

It was tended and mythologised for millennia by hundreds of nations of sophisticated ‘hunter-gatherer’ land managers, followed by a sudden and momentous biogeographic watershed: the arrival of Europeans a mere 230 years ago. What followed is summarised pithily in, and provides the starting point, for Monaro (Southern Australia) sheep farmer Charles Massy’s recent book, Call of the Reed Warbler: a violence inflicted on the people and their country as the newcomers imposed ideologies and management practices disastrously ill-suited to the land they had arrived in.

Massy outlines how these industrial agricultural practices, embedded within our prevailing socio-political systems, have depleted Australia’s soils, destroyed vast areas of forest and grassland, driven species to extinction and undermined animal and human health, as well as contributing to anthropogenic climate change.