BOOKS – Hopping Around Australia After Kangaroos

By LISA PALMER; Special to the Journal

CHASING KANGAROOS: A Continent, a Scientist, and a Search for the World’s Most

Extraordinary Creature,

by Tim Flannery.

Grove Press. 272 pages. $24.

* * *

Obsessions are difficult to shake. Some of us dive deep into an interest for a month or a year or a decade, and eventually move on to a new pursuit with our curiosity satisfied. Others latch onto a fixation and never abandon it. That’s what happened to Tim Flannery, who caught “‘roo fever” as a feisty college student viewing a fossil, and could never shake it.

Flannery, an Australian and author of the bestseller The Weather Makers, was working as a volunteer at the Museum of Victoria in 1975 when anger ignited a passion for wildlife conservation. He learned that his “eyes opened on the world in Melbourne nineteen years, three months and three weeks after the last (Tasmanian) tiger closed hers forever.”

Imagining the same plight for kangaroos, he began a lifelong study of those wondrous creatures, the national symbol of Australia. “So breathtakingly different is the kangaroo that if it did not exist we’d be unable to imagine it,” he writes.

Chasing Kangaroos is equal parts memoir, travelogue, natural history, and science. It centers on Flannery’s hunt for kangaroo fossils throughout Australia, beginning with his circumnavigation of the country at age 19 on a dilapidated Moto Guzzi motorcycle. Later, on “an epic quest” for dinosaur bones with scientists from the British Museum of Natural History, he learned a British strategy from Alan Charig, a researcher whom Flannery had long considered a god.

“‘Queensland cattle-men,’ (Charig) explained, ‘are a curious and thirsty people. While out mustering cattle they must come across plenty of fossils which they occasionally bring into their pub to show their friends.’ Charig reasoned that these fossils sometimes get propped up behind the bar, at least until a paleontologist wanders by. And he proved to be spectacularly correct, for in a couple of weeks of pub-crawling the British turned up more fossils than we could see in a month’s intensive on-the-ground survey.”

Flannery writes with enthusiasm about the natural history of his subject and explorations in his native land, but there are several passages that leave the reader wondering if he had planned to return to the text to fill in the blanks. For instance, he discusses his search for a predator kangaroo, provides a summary, and then delivers soft language – probably, doubt, perhaps – when he reveals scientists have not even found a skeleton of one.

Overall, fans of Flannery’s work will enjoy his spirit and intellect. He is bold in his presentation, and his stories of field research unfold with wit and flair, which is reason enough to forgive his occasional narrative lapses.

Lisa Palmer is a freelance writer and reviewer in Middletown.

(c) 2007 Providence Journal. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.