Animals Make Us Human

Every one of the 44 essays is worth reading and the accompanying photographs are spectacular. Geraldine Brooks starts her appreciation of huntsman spiders in a way that shows why she has a Pulitzer Prize to her name: “I’m looking at him. He’s looking back. He’s looking down, in fact, from the ceiling of my bedroom. His eight-eyed stare is the last thing I see each night …” Paul Kelly contributes a song, Sleep, Australia, Sleep, that laments the animals we are losing. “Our children might know them / but their children will not.” Indigenous writer Kirli Saunders, in a poem from her new collection, Bindi, pays respect to the sacred garrall, the bird non-Indigenous people know as the black cockatoo. “We pause to hear her calls / from far away.”

Stephen Romei, The Australian

A beautiful, heartwarming book.

Thuy On, The Big Issue

Animals Make Us Human is a collection of moving essays and photographs that celebrates our stunning wildlife and raises money for its conservation.

Toni Jordan, Sydney Morning Herald, Books of the Year

Animals Make Us Human is a response to the devastating 2019-2020 bushfires. This stunning collection features many of Australia’s finest writers and photographers (full disclosure: I am in it). Essays of hope and love for nature, this is the perfect Christmas gift. Proceeds will help wildlife conservation.

Favel Parrett, The Sydney Morning Herald, Books of the Year

Australian writers divulge their creature crushes in Leah Kaminsky and Meg Keneally’s edited anthology, Animals Make Us Human. A post-bushfire fundraiser for Australian wildlife, this collection of stories and photographs by a truly spectacular line-up of authors will appeal to nature aficionados young and old. (And keep an eye out for #literarycritters, a guerrilla group of crafters making knitted replicas of the animals featured in each story!)

Clare Wright, The Australian, Books of the Year

Animals Make us Human brings together a stellar cast of Australian writers, field ecologists and photographers to share stories of close encounters with animals. The focus is on Australian native fauna – wonderful and bizarre in its diversity – wombats, koalas, dingoes, Leadbeater’s possums, bush-tailed phascogales, blue-tongue lizards, echidnas, whale sharks, Crabeater seals, spiders, magpies, and more. These magical moments of interspecies’ meetings can be fleeting but life-defining. Most of us have a story we can relate. Placing ourselves in nature not outside it can bring precious clarity to our crowded lives. In nature we soften our gaze and slow down to a pace that feels more biologically compatible with the bodies we evolved to occupy. But rapid land-clearing, urbanisation and climate change are threatening what’s there. Last Summer’s bushfires killed or displaced a staggering 3 billion native animals. The message in this anthology, with beautiful photos to match, is clear. Do something before it’s too late. Proceeds from the sale of Animals Make Us Human go to the Australian Wildlife Conservancy and the Australian Marine Conservation Society. Read it to your children, so they know what once was, or could be.

Natasha Mitchell, The Age