FEAST OR FAMINE

 

  Burrunjor: The Search for Australia’s Living   Tyrannosaurus  by Rex & Heather Gilroy (2011) is an account – with ample black and white photographs – of two people’s search across Australia for an alleged small species of living dinosaur – one that survived the extinction period.    Is a living dinosaur from the Cretaceous period possible? Despite much skepticism, criticism, and ridicule, the two cryptozoologists have been searching for the ‘impossible’ since the mid-1970s.   The Gilroys (and others) go Burrunjor hunting in remote, rugged swamplands, forests, and deserts in South Australia, Queensland, Northern Territory, and Western Australia. Finding fossils, bones, and footprints of other species of dinosaurs, as well as the Burrunjor, they record their finds and photograph the landscape.    They write too of the many, many sightings of the Burrunjor by people living in the outback. The first alleged sighting of the Burrunjor occurre...

  Of Ants and Dinosaurs: The Cautionary Tale of Earth’s First and Greatest Civilization (2010, this edition 2020) is set on Gondwana Land on Earth from an ordinary day in the Late Cretaceous period until the last day of the Cretaceous period. On Earth’s 24-hour timeline, life appeared at about 8:00 or 9:00 in the morning, and humans appeared in the last tenth of the last second of the day. So, what was this ‘life’ doing before humans arrived? At the equivalent time of twenty minutes to midnight, two very different life forms were present in the period called the Late Cretaceous period: the ‘social’ ant and the ‘ludicrously large’ dinosaur. Both had flaws in their design: ants could construct intricate architecture but had no richness of thought – depending on community communication rather than individual intelligence – and dinosaurs that lacked dexterous hands to undertake any elaborate work. Together, they formed a cooperative dinosaur-ant alliance.  They both thrived togeth...

  The Question of Red (2016) is set on Buru, the third largest island in the Maluka Islands—the Spice Islands—in Indonesia in the 1960s, and in 2006, ending in 2011. During President Suharto’s administration from 1965 to 1998, the island was a large penal colony for alleged Communist Party sympathizers.    The story begins with Samuel and Amba in Buru in 2006. Amba Kinanti Eilers is 62 years old. She has come all the way from Jakarta to see the love of her life, Bhisma Rashad, but he is dead. Samuel Lawerissa is a 40 year old friend she meets on the ship on its way to Buru Island, where he spent his childhood in the 1960s.   Amba was named after a tragic mythological princess (‘my name ended the battle of all battles’)—a story she has tried to rewrite throughout her life: ‘history is like a long, twisted joke. You never know when the punchline will come.’    Now in Buru, her mind returns to Jakarta in the 1950s when she first met her husband Bhisma, a refin...

MARTINA NICOLLS  is an international aid and development consultant, and the  author   of: Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the  author of:-  Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).