Shimmer

Deborah Bird Rose (1946–2018) was a world-renowned anthropologist and leading figure in the emergence and shaping of the interdisciplinary environmental humanities. Over the course of a career spanning almost 40 years, Rose published many widely read, cited, award-winning and often-reprinted books, including Hidden Histories (1991), Dingo Makes Us Human (1992), Nourishing Terrains (1996), Country of the Heart (2002), Reports from a Wild Country (2004) and Wild Dog Dreaming (2011). She also edited numerous significant volumes, including Aboriginal Australians and Christian Missions (1988), Manifesto for Living in the Anthropocene (2015), and Extinction Studies(2017), and co-founded the journal Environmental Humanities. Through this work Rose made major contributions in a range of important fields: from the environmental humanities, and the anthropology of indigenous Australia, to extinction studies, animal and multispecies studies, and philosophies of ethics, justice, religion, temporality and place. Rose was a Fellow of the Australian Social Sciences Academy (ASSA) and was for most of her career based at the Australian National University (1995–2008) and Macquarie University (2008–2013).

Deborah Bird Rose became kin, real kin, to flying foxes when a flying fox matriarch at Lingara named her as sister during her first period of serious study, called ethnography, with the people of Yarralin. That kinship—its ethics, responsibilities, corporealities, passions, and terrors—is embodied in this wonderful book. Rose entices us all to care about the often despised, sometimes loved, and now comprehensively threatened flying foxes of Australia. I am in her capacious hands, as she shows me the animals, the people, the trees, the flowers, the dry and the wet, and those who care and those who destroy. She does not fail me; she does not fail the flying foxes. Perhaps they have a materially better chance of a future because Rose was a flying fox woman, a human being who used the hard-earned power to tie together Aboriginal teaching and kinship, settler science, and everyday complexities of caring and responding to others of truly different kinds that is carried on by ordinary people. I love Rose’s work; I love this book. It proposes a still barely possible way to live together for flying foxes and people in the face of the killing of generations that pervades our times. This small situated refusal of killing, this small situated fulfilling of obligations, might ramify across our troubled times and places.

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