Walking to Australia - David Robbins

A traveller and an autistic boy explore the ancient routes and glimpse humanity’s restless heart.

A journey that follows the general direction taken by anatomically modern humans who, some scientists conjecture, left the African nursery around 85000 years ago in search of survival, and whose descendants happened upon Australia 20000 years later. Along the way, they laid the genetic foundations for humanity’s oldest civilisations, and ultimately inhabited every corner of the globe. The author travels this historic west-to-east route in the imagined company of his grandson, who serves as confidant and also as human archetype. What they find together is a tangle of new experience and emotional responses from which the links between ancient past and complex present gradually emerge. Here is a sweeping celebration of the human adventure.

‘A delight to read. This is a rare and staggering work of ambitious scope and literary depth. Readers will come away from the text immensely rewarded.’ Wesley Thompson, Editor