Amazing Australia - Laine Cunningham

Ideal for the nature-loving traveler, Amazing Australia is a handy pocket guide to the most unusual and the most common birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, insects, plants, and trees of Australia. This focused guide features over a hundred of the bizarre and the beautiful, the curious and the downright strange.

Written with a traveler’s eye for the wonderful weirdness the world can offer, Amazing Australia gets right to the heart of the natural miracles that define Australia’s coasts and deserts. Discover the danger lurking in a lovely rainforest plant that can leave hikers with pain that last for eighteen months. Learn how to avoid the redback, a venomous spider that panicked an entire country.

The origins of evocative names like “blood gum” are explained. Information explains how echidnas and ants survive in such a harsh environment. Invasive species like the cane toad and the cane beetle are discussed. The uniqueness of the country’s most beloved creatures like the kangaroo and the koala takes center stage in Amazing Australia.

Packed with information that comes from being in the country for an extended time, Amazing Australia will entertain as well as inform. Details about how Aboriginal tribes used different plants, animals, and trees are included. Settler’s histories are touched on for the most common species.

This compact introduction to Australia’s astonishing animals and plants makes an excellent addition to the classroom for curricular units in social studies and biology.

Laine Cunningham, a three-time recipient of The Hackney Award, writes fiction that takes readers around the world. Her debut novel, The Family Made of Dust, is set in the Australian Outback, while Reparation is a novel of the American Great Plains. She is the editor of Sunspot Literary Journal.