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Dingo Bold is a thought-provoking exploration of the relationship between people and dingoes. At its heart is Rowena Lennox's encounter with a dingo on the beach on K'gari (Fraser Island), a young male she nicknames Bold. Struck by this experience, and by the intense, often polarised opinions expressed in public conversations about dingo conservation and control, she sets out to understand the complex relationship between humans and dingoes.
Weaving together ecological data, interviews with people connected personally and professionally with K'gari's dingoes, and Lennox's expansive reading of literary, historical and scientific accounts, Dingo Bold considers what we know about the history of relations between dingoes and humans, and what preconceptions shape our attitudes today. Do we see dingoes as native wildlife or feral dogs? Wild or domesticated animals? A tourist attraction or a threat? And how do our answers to these questions shape our interactions with them?
Dingo Bold is both a moving memoir of love and loss through Lennox's observations of the natural world and an important contribution to wider conversations about conservation and animal welfare.
Map of K'gari
Prelude
1. Wildlife
2. Strange familiar country
3. Coolooloi
4. Eurong
5. Let's dance
6. Sister Girl
7. Brothers
8. What they're capable of
9. Traces
10. Meeting at Pialba
11. Wongari
12. Over and over
13. With their whole gaze
14. Sore feet, tears and seeds
15. In the realm of science
Coda
References
Acknowledgments
Index
Rowena Lennox has worked as a book editor for many years and now teaches creative writing. She has published essays, fiction, memoir and poems in Hecate, Kill Your Darlings, Meanjin, New Statesman, Seizure, Social Alternatives and Southerly, among others. Her first book, Fighting Spirit of East Timor, won a New South Wales Premier’s History Award.
"Combining natural history, Indigenous culture, memoir, and environmental politics, this is an elegantly written and affectionate tribute to Australia's most maligned and least understood native animal."
– Jacqueline Kent
"Fuelled by empathy, curiosity and passion, and informed by research, data and observation, this moving and compelling book speaks to the heart and to the head. Rowena Lennox poses questions about our relationship with dingoes – and our role in the natural world – that are as bold and lively as her subject."
– Debra Adelaide
"Dingo Bold is a thoroughly engaging and deeply personal book that examines dingo life and the humans charged with their survival."
– Warren Bonett, Books+Publishing
"[The book] brings into focus the complex entanglements at play between humans and other species, effectively promoting consideration and the importance and agency of non-human animals in an interconnected world [...] Dingo Bold ultimately offers hope for the future of dingoes and dingo-human relations."
– Simone Lyons, Text: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses
