Contents:
The management of India's national parks and wildlife sanctuaries, Part V. Pathogens, pugmarks and political 'Emergency', The s' south Asian Debates on nature. Krishnan and India's wildlife. Penguin First published in by OUP. The unquiet woods, ecological change and peasant resistance in the Himalaya.
How much should a person consume? Thinking through the environment. The challenge of contemporary history. Economic and Political Weekly The Nehrus, personal histories. Lustre Press, Roli Books. Globalisation, democracy and terrorism. Management plan for Dachigam sanctuary, The amazing life in the Indian desert. The Illustrated Weekly of India. When tigers became 'citizens', refugees 'tiger-food'. The forest of tigers. Indira Gandhi , an intimate biography.
Making room for nature. Dams and development, international struggles for water and power. An ecological survey of the mammals of India. The United States and India, , estranged democracies. Inventing g lobal ecology, tracking the biodiversity ideal in India, Polyester prince, the rise of Dhirubhai Ambani. Indira Gandhi, a personal and political biography. Indira Gandhi , Delhi: Dream merchants, politicians and partition, memoirs of an Indian muslim. Something new under the sun, an environmental history of the twentieth century.
International efforts to save the tiger. The Bodley Head New edition published in by Penguin. The discovery of India. Signet Press New edition published in by Penguin. Letters to a friend, Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust. Project Tiger Ten Years Later. Conservation and development, the role of Parks in sustaining society eds.
Technology at the core , s cience and technology under Indira Gandhi. The Politics of ecology: The debate on people and wildlife, Battles over nature, science and the politics of conservation eds. India's wildlife history, an introduction. Permanent Black in association with the Ranthambhore Foundation. Ideology, the environment and policy: The India International Centre Quarterly Relocation from Protected Areas: Towards a historical and biological synthesis.
Conservation and Society 4 3: Of nature and nationalism: As if nature existed eds. Jose Padua and M. First published in by Penguin. Before freedom , Nehru's letters to his sister, Reintroduction in Indian wildlife management. Wild beauty , Delhi: The National Parks of India. The controversial tiger, a study of ecology, behavior and status, May to April Quarterly Report to the J. Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund. The story of the Indian tiger. Lest we forget, Kailash Sankhala's India ed. The book I won't be writing and other essays. The Green Revolution can reach the small farmer. The real issues in the world crisis ed.
They can use ink on alternate days, after 6 pm. They drink coffee that is not straightforward, eat toast. It is the first of spring and the writer is on her way home from a workshop with her friend. On her bike these mornings, she has thought about how simple it would be to end life, how kindly to find a truck large enough to leave a doubt in the minds of those remaining. Some days she gets in the shower and turns on the water and lets it hit a place on her back.
She turns off the tap and cries in the drought, wastes only the water of her tears. This is a city too dry for melodrama. At the intersection of Grey and Melbourne Streets, there are two police cars across the roadway, their blue lights spinning slowly. A man is lying in the red bus lane, face up, his legs splayed wide. He is not wearing a shirt.
There is no mark on him as far as the writer can see in the minutes and minutes it takes for the light to change. She is noticing this grist for the mill, this water in the well. She is thinking, it could be me. The man is wearing brown shorts, like suit pants cut off at the knees. She can see his underpants, blue and white checked boxers, puffing over the waist of his shorts.
He is young, not thirty. There is an ambulance, paramedics with blue gloves who move as slowly as the blue police lights. The young man is dead. His soul is flying.
The paramedics know there's no point calling it back. The man who died is an artist named Jason Halligan and the writer wants to go to a memorial being held later in the week. But people will ask what she's doing there, how she knew the artist, and all she will be able to say is that she had a friend who died, she lost a child. I never wanted to do anything else, right from school.
Mum and Dad thought I should do a trade first but I knew what I wanted. I started in the shop at Toowong, cleaning the buses after service. Eventually, they let me drive. At the inquest the Coroner will look at me and ask did I know the route. I did but as if I'd tell him I didn't.
I'm not that stupid. I know how to keep my job. I want to go to the funeral but Michele stops me. I want to meet his father, tell him I have a son, I have a son too, I know what sons cost, weigh. My son is seven and today I sit in the front yard and polish his bike while he's at school. Today he's not sure yet. He woke with the sun streaming in the window.
He rang Kyah again. What hurts worse than her contempt is when she feels sorry for him, asks, 'Is anyone with you? Can anyone take you home? It was crazy to ring her when he'd been drinking since drinking had been his problem, she'd said. Aimlessness, even the word was a snake. Fuck, who needs an aim? The beach, painting at the beach. She'd sighed, as if what he'd said proved some point. He didn't need the stupid sell-out bitch. He just wished he could stop calling her.
The night Kyah told him they were finished it was like a punch from some guy in the street, totally unexpected. He went home and didn't drink. He sat on one of the old chairs in the front room and counted cars, seventeen before he fell asleep. We both need a break. Where were those cars going? And why were four of them yellow? The moon pulled him to bed finally but bed smelled like Kyah so he moved to the floor. The next day, Sunday, he washed the sheets, which made Maria next door cluck with satisfaction.
Love myself better than you, over and over again. Later he will hate himself for pleading with her. He tells himself she'll come back, fantasises about not taking her back. But she doesn't come and he knows he'll take her back if she does. He isn't spying exactly; it's just that sometimes he walks past her place to go to work. When she comes to the door to greet clients she smiles. He can't believe she can do this. Jason and Kyah have been together since college. She'd done printmaking, he was in fine art and then intermedia, but she'd given it away and he'd stayed on.
She helped out at a childcare centre while she did a massage course at night. Now she was running a business from home. Jason makes greeting cards out of pieces of paper and sells them to a local bookstore. It's not so different from massage, he thinks. Each month, he'll do twenty cards and someone comes into the bookstore and buys the lot. A writer, the bookseller tells him. You wouldn't have heard of her. Jason has a gig with the museum. They're working with the Council's town planners to prepare the south east for change, for population growth, only you're not allowed to mention the words 'change' and 'population growth' because they make people nervous.
It's money for once, real money, a hundred bucks. He stands in front of city hall and screams on the hour for two days before the Lord Mayor sends a message down for him to stop. Jason gets called a performance artist, a hard case. His twin sister Annie is a lawyer with long blonde hair. She has a tattoo she doesn't tell people about. Jason has a snake down one arm and is thinking of a blue hypodermic syringe for the other. I pulled up, watched in the rear view as she approached the door and I said, 'Do you need a hand?
I should have used the ramp, but old people don't like the ramp; it makes them feel disabled. She didn't even want my help on the step but she'd never have got down on her own. I knew I'd fucked up, getting out of my seat on the route. You never do that because the bus could be hijacked. But I flicked a look in the rear view when I returned to my seat. None of the passengers looked like a plain-clothes inspector, which is what Reg told me to look out for, and none of them looked like hijackers. And the old woman really did need help. I think I remember another woman, a woman in a blue dress.
She has bright pink hair to match her bright pink bag and shoes and she is bouncing along Grey Street. I am looking at her and thinking about how much she reminds me of my younger sister who is the black sheep of our family because she's doing arts and my parents think she should be a doctor like my brother. I am looking at the woman with pink hair and when I look back there is no time to stop.
The boy is there, the young artist, the son of a father, and I am over him. The police are all around me. I hear one say to another, 'I don't think he's on anything. I think he's just thick. His parents were circus performers who met on the trapeze, or almost. His father dropped his mother at a practice during which they hadn't bothered with nets and his mother broke her back. Later she blamed their slippery unchalked hands for the end of her circus career and not the two babies she carried inside her.
After their father left, they stayed in the house on Skinner Street with their mother and Jason never saw his father except at the shops where he kept his distance. Jason's mother kept the trapeze in the backyard. It grew ivy and housed a family of butcherbirds in the nets and when his father came to collect it, his mother came out with a kitchen knife and told his father he was trespassing and did he want her to call the police? Jason's father backed away then, his hands in front of him like in a television show.
These changes were also evident vis a vis forests and wildlife. There was no neutral position. Her family and friends aren't obsolete, but what can you do? Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund. He does not hear or feel or see anything. We have a tragedy that is no one's fault.
She didn't need the knife, she told a friend later, drunk on cheap chardonnay on the back verandah. The threat of the cops was enough. They'd been drinking the day of Jason's mother's accident.
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But Jason's father touched everything else: The Great Circle might be the best for this, you go right round from Chermside to Mount Gravatt, never going back the way you came. The is short. It starts in the city, goes over to South Brisbane as if it's tricking, comes back over the Grey Street Bridge, heads out through Paddington with the and then finds the tail of Ashgrove along Coopers Camp Road and finishes in the bush. I'd been out of the water for a week with my shoulder but I swam that morning.
At Grey Street now there are plastic flowers lining the pedestrian barrier and a kangaroo paw sticking up in the median strip where his body finished up. Annie gave Jason the number of the counsellor she'd seen, to get those fuckheads out from under my skin, she'd said, meaning their parents. He threw the number in the bin at the front gate and went to Skinner Street and took as many pills as he could find and went into the shed and curled up on the floor.
His mother shouldn't have found him — she never went into the shed — but she needed a hammer. I reckon I knew, she told a friend later, in my spiritual body I felt him trying to leave. I willed him back. She willed him back and he woke in the hospital sicker than a bottle of OP rum would have made him, aching all over. When he got home he slept for thirty hours, waking to hear his mother on the phone. He had a referral from the hospital for a clinic. It was the first thing he said when he woke up in hospital and she slapped him.
But you're alive and there's all of life from here. His mother asked him had he been to the clinic and he said yes. What was it like? I'm okay now, Mum. Well, not okay, but not wanting so much to teach Kyah a lesson that would require his death for the learning. Just in case, she goes to the kitchen, takes a cracker from the jar, goes out onto the verandah and nibbles like a mouse. There are balloons this morning, Remax and Sirromet and another one she can't read. And I always knew that.
In fact, I think she almost loved me more because I wasn't like the other two. I needed more help. With Dad it was the same. They were kind, my parents, and could accept that nature deals the hand it deals. The emptiness of waking has a weight. That's it, the whole gig, 'Difference'. The Minister — call me Frank — said Jason would make a difference.
The Minister laughed then and said that was a joke, mate. For a thousand bucks, Jason would do whatever Frank said to do. When he said as much to the Museum Director, she looked at him as if she wanted to understand but couldn't possibly. At South Bank the swimmers have emerged like bears from the mountains. There are two sorts. The ones who run around and around the lake like startled flamingos, then jump and hop and crawl over the sand and then dive in and thrash their way from one side to the other, their splashes calling, Notice me, Notice me.
I used to call them the Notice Me birds when I told little Sam about them. And the others, slow swimmers like me, who trace our figure eights through the water, waiting for the sun. The guy from the winter is gone, I notice. Perhaps like me he's shy of the flamingos. Some mornings the water is still cold enough that I can stand under the shower afterwards and let the shaking find me. Someone had called the police. He'd been arrested and the curator had had to vouch for his bona fides, as she called them.
When they arrested him, one of the officers looked at the other, scratching his crew-cut as if it were brand new. He heard a writer on the radio talking about painting. She said visual art was real whereas writing was such artifice. He laughed at that. They're not honest, he wanted to tell her, they're a way to eat.
You get better at it with experience.
I can't imagine Reg having sex, like imagining your parents. He's been over to visit. He said, 'Sammy, you have to get back up there buddy or you'll lose it.
Michele has ironed my shirts. Little Sam has polished my shoes. They are waiting on the rack out the front and Sam walks them along the floor with his hands and says they're saying, 'Time for work. I went to the depot and guys said hello who'd never said hello to me before.