The Vanishing Wild

Award-winning science writer Justine E. Hausheer travels across the continent to meet Australia’s incredible native animals – and the innovative scientists working to give them a better future.



‘I’m listening for a ghost. Bright green and yellow, with a tail striped like a bumble-bee, it crouches in wait as the sun sinks below the escarpment...’

Australia is a country celebrated for its wildlife, and yet native species are in crisis. In the last 200 years, Australia has lost more biodiversity than any other developed nation. In this book, Justine E. Hausheer encounters the pygmy possums that live high in the Snowy Mountains, hears the booming calls of bitterns from their adopted home in the Riverina’s rice fields, crouches after dark in the spinifex grasslands listening for the elusive night parrot, and meets the adorable fat-tailed dunnarts who might hold the answers to reviving the Tasmanian tiger. The Vanishing Wild shows us the harsh reality of the extinction crisis – as well as the future of conservation and what can be done to save Australia’s native species.