The Dingo’s Noctuary | The Saturday Paper

“Do you know my family? Can you tell me who I am?” Poet, environmentalist and visual artist Judith Nangala Crispin’s illustrated verse novel, The Dingo’s Noctuary, is a yearlong travel journal that invites us to stop and observe both the majesty and the unrestricted warfare of contemporary desert life.   

Natural science is visually logged with botanical specimens and seasonal astronomical and geographical maps. Crispin’s lumen prints of dead animals ascending the night sky are mystical. Their colourful incandescence is enhanced over multiple long exposures with a variety of elements that include wax, Vegemite, berries, ball bearings and maggots. Titles in red text lyrically anthropomorphise the animals and berth shamanistic visions.

Crispin’s journal entries meet the celestial rise of the animals. Her perspective of desert life is at once aerial and microscopic, stabilising the narrative and adding an appealing urgency. The bush is a mother’s pantry with a medicine cabinet – she “whispers stories through speaking plants”. Crispin joins a women’s goanna hunt: “listening, with our bare feet, for those slight vibrations over ground”. “In bird-country, tracking raptors with old Warlpiri men”, she’s counselled that “hunting birds are syllables in the desert’s poetic language”.

Places she passes, such as Battle Creek and Poison Bore, bear the names of their histories. She dedicates one entry, “The Dingo Genocides”, to 96 “victims of Australia’s war on Indigenous animals”. Unseen but present are mining sites, fracking, weapons manufacturing, backyard asbestos dumps
and poisons “banned world-wide except Australia and New Zealand”. She records phenomena such as the Delamere Air Weapons Range, a RAAF bombing range: “a counterfeit town, complete with houses, a church and school – purpose-built for US strategic bombers to practice killing. All the trees have vanished from this Country … the horizon glows like cigarette embers, under high explosives and bombs.”

“The US military has its tentacles wrapped around this land,” Crispin writes elsewhere. “Soldiers in masks release canisters of poisonous gas, clouds obscure the granite cliffs, birds falling one by one like gnostic vowels.” Amid this magnitude of destruction, she timestamps the final pages of The Dingo’s Noctuary as an almanac that includes bird profiles and data coordinates for natural, man-made and managed sites. The measured inclusion of science and technology provides a powerful backbone to Crispin’s poetic testimony of truth. The plea for interaction resounds: the umbilicus of Country connects us, and our hearts need healing – the future will not forget.

Puncher & Wattmann, 285pp, $130 (hardback)

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
February 14, 2026 as “The Dingo’s Noctuary”.

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