\u201cDo you know my family? Can you tell me who I am?\u201d Poet, environmentalist and visual artist Judith Nangala Crispin\u2019s illustrated verse novel, The Dingo\u2019s Noctuary, is a yearlong travel journal that invites us to stop and observe both the majesty and the unrestricted warfare of contemporary desert life.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n
Natural science is visually logged with botanical specimens and seasonal astronomical and geographical maps. Crispin\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Crispin\u2019s 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\u2019s pantry with a medicine cabinet \u2013 she \u201cwhispers stories through speaking plants\u201d. Crispin joins a women\u2019s goanna hunt: \u201clistening, with our bare feet, for those slight vibrations over ground\u201d. \u201cIn bird-country, tracking raptors with old Warlpiri men\u201d, she\u2019s counselled that \u201chunting birds are syllables in the desert\u2019s poetic language\u201d.<\/p>\n
Places she passes, such as Battle Creek and Poison Bore, bear the names of their histories. She dedicates one entry, \u201cThe Dingo Genocides\u201d, to 96 \u201cvictims of Australia\u2019s war on Indigenous animals\u201d. Unseen but present are mining sites, fracking, weapons manufacturing, backyard asbestos dumps
and poisons \u201cbanned world-wide except Australia and New Zealand\u201d. She records phenomena such as the Delamere Air Weapons Range, a RAAF bombing range: \u201ca counterfeit town, complete with houses, a church and school \u2013 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe US military has its tentacles wrapped around this land,\u201d Crispin writes elsewhere. \u201cSoldiers in masks release canisters of poisonous gas, clouds obscure the granite cliffs, birds falling one by one like gnostic vowels.\u201d Amid this magnitude of destruction, she timestamps the final pages of The Dingo\u2019s 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\u2019s poetic testimony of truth. The plea for interaction resounds: the umbilicus of Country connects us, and our hearts need healing \u2013 the future will not forget.<\/p>\n
Puncher & Wattmann, 285pp, $130 (hardback)<\/p>\n
\n This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on
\n February 14, 2026 as “The Dingo\u2019s Noctuary”.<\/p>\n
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