Danielle Clode's Blog

I'm super excited to announce that my new book on one of Australia's most mysterious and intriguing animals - the koala - has just headed off to the printers. So it's right on track to be launched in Australia on October 4 by Black Inc, https://www.blackincbooks.com.au/book...
The US/UK edition published by W. W. Norton will launch in January 2023. You can put your pre-order in now! Koala: A Natural History and an Uncertain Futurehttps://wwnorton.com/books/97813Koala: A Natural History and an Uncertain Future24036838.
Where I live in the Adelaide Hills in South Australia, there are an abundance of koalas and I often see them wandering around or sleeping in the trees. But in the more northern forests of Australia they are increasingly rare and may even be in danger of disappearing completely in parts of their range. It made me wonder why these animals are struggling so much in some places and yet doing so well in others.
The more I looked into koalas the more I realised just how complicated they are. There's a lot more too them than just sleeping and eating gumleaves. Actually they are an amazing resilient and adaptable animal that's evolved in quite remarkable ways to exploit its unusual eucalyptus diet. I really enjoyed discovering so much more about the lives of koalas and hope that we can do more to protect them, and the forests they depend on better in the future. I think we'll all be better off for it if we can!
To find out more about this book and others, visit my website www.danielleclode.com.au

Despite COVID delays, my new book on the first woman to circumnavigate the globe has finally been launched in Australia. In Search of the Woman who Sailed the World proved to be a challenging book to write from navigating 18th century handwritten French archives to reconstructing the past in locations like Mauritius, Burgundy, New Guinea and Pacific Islands.

The resulting book is a weave of biography, memoir, nature, travel, science, feminism and history. The story of Jeanne Barret's journey and life is woven into my research journey as well as reflections on my own childhood on a boat and the changes to the ocean and environment. The book is, I hope, "an ode to the sea, to science and to a remarkable woman who, like all explorers, charted her own course for others to follow."
If you are in Australia, the book is in bookstores now (or from this Booktopia author affiliate link). If not, you can read a short essay I wrote on the challenges of reconstructing the lives of women in history here.

The first woman to circumnavigate the globe was a French peasant woman from Burgundy, who dressed as a man, signed up as the botanist's assistant and sailed on Bougainville's voyage of discovery in 1767. How did an impoverished young woman from the lowest strata of French society achieve such an adventurous life? Little is known about who Jeanne really was and a lot of myths have developed around her. My latest book 'The Woman who Sailed the World' untangles fact and fantasy and paints a picture of a determined and stoic woman who achieved remarkable things in the face of adversity. I've explored her childhood and family in Burgundy through her extraordinary voyage to her long contented later life through the prism of my own experiences as a biologist and of growing up at sea. Due out with Picador Australia in June 2020.

Mauritius has always fascinated me. It's such a beautiful isolated island in the middle of the Indian Ocean and the fact that it wasn't populated by humans until the 1600s means that the wildlife evolved with few predators. But that isolation also makes the wildlife very vulnerable and Mauritius is synonymous with extinction - as in dead as a Dodo! A few years ago I visited Mauritius to do some research for my books on French exploration - the island was occupied by the French as Ile de France for many years and was an important gateway to India and Australia. I was saddened by how little native forest was left, but very heartened by the amazing conservation efforts there which, in the last couple of decades, have brought several species back from the very brink of extinction. If you'd like to read more, I've posted a link to an essay I recently published in Zoomorphic magazine on the subject. http://zoomorphic.net/2017/03/mauriti...