Kangaroo Dreaming: An Australian Wildlife Odyssey

by Edward Kanze

Recounts the author's nine-month journey through Australia in a station wagon with his wife, travelling from Melbourne to the Northern Territory, describing their experiences with wildlife and varying climate and terrain.

Genres: Australia, Travel, Nature, Nonfiction

384 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2000

Reviews

[Petra X · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the sort of book you keep to read a few pages of while the kettle boils, or the website loads or the bath fills with water. A couple of pages of reading about driving the entire way around Australia (avoiding the cities wherever possible) and listing every single animal the author and his wife come across - and those that they don't see as well is about all I could take at a sitting.

However, the book has charm. I'm not sure where that charm resides, but I didn't give the book up and now I know if I go to Australia, which I would like to, that I shouldn't bother driving around the perimeter of the island-continent and criss-crossing the mountains and deserts because unless you are a list-keeping naturalist, its a trip that definitely sounds like it lacks charm and is composed of hours, days of extreme boredom where you see nothing. I did that once, 27 hours in the Turkish steppes. Ended up counting telegraph poles! Really.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author and his wife see over 400 different birds on their journey around the continent of Australia, and each one is detailed in this book. Sound boring? It's not. This book is a great guide to travel across Australia. Not in the "eat here, sleep there, and don't forget to see this sight!", Lonely Planet-type of guide, but in the sense that it tells you what exactly it was like to travel through it. That does include a fair amount of info about Australian wildlife, but written in a totally accessible style. Thanks to the index I've actually been able to use this book to identify plants and animals on my trip.

[Chad E Spilman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Edward Kanze writes about adventure, sometimes dangerous, in the Australian wild. He and his wife are American but they buy a car and drive around the entirety of Australia and Tasmania in search of many animals, plants, and land structures. He writes some of the adventures in a way that kind of compares to Homer's Odyssey, which gives a bit of charm to the story.

On the copyright page it mentions that the book is at least 50 percent recovered waste paper and 10 percent post consumer waste fiber content.

[Mark Jenkins · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sometimes I don't realize I have a pet peeve until I read a book like Kangaroo Dreaming. In this case, I can't stand Kanze's decision to repeatedly and painfully compare his trip around Australia to the Odyssey. It is something that would have been fine to use once, but even with all the adventures and difficulties that he and his wife face are nothing like what Odysseus faces in his 10 year journey form Troy to Greece. Kanze didn't seem to trust the story of his trip to see as much Australian wildlife and wilderness as possible, which at least to American and even one that spend several months in Australia is much for interesting then being retold a fairly well known Greek Myth. He also includes much Emerson, but thankfully not to the point that it becomes distracting. I also felt that compared to other travel books, I didn't get much of a sense of himself and sometimes don't get much about his wife save when they argue or chase down another bird.
Otherwise Kanze has obviously read what previous writers and explorers have written about Australia, which he includes where useful, as well as facts about the unique wildlife he and his wife encounters. So don't read it for a great travel book, read it as a piece of nature writing that happens to involve travel. I agree with other reviewers, why weren't a few photos included with this book? I would have loved even just a few to refer to as he describes a particular encounter.

[Suade · Rating 1 out of 5]

To put it simply, this book was boring, not wanting to diminish Debbie and Ed Kanze's wonderful and special circumnavigate exploration of Australia. I would have stopped reading this book about 50 pages in if it wasn't for my love and fondness of Australia. If I were a bird lover I would have loved this book wholeheartedly. The author and his wife see over 400 species of birds on their trip and I think Kanze must mention and/or describe more than half of them. With this book totaling 300 and some pages, after about the 100th page that becomes rather tiresome and redundant to anyone other than a bird enthusiast.

Also, to the benefit the Kanze's, they had what seemed to me to be a bit too many contacts, or rather friends-of-friends, who they seemed to have at just the right key moments all throughout the book. And the fact that they, if I remember correctly, came across all but a few of every mammal, marsupial, or bird they wanted to see; how lucky and coincidental for them.

I did not learn much of Australia that I didn't already know, which again, is why I trudged through this book. If you are a fan of AU and already know a good bit the history, flora, fauna, and geography of this great land, do yourself a favor, don't waste your time.

[Krista · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had huge hopes for this book (written by a "sometimes" park ranger, drove most of the route that I did, a birdwatcher), but was hugely disappointed. The author comes off as douche, talking about the poor city folk who did not travel or enjoy Australia as they did. Although there were definatly some very interesting natural history stories and notes, the entire book read like a "I saw" list. Really, listing off the birds you saw is boring. And I'm a bird nerd.

I think that the crux of the problem of this book is that the main characters are boring. All they do is hunt down wildlife and plants (coming from a fellow naturalist, this is huge). They really miss out on the real Australia, which is the people (granted they do hang around with a click from Melbourne, and they mention people who they stay with, but that's about it).

Oh and the whole Odysseus parrell: lame.

Three things that would be huge improvements: photos (the author talks about being a photographer), sections written by his wife/travel companion and shorter chapters.

The big question that I was left with though, was how the hell did they manage to get 9 month visas?

[Colleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Would have made it three and a half, if goodreads allowed. The descriptions of Australia are good and the book benefits from the frequent comments of people like Twain, Huxley, Muir et Al that the author adds.
It is best read with a device at hand, since there are no illustrations and this will whet your appetite for the described Australian animals and scenes.
The only reason I’m not rating it higher is that the author did not endear himself to the reader… or at least not to this reader. He seemed at turns ungrateful, whiny, pretentious ( could have done without the Odyssey frame) judgmental and more than a bit of a mooch.
It is a very difficult thing for a white man to comment on imperialism and the fate of the Aborigines and I don’t quite think this author pulled it off.

[Jan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to give this book a higher rating because I did enjoy a lot of the interesting information presented about the natural history of the country. However, all the parallels of their travels with Homer and the Odyssey and the amount of time spent on the comparisons got to feel totally contrived. Also I'm not sure I can believe that Ed and Debbie were able to score sightings of almost every rare plant/animal they searched for. Also, how did they manage to have so many personal contacts all over the country? I think it would have added a lot to the book if Kanze would have included some of his photos.

[Tim Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book just after having finished Bill Bryson's travel book on Australia, "In A Sunburned Country," and the contrast could not be more vivid. Bryson focused mainly on the cities, towns, and people of Australia, and I believe he only saw a few kangaroos in his entire sojourn there. Though he did cover some natural history, most of his work was focused on the human history and culture of Australia. Kanze on the other hand on his massive journey around Australia with his wife Debbie spent very little time in cities, trying to avoid urban areas for the most part, and saw a great deal of wildlife, including probably hundreds of kangaroos. In fact, the principal reason they flew to Australia, bought a car, and spent the better part of a year driving around the continent/country (including Tasmania) was to see a bewildering array of plants, animals, and natural landscapes in the "bush."

The author introduces the reader to a many animals, some familiar, many not. We meet a wide variety of kangaroos, including the "big four," the common wallaroo (known as the "euro" in Western Australia), the red kangaroo, the eastern grey, and the western grey, as well as the musky rat-kangaroo, most "primitive" of kangaroos, smaller than a housecat, distinct in that hops on four feet rather than two, carries nest material with its tail, and is the only kangaroo that raises two young at a time rather than the usual one . They encounter the sugar glider, a marsupial that is strikingly similar to the flying squirrel of North America, one that feeds on the excretions of sap-feeing insects and eucalyptus resin, something few marsupials can digest. A wide variety of parrots (the continent possesses fifty-six species) also amazes the Kanzes when they encountered them in virtually any setting, from rain forest to desert to the middle of large cities. They meet koalas several times, a strange animal that Kanze informs us actually for a time grew more common after English settlement, as Aborigine hunting of them declined as their own populations retreated before the Europeans, only to suffer in turn when koalas caught the fancy of London furriers. They run into the ubiquitous termite mounds of Queensland, thousands of which tower over the landscape up to eight feet in height, vital to the local ecology as they serve the function of earthworms, which are unable to survive the monsoonal inundations of the local landscape. Interestingly, we learn that at least some termite species build their mounds with their broad fronts parallel to the earth's magnetic poles, one end pointing to magnetic south, the other magnetic north, with the mounds thus situated to soak up morning and afternoon sunshine but only present a thin edge to the blistering midday sun. They meet the potentially dangerous cassowary, a huge flightless bird able to run thirty miles an hour, jump five feet into the air, and disembowel a man with the slash of a talon. Advised to hide and freeze should they encounter one in the forest, the Kanzes run into an overcurious youngster and its protective parent at one point, a situation that could have ended in disaster. Told that if one froze they might be missed, as their eyesight is poor, a comment that to me brought to mind "Jurassic Park," a thought the author apparently shared. Kanze roots around underwater with a snorkel and mask for the elusive Arafura file snake, not formerly described until 1980, a snake with unusually loose but rough skin that uses to grip slippery fish, a water snake that hunts, sleeps, breeds, and gives birth without leaving the water. Among the many other animals they meet and describe for the reader are the manatee-like dugong, honey possums (the only terrestrial mammal to subsist entirely on pollen and nectar), Tasmanian devils, the hated alien cane toad, a wide variety of native frogs, bowerbirds, bandicoots, platypuses, flying foxes, dingoes, echidnas (also know as spiny anteaters), lyrebirds, sunbirds, and a wide variety of reptiles including sea turtles, pythons, many venomous snakes, goannas (among the largest lizards alive today, goanna being the Australian name for a monitor lizard, the name probably a corruption of "iguana"), and crocodiles (both freshwater and saltwater varieties).

I learned a lot about Australian wildlife and landscapes and some about Australian history and culture and really enjoyed the book, but do offer a few small complaints. Kanze repeatedly compares his journey throughout Australia to that of Odysseus and his trials that were described in "The Odyssey." While sometimes the comparisons were apt and even mildly humorous, sometimes they seemed a bit forced and even slightly tedious, with occasional asides into Greek mythology that seemed out of place. Second, many times Kanze mentions taking pictures of a variety of animals throughout his journey, yet there is only the cover picture; nowhere are there are photographs in the book. I would have liked to have seen a few pictures at least of landscapes.

Having said that though, this is a very good Australian travel and natural history book, one I would recommend.