Flannery speaks of exploring and growing up in museums. He describes himself as an explorer, and he writes traveller’s tales that wilfully cross times and places, unpacking ideas. He reads – and introduces – explorers’ diaries. Deeper in time are the imaginative travels of his palaeontological fieldwork. His youthful wildness was tamed through the calming mentorship of the Museum of Victoria’s vertebrate palaeontologist Tom Rich. Visits to hallowed halls of bones have shaped many of Flannery’s big ideas. He reverently describes his visit to the Humboldt Museum, the ‘finest natural history exhibition on Earth’ (in the 1930s at least). But the date of his visit, 11 November 1989, is also significant. The articulated dinosaur specimens of the ‘glorious colonial age’ of German East Africa are shadowed as fireworks blaze above the falling Berlin Wall outside. The extraordinary museum and its place in world history become the backdrop as another story unfolds. It is now 2019, and we are adventuring in eastern Indonesia, exploring evolutionary cul-de-sacs, and their near-extinct fauna, guided by knowledgeable locals. Alfred Russel Wallace formulated his theory of evolution by natural selection in the Spice Islands, a tiny volcanic archipelago straddling the equator. We end this essay scuttling outside in haste, chased by the hounds of the East German museum. Flannery takes both physical and intellectual risks in his explorations. It is the interweaving of these that makes the essays so vivid.

Tim Flannery (photograph supplied)

Adventurous, curious, and intriguing, these fifty essays work together to explore the macro and micro of life through biological, evolutionary, geological, and cosmological time frames, sometimes all at once. The bedrock of Flannery’s oeuvre is history – environmental, natural, human. His big continental natural histories, three of them, have structured his thinking over three decades. The Future Eaters (Australasia, 1994), The Eternal Frontier (North America, 2001), and Europe: The first 100 million years (2018) have built and rebuilt his ideas. The essays of this collection sift through the details, creating the structures that support the bigger books, and the books in turn provide kicking-off points for new essays later.

Flannery is most famous as the climate guy, author of The Weather Makers (2010), and chief councillor of Australia’s Climate Council. Yet we are more than halfway through the book, in 2005, before we find climate change in an essay. He is also a public figure, a former Australian of the Year, and we have his Australia Day address in 2002 in this collection. The history and future of Australia, the effects of climate change, and life in the public eye all demand different skills; there is no formal training for these. Flannery describes as a ‘tidal wave’ the realisation of the implications of climate change. Engagement with this most wicked problem of our times ‘swept me far from my comfort zone’. Flannery’s climate engagement begins deep in the past, following extinctions and evolutionary changes. He is equally passionate about the planet’s deep future.

To essay is to try out, to explore in another way. The range and breadth of these essays is at times breathtaking: it is invidious to select favourites from a smorgasbord that stretches from tree-kangaroo foot bones to cosmology, across reviews, new syntheses, science communication, and, mischievously, one fictional chapter from his novel, The Mystery of the Venus Island Fetish (2014, written under the pseudonym Dido Butterworth). Yet reading ‘The Great Aerial Ocean’ (2005) is one place to start. Understanding the atmosphere is the first step to understanding both life on Earth and what climate change means for it. When read with ‘Curiosity and Adventure’, the new introduction to the collection as a whole, one can trace Flannery’s personal journey with the idea of life. He is awed by the way he can see the planet breathing the Keeling Curve of CO₂ concentrations, with a ‘great inspiration’ in the northern spring and an ‘exhalation’ of enrichment as the northern autumn sheds its biomass. Yet that same curve, with its ‘innocent perkiness’, is the ‘Silent Spring of climate change’ as ‘each exhalation ended with a little more CO₂ in the atmosphere than the one before’. This curve was the red flag that changed Flannery’s life and put his private life ‘under siege’. The collection captures both the lucid communicator in his revelatory moment and, in his fictional piece back in the safety of a 1930s museum, his humorous and writerly way of escaping the stress that becoming a climate activist brought to his life.

Flannery writes life as it happens to him. He found his mojo in the curation of bones, as a museum keeper, but he has never forgotten the exploration and engagement, the research that breathes life into collections. Working in museums means embracing the public, never being so arcane as to forget to communicate. His passion is to work alongside the people who know the living animals and their livelihoods, whatever language they speak. The partnerships forged in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, the Solomon Islands, and beyond were about listening, and learning ‘with’, not telling. Pen-portraits of people from places of curious creatures warm these essays, offering humour in dark moments, often at the author’s expense.

Spanning long timescales and large ideas, the essays are decorated with delicate cameos. In making sense of the blue planet, Flannery is always writing. ‘It’s my way of exploring and making sense of the world’, he says. For the intrepid fellow traveller, reading Life is a wild and wonderful ride.