Anyone with an interest in natural history will find this book fascinating. It relates the adventures and research activities of Dr. Richard MacMillen and his wife during their many research sabbaticals in Australia over a 25-year period, beginning in 1967. These two folks are obviously in love with Australia, and this book shows it. Dr. MacMillen’s wife, Barbara, who has a degree in Geography, assisted him in his research, and is a co-author. Their son Ian, who was born in Australia, accompanied them on their trips. Those trips involved thousands of miles of travel, mostly through the arid central section of the continent.

Some of the things with which we become familiar, in these trip accounts, are: "road trains," which are huge trucks with three or more trailers; "bulldust," which is kicked up in blinding clouds by the road trains; and "bush-flies," that thrive by the millions during the warm months. Bush-flies are tiny flies that are attracted to moisture, and swarm around one’s face. They don’t bite, but in the author’s words, "are enough to drive a person to irrational acts."

Fortunately, they are active only by day.

Dr. MacMillen is a biologist, specializing in the ecology of desert wildlife. He is an Emeritus Professor from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, at the University of California, Irvine. In Australia, he worked with creatures such as desert rodents, seed-eating parrots, and desert crabs. In some of the rodent and seed-eating bird species, they may get all the water they need from the seeds they consume, and provide fascinating research topics for ecologists. As for the crabs, living as they do in an arid environment with occasional torrential rains, they spend 95 per cent of their lives in deep burrows where the soil remains moist, and "come out of their black holes when it rains."

The book’s intriguing title is "Meanderings in the Bush." Apparently, the Australian term "bush" has variable meanings. For a resident of Sydney (population 3, 460,000) it might merely mean visiting a smaller city. However, it mostly refers to the remote desert wilderness (often called the "outback"), and this is what is meant by the author. His subtitle, "Natural History Explorations in Outback Australia," gives an even clearer picture of what the book is about. A bonus is that you learn a great deal about the outback, about the people who live there, and about its astonishing cycles of aridity and floods.

If you ever wondered what it is like to work as a field biologist, this book will give you an inside look. Hours of work, often at night, are spent in collecting live specimens. It can be exhausting, with the researchers often cold and sometimes wet. Yet this is thought of as the "fun" part of biology, because it is then followed by weeks of painstaking (read: essential but boring) work in the lab, collecting data on the response of animals to varying environmental conditions. In the final chapters, Dr. MacMillen provides a description of the adaptations of various species of wildlife in the desert outback, and a discussion of the impact by humans.

Read and enjoy.

Dr. John Kemper
Emeritus Dean and Emeritus Professor of Engineering, University of California, Davis

$15.95
Paperback, 6x9
ISBN: 978-159858-383-0
248 pages

Available at fine bookstores everywhere