Don Watson has delivered another readers’ delight, but this one has only a limited amount of his elegant, eloquent and perceptive prose. It’s in the introduction to this collection of what Watson calls ‘fragments’, research material he used for The Bush, his 2014 award-winning book.

Although a companion to The Bush, this volume stands alone, to be dipped into at any time to read what these excerpts tell us about the Australian bush. The fragments Watson has chosen come from history, autobiography, reportage, science, anthropology, prose, poetry and information bulletins. They are extracted from individuals’ private journals, explorers’ reports and pioneer memories. They tell us what Europeans thought about Aboriginal people. Some show a dark pattern of brutality across the continent towards Aborigines, and we learn of schemes for reparation in the 1800s for their loss of land.

Watson rightly advises that this is just a fragmentary history of humans in the Australian bush, recommending that readers go to the works of some of these authors for a grander narrative.

This collection, however, isn’t selected just from the writing of early explorers or from some of our great national authors such as Tom Keneally, Tim Winton, Ion Idriess or Eric Rolls. Some of the most interesting excerpts about early days in the bush come from self-published memoirs and typescripts stapled together by local history groups.

As for the title, Watson writes that to understand the destruction of a forest it is useful to know the effort that went into felling a single tree. This book brings to life the voices of real people. Every city-dwelling Australian should read it.

Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville