(See ' Beyond the Book' for details about the Tasmanian tiger and its history).

Nowra's imagination climbs to great heights and gives these extinct marsupial predators substance and personality. The tigers are the powerful center of the novel.

It's a place and time we look back on with longing and regret.Īs children, Hannah and Becky have a fluid ability to adapt, and where their Tasmanian tiger mother leads, they follow. Hannah speaks in slightly fractured English because, as she says, 'I lost it and had to learn it again.' The girls occupy a powerful vantage point in a world that is on the brink of change, like embedded spies in the last days of the Garden of Eden. In this way Hannah and Becky are transformed into those most fascinating of creatures - feral children (the focus of so much attention in literature and psychology, from the real-life 'wolf children' like eighteenth-century Wild Peter to Mowgli in Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book). A pair of Tasmanian tigers are their salvation - the tigers pluck the girls out of the flood and teach them to survive in the wild. Hannah and her friend Becky, who has the misfortune of coming along for the picnic, find themselves lost in the bush. The protagonist, Hannah, who narrates the story, loses her parents when their country picnic is swept away by a violent flash flood. It's a spellbinding tour, and one you won't want to end. Into That Forest probes what seems to be the last wild corner of the last wild place, putting the reader on intimate terms with magnificent creatures who are among the last of their kind of earth. The fictional fantasy is set in mid-nineteenth century Tasmania, the Australian island state, where marsupial mammals dominated and there were almost no placental mammals until humans introduced them from outside. Nowra's forest is animated not by fairy-tale magic but by the scientific wonder of a nature documentary. When Louis Nowra travels Into That Forest, he goes in deep, delving into wild terrain where humans have scarcely set foot, trekking through thickets of 'gum trees reeking of peppermint' and over 'forest floors smothered in hairy toadstools.' He tunnels deep into night landscapes alive with the scents of exotic animals quolls and wombats, devils and wallabies and nestles down into the wild lair itself, nose pressed into warm and sweet-smelling fur. Into That Forest is a young-adult novel with a deep-seated ecological conscience, by the award-winning Australian playwright, Louis Nowra.

Into that forest by louis nowra