Boom and Bust: Bird Stories for a Dry Country, co-edited by ANU researchers and featuring many contributions from ANU, has won the Whitley Medal, the nation’s most prestigious award for zoological publication.
Editors Dr Libby Robin and Professor Rob Heinsohn, from the Fenner School of Environment and Society at ANU, and Dr Leo Joseph from CSIRO, received the Whitley Medal and Certificates on behalf of all the contributors at a special Whitley Awards ceremony at the Australian Museum in Sydney on Friday 18 September 2009.
Boom and Bust is about the relationship between Australian birds, climate, landscape and people, but from very different perspectives, including: ornithology, biology, ecology, archaeology, palaeontology, history and anthropology.
The medal honours “a landmark contribution to the understanding, content or dissemination of zoological knowledge”.
“It rewards not just knowledge, but outreach, and making connections between science and society, all very much part of the Fenner vision,” Dr Robin said.
“We wrote these bird stories for bird-lovers and the wider public as a way to think about how we live in this dry country. Our book interweaves the natural and cultural histories of the birds, and also consider the ways in which people have understood natural history in this place that so often defies expectations shaped in wetter places in the northern hemisphere.
“The stories are about birds adapting – or failing to adapt – to the limits of this dry country. But they are also about people. People change the places where birds live, and the birds can change the lives of people.”
The Whitley Medal is the highest ranked of the Whitley Awards presented by the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales and is reserved for work of outstanding quality that makes a landmark contribution to zoological knowledge.
The medal is named for Gilbert Whitley, zoologist and fish-specialist, curator of fishes at Sydney’s Australian Museum from 1925 to1964 and fellow of the zoological society. Whitley was also a natural historian and communicator, who wrote much and edited the zoological society’s publications from 1947-71.
