Shimmer Flying Fox Exuberance in Worlds of Peril

By: Deborah Bird Rose

Published by Edinburgh University Press, 2022

I was called to flying-foxes. My research questions led me into multispecies ethnographic work involving wildlife carers and academically trained scientists in eastern Australia. The people I met were at the front line in the work of holding flying-foxes back from the edge of extinction. I continued to visit the north, and I revisited my notebooks from several decades of research with Aboriginal people. The research was exhilarating, and then again at times deeply disheartening. I was to encounter more passion, intimacy, cruelty, horror, complexity, generosity and wild beauty than I could ever have imagined. Living with flying-foxes, I came to understand, takes us straight to the heart of every big question facing Earth life in the 21st century.' In this deeply personal book, the last one she wrote before hear death in 2018, Deborah Bird Rose explores the shimmer of life - the iridescent pulse of beauty and power, the processes of transition and transformation - that flows across and between generations. Grounded within this insight, she develops and advocates for an ethics of attention that is in the world within everyday practices, and in this case for and with flying foxes and their worlds.