Cal Flyn

'Meticulous research, lyrical writing ... A book that goes to the eeriest, most desolate places on Earth and finds hope' LOUISE GRAY This is a book about abandoned places: exclusion zones, no man's lands, ghost towns and post-industrial hinterlands - and what nature does when we're not there to see it. Exploring some of the eeriest, most desolate places in the world, Cal Flyn asks: what happens after humans pick up and leave? Whether due to war or disaster, disease or economic decay, each extraordinary place visited in this book has been left to its own devices for decades. In this time, nature has been left to work unfettered - offering a glimpse of how abandoned land, even the most polluted regions of the world, might offer our best opportunities for environmental recovery. As part of a journey that takes her around the world, Cal Flyn travels to Chernobyl where she meets the scant handful of people who returned to their irradiated homes. She spends a night on an uninhabited Scottish island where feral cattle - descendants of a herd set loose in the 1970s - live wild. She visits a botanical garden lodged high in the cloud forests of Tanzania where exotic plants brought from opposite habitats grow alongside native trees - a show of how adaptable our ecosystems might prove. She visits a Caribbean ghost town where volcanic flows have subsumed the streets. She explores derelict buildings ruled by urban scavengers, sneaks through barbed wire, and walks a beach made of bones on the shore of a dwindling sea. By turns haunted and hopeful, Flyn's luminous journey is pinned together with new ecological insights that map an answer to the big questions: what happens after we're gone - and how far can our damage to nature be undone? Though these strange, forgotten landscapes represent some of the most damaged spots on the planet, they are also proof how much potential we have for biological diversity, regrowth and a chance at redemption.

Life in the Post-Human Landscape

Islands of Abandonment

‘The most precious hymn to resilience ... written with a beautiful attention to detail ... Wonderful ’ ADAM NICOLSON, winner of the 2018 Wainwright Prize This is a book about abandoned places: ghost towns and exclusion zones, no man’s lands and fortress islands – and what happens when nature is allowed to reclaim its place.

Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape

Este libro es una hermosa exploración de lugares donde la naturaleza florece en nuestra ausencia. Algunas de las únicas reses verdaderamente asilvestradas del mundo deambulan por una isla abandonada desde hace tiempo en el extremo norte de Escocia. En los terrenos irradiados de Chernóbil ha resurgido una variedad de vida silvestre que no se había visto en mucho tiempo. En la estrecha zona desmilitarizada de la península de Corea, un exuberante bosque alberga miles de especies extinguidas o en peligro de extinción en cualquier otro lugar. Flyn visita los lugares más sombríos y desolados de la Tierra que, debido a la guerra, la catástrofe, la enfermedad o la decadencia económica, han sido abandonados por los humanos. Lo que encuentra en cada ocasión es una «isla» de nueva vida: la naturaleza se ha apresurado a llenar el vacío más rápido y con mayor profundidad que las proyecciones más optimistas de los científicos. Islas del abandono es un recorrido por estos nuevos ecosistemas, como lugares de inesperada importancia medioambiental, donde el mundo natural ha reafirmado su poder salvaje.

La vida en los paisajes posthumanos

Islas del abandono

A compelling and beautifully written memoir about dark and shameful family secrets, and one young Scottish woman's pilgrimage to Australia to attempt to lay the past to rest.

Thicker Than Water

A compelling and beautifully written memoir about dark and shameful family secrets, and one young woman's pilgrimage to Australia to attempt to lay the past to rest. British journalist Cal Flyn was holidaying in her childhood home in the Highlands of Scotland, when she stumbled upon a dark family secret. To her horror, she discovered that her great-great-great uncle Angus McMillan, who had been mythologized as a great explorer and pioneer of early Australia, was in fact also the leader of a number of gruesome massacres of indigenous people. In 1843, he led a loosely formed 'Highland brigade', linked to a series of assaults so ferocious that the sites would ever after be synonymous with bloodshed: Butchers Creek, Boney Point, Skull Creek, Slaughterhouse Gully. Driven to piece together his story and to confront her own history, Cal decided to retrace McMillan's journey to Australia, looking for answers: how could a man lauded for his generosity and integrity commit such terrible acts? How could people who directly suffered from the brutal expulsion of the Highland Clearances re-enact this brutality in Australia? And has today's generation inherited a responsibility to atone for its ancestors' sins? Part family memoir, part travelogue, part history, and an intimate, revealing and fascinating journey into our Australian heritage, Thicker than Water is a beautifully written, wholly compelling and devastatingly clear-eyed examination of the burden of intergenerational grief and inherited guilt that we all carry with us.

Cal Flyn was very proud when she discovered that her ancestor, Angus McMillan, had been a pioneer of colonial Australia. However, when she dug deeper, she began to question her pride. McMillan had not only cut tracks through the bush, but played a dark role in Australia's bloody history. Angus McMillan had left the stark, windswept landscape of the Highlands in the 1830s blighted by the Clearances for the alien harshness of the Australian frontier and had since been mythologised as a great explorer. This tug of personal history and a glimmer of an ancestor's greatness convinced Cal Flyn to investigate her great-great-great uncle's story fully. So when she uncovered the tough Highlander's involvement leading several horrific massacres of Aboriginal people, she realised that her family had played an iconic role in a most shameful chapter of Australia's bloody history. Indeed, Angus McMillan was known by another name: 'The Butcher of Gippsland'. Driven to piece together his story and to confront her history, Cal decided to follow Angus's route from Skye to rural Australia. 'Thicker Than Water' evokes the startlingly beautiful wilderness of the Highlands, the seemingly empty bush of Victoria and the echoes and reverberations on one from the other. The expulsion and brutality that marked the Highland Clearances were re-enacted in Australia, and Flyn's stunning prose prompts contemplation on the nature of the destruction of ways of life and the way in which one culture lays claim and asserts its weight over another. Delving into a dark period in Australian history with a novel's immediate style, this book asks how whole societies can come to be overlooked, forgotten and shamed.

Cal Flyn

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