Gum: The story of eucalypts & their champions

This new edition of Gum, from award-winning author Ashley Hay, is a powerful and lyrical exploration of these transformative and still transforming trees. It's a story of unique landscapes, curious people, and very big ideas. Ashley Hay writes with heart, head, energy and passion. She understands the natural world as we must all experience it, with deep love and respect. To preserve Country and to save ourselves we must live with and in a treed world. They are our champions, just as Ashley Hay is for them. - Tony Birch, author of The White Girl and Dark as Last Night Gum is one of my favourite books, I return to it often. Ashley Hay's curiosity ranges wide, her research skills run deep and she's a beautiful writer, thinker and storyteller. To have all these skills brought to bear upon a tree as deserving, as iconic, as the eucalyptus: well, I'm in heaven. - Sophie Cunningham, author of City of Trees and Melbourne A classic of Australian environmental writing, Gum offers a startling new perspective on Australian history, suggesting powerful new ways of seeing the past and revealing the complex and often surprising ways trees shape both our physical and imaginary worlds. - James Bradley, author of Ghost Species and Clade Ashley Hay's words fill you with the same kind of awe and wonder as a crushed gum leaf held to your nose: Gum is a heady, intoxicating and powerful exploration of the extraordinary history and relationships between people and the iconic eucalyptus. Since reading this book, the sight of gum trees has filled me with a new level of reverence and gratitude to know these sentient beings, and to know Ashley Hay's writing. - Holly Ringland, author of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart and co-presenter of Back to Nature The book's great strength comes from the unfolding sense of Australian national identity that somehow crystallizes around the eucalyptus tree. - Tim Flannery, The New York Review of Books (2002) Hay's Gum is like a gum itself: it is made in equal parts of light and leaf; of music and matter ... [It is] a sturdy, shapely book of fact, animated by wonder. - Mark Tredinnick, The Canberra Times (2002) Hay brings these peculiarly Australian trees to life, describing a slice of our colonial history in the process. - The Sydney Morning Herald (2002) As this beautifully written and evocative book makes clear, we are tied to the gum tree in ways we can't even imagine. - Eureka Street (2002)