Harry Sadler 2018. The Eastern Curlew. Affirm Press: South Melbourne, 216 pp.

A short book and a pleasure to read, not just brilliantly evoking the life and perils of the Eastern Curlew but also as good as any explanation of why folk would go and watch waders at all. Besides curlew-watching in Australia, the author also relates visits to flyway stopovers in China and Korea, and the breeding destination in Russia, and also writes very proficient summaries in turn of migratory shorebird biology and conservation, bird systematics and taxonomic progress. I didn’t realise that some waders gain and lose 60% of their body weight before and after migration, nor that the last curlew seen at Werribee was in the 1990s.

Also prominent are some related art and performance projects including those of Jackie Kerin and the Flyway Print Exchange, notably Kyoko Imazu’s Eastern Curlew print; the “travelled” version is especially compelling: