John Blay, Wild Nature: Walking Australia’s south east forests
‘Chequerboard forests: John Blay on walking with intent, Australian Book Review November 2020
“Blay walks a chequerboard of forests – some exemplify the ‘wild nature’ he craves, beyond the most destructive marks of human activity. Some resemble memorials where enormous tree stumps stand ‘like gravestones’ amid scrubby, post-logging regrowth, ghosts of the old forest. Others are freshly bulldozed grounds that bring to mind Benjamin’s World War I battlefields lying mangled ‘under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds’.”