Description
ISBN: 9781923099715
Year: 2025
Publisher: Puncher and Wattmann
Description:
**Highly Commended, Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2026, Poetry**
Set against a backdrop of Australia's central deserts, The Dingo's Noctuary explores themes of identity, belonging, and the fragile threads that connect all living beings. At the heart of the tale is a soul's dark night, the flight of a lady motorcyclist, in the prime of her invisibility, and her mongrel dingo Moon, into the Tanami desert. She's searching for a caravan of miraculous dog-headed beings, glimpsed in dreams and the dementia tales of an old desert lady.
The Dingo's Noctuary is an illustrated verse novel, complete at 70,500 words. It includes accurate hand drawn maps of the Australian central deserts, pressings of rare plants, and forty-seven lumachrome glass prints, afterlife portraits of animals and birds. The story unfolds through combinations of poetry and prose, alongside visual images- maps of land and stars, plant pressings, and forty-seven afterlife portraits of animals and birds. It is a single-authored book in which the images and texts are equally weighted. The book was written over thirty-seven desert crossings, sometimes on the motorcycle with the dog on the back. The entire second half of the book was written on a typewriter after a motorcycle crash (the unsuccessful 37th crossing) left me unable to use a computer. I made a motorcycle blog about one of the journeys in this book here https://judithnangalacrispin.medium.com.
Work from The Dingo's Noctuary has received a number of awards and prizes including the 2023 Sunshine Coast Art Prize and the 2020 Blake Prize for Poetry. It was highly comme