'He was an Austrian immigrant; she came from Tasmania. He grew up beside the Carinthian Alps; she climbed mountains when few women dared. Their honeymoon glimpse of Cradle Mountain lit an urge that filled their waking hours. Others might have kept this splendour to themselves, but Gustav Weindorfer and Kate Cowle sensed the significance of a place they sought to share with the world. When they stood on the peak in the heat of January 1910, they imagined a national park for all.
'Kindred: A Cradle Mountain Love Story traces the achievements of these unconventional adventurers and their fight to preserve the wilderness where they pioneered eco-tourism. Neither lived to see their vision fully realised: the World Heritage listed landscape is now visited by 250,000 people each year. Award-winning journalist Kate Legge tells the remarkable story behind the creation of the Cradle Mountain sanctuary through the characters at its heart.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'‘Come to the woods,” wrote the Scottish-American conservationist John Muir, “for here is rest.” Muir’s tenacity as an explorer and gifts as a writer galvanised the national park movement in the US. Teddy Roosevelt, who loved killing things as much as preserving them, was convinced by Muir that wild places needed to be kept for future generations.' (Introduction)
'Early on in Kindred: A Cradle Mountain love story, the journalist and walker Kate Legge dwells on an ‘extraordinary coincidence’ that took place over Christmas in 1903. While the Field Naturalists Club of Victoria were on excursion to Mount Buffalo, the itinerant prophet of the National Park movement, the Scottish-American John Muir, was also in the mountains of Victoria. On Christmas Day, Muir plunged into the valleys around the Black Spur to verify optimistic claims of eucalypts ‘as high as the Great Pyramid’. He was soon disappointed by how these mountain giants compared in height and age to the redwoods of the Sierras, but he was charmed by the seclusion and intimacy of Victoria’s forests.' (Introduction)
'It is the photographs scattered through the text of Kindred that grab our attention first. Two pairs of battered boots in close-up, hanging on a nail. A rudimentary bush campsite where a couple of thin ropes are tied between two trees and draped with canvas. The corpse of a wombat, strung up to be butchered. Men in puttees and a woman in full Edwardian dress, posed in an alpine heath. And panoramas of gorges, crevasses and mountain peaks in which gums twist out of boulder cracks and human figures are registered as ants with walking sticks.' (Introduction)
'It is the photographs scattered through the text of Kindred that grab our attention first. Two pairs of battered boots in close-up, hanging on a nail. A rudimentary bush campsite where a couple of thin ropes are tied between two trees and draped with canvas. The corpse of a wombat, strung up to be butchered. Men in puttees and a woman in full Edwardian dress, posed in an alpine heath. And panoramas of gorges, crevasses and mountain peaks in which gums twist out of boulder cracks and human figures are registered as ants with walking sticks.' (Introduction)
'‘Come to the woods,” wrote the Scottish-American conservationist John Muir, “for here is rest.” Muir’s tenacity as an explorer and gifts as a writer galvanised the national park movement in the US. Teddy Roosevelt, who loved killing things as much as preserving them, was convinced by Muir that wild places needed to be kept for future generations.' (Introduction)
'Early on in Kindred: A Cradle Mountain love story, the journalist and walker Kate Legge dwells on an ‘extraordinary coincidence’ that took place over Christmas in 1903. While the Field Naturalists Club of Victoria were on excursion to Mount Buffalo, the itinerant prophet of the National Park movement, the Scottish-American John Muir, was also in the mountains of Victoria. On Christmas Day, Muir plunged into the valleys around the Black Spur to verify optimistic claims of eucalypts ‘as high as the Great Pyramid’. He was soon disappointed by how these mountain giants compared in height and age to the redwoods of the Sierras, but he was charmed by the seclusion and intimacy of Victoria’s forests.' (Introduction)
