Adani, Following Its Dirty Footsteps : A Personal Story
Geelong North
:
Spinifex Press
,
2018
14756333
2018
single work
autobiography
'From fishing villages on the Gujarat coastline to Adani's power plant in Mundra and the company's headquarters in Ahmedabad, Lindsay Simpson’s personal story tracks how the Adani Group managed to woo Australian governments into approving Australia’s largest coal mine in the Galilee Basin and port expansion in a zone of great ecological sensitivity.
'Why would an Australian Prime Minister, a State Premier and a handful of regional mayors back such a project, risking the future of the Great Barrier Reef and threatening Australia’s vast precious source of underground water – the Great Artesian Basin? And what of the consequences for greenhouse gas emissions if other proposed mines in the Galilee Basin go ahead?
'Why is there a single-minded pursuit of the mining of coal when we are running out of time to do something useful about climate change? As a tourism operator in the Whitsundays Lindsay Simpson, investigative journalist, former academic and author, is determined to expose the contribution of coal mines to global warming, which is threatening the world’s largest living organism – the Great Barrier Reef – with extinction.
'With other activists, she travels from Adani's Indian headquarters in Gujarat to Parliament House in Canberra to lobby politicians, demand answers and question motivations. She also documents the power of the social movement, Stop Adani, which has captured the public imagination.
'In an astute analysis of this ongoing environmental battle, the biggest since the Franklin Dam in the 1980s, Lindsay Simpson argues that while Adani might have gained the backing of politicians, it has not won over the Australian people. (Publication summary)
The Curer of Souls
Milsons Point
:
Vintage Australia
,
2006
Z1304148
2006
single work
novel
historical fiction
In London in 1865 Lydia Frankland finds a love letter written twenty years earlier by her late stepmother, Jane, to a natural historian at Port Arthur, Louis Lempriere. In the letter Jane confesses she is in love with Louis. Lydia is horrified at her stepmother's apparent infidelity, and begins to read Jane's diaries. In them she finds more details about the time the family spent in Van Diemen's Land all those years ago, when Lydia's father, Sir John, was governor there. She reads an account of a macabre murder involving two convict boys; of horrible experiments conducted on prisoners held on the island; and of Jane's obsession with Darwin's theories of evolution. Lydia realises there are secrets in her family's past, and she sails to Van Diemen's Land - now Tasmania - to unravel these mysteries. There she finds out more about her stepmother's friendship with Lempriere, and is forced to confront the fact that her father, whom she had believed a hero, upheld a sadistic regime in the penal colony. She is also transported back to a world where Charles Darwin's theories were emerging and threatening to take over long-held religious beliefs. In this historical novel, Simpson intertwines real historical events and figures with her own fictions, to 'map the silences' that traditional history leaves untouched. She masterfully weaves the reality of the darkness of Van Diemen's Land with brilliantly realised imaginings of the past on this remote island at the end of the earth. (Publisher's blurb)
