Guided walks
Pathways
A pathway strings a handful of guides into an ordered walk with a single question at its end. Follow one to read a stretch of the gulf-to-range gradient in the field, then check whether it stuck.
A day on the samphire coast
Read the salt threshold of the gulf-to-range gradient in the field: recognise the samphire flats and their mangroves, understand the backwards sea that drives them, and meet the threatened birds that depend on the mud.
Pathway · ~15 min · 5 stepsBirds of the flyway
Stand on a mudflat and read a hemispheric migration — why a bleak-looking salt flat helps feed the Arctic.
Pathway · ~15 min · 5 stepsBuilt to burn
Read the fire-survival kit in the field — the plants that are pruned by fire, not killed, and the bird that farms it.
Pathway · ~20 min · 4 stepsDeep time in an afternoon
Read eight hundred million years in the rock behind the city — rift, ice, the dawn of animals, and a range still rising.
Pathway · ~15 min · 4 stepsMending ground
Read recovery in progress — the turn from taking to keeping, and what a mended patch of country looks like.
Pathway · ~20 min · 6 stepsReading absence
Learn the hardest skill the book asks — seeing what is no longer there, from a paddock to a fence-line to a suburb.
Pathway · ~15 min · 5 stepsThe backwards sea
Read Gulf St Vincent as an inverse estuary — the drowned meadows, the rising salt, and the improbable life below the tide.
Teacher track · ~40 min · 5 stepsThe gradient (for students)
For senior-secondary and undergraduate students: read the gulf-to-range transect as a live demonstration of climate, adaptation and clearance — a field lesson in one slope.
Pathway · ~15 min · 8 stepsThe web of partnerships
Read the invisible deals — pollination, seed-planting, dependency — that turn a list of species into an ecosystem.
Pathway · ~20 min · 7 stepsThe wet island
Read the Mount Lofty refugium — a wet island marooned in a drying sea of country, and the birdsong going quiet in it.
Pathway · ~30 min · 7 stepsThe whole gradient — gulf to summit
Read the entire climb from the floor of Gulf St Vincent to the summit of Mount Lofty and down the dry side — the book’s central journey, and the frame everything else hangs on.