Cloud land

Penny van Oosterzee
In the gripping and extensively researched Cloud Land, Penny van Oosterzee imagines what a small region of Queensland’s Atherton Tablelands has witnessed over both geological time and since white settlement. She describes her life there and the natural history of a small patch of forest, a plot of land that she purchased with her husband with a plan for research and regeneration. The detailed descriptions of the regenerated forest patches and the evolutionary pathways of humans, marsupials and birds are punctuated with stories from the ‘Killing Time’ of European settlement, when the devastation of the people of the top end, as well as of the tropical forests, was frenzied and almost complete.