Inconvenient Animals

A devastating, brilliant book that will change how you think about the habitat around you.

In 2024, an earless dragon was spotted the first in over 50 years. Within weeks, ecologists and sniffer dogs patrolled the grasslands, as development ground to a halt. A species of lizard had effectively exacerbated the housing crisis, forcing an uncomfortable question: what matters more our right to shelter or theirs to exist?

Across Australia, native species often get caught in the tug between environmental protection and urban development. Some whether the koala (New South Wales), the orange-bellied parrot (Tasmania), the Boggomoss snail (Queensland), the pygmy blue-tongue lizard (South Australia), the plains-wanderer bird (Victoria) or the tiny peacock spider (Western Australia) are so crucial to the ecosystems they inhabit that their demise can herald collapse. How did we come to see nature as a resource to exploit rather than an integral part of our future?

The dragon's disappearance mirrors the vanishing of Victorian grasslands, Australia's most endangered habitat. Both are part of a deeper story: one that connects John Batman's vision of Port Phillip to the sprawling suburbs now built over ancient habitat. A story about how the men who declared Australia terra nullius and the modern developers who reshape it share more than we'd like to admit.

This is a book about what we miss when we don't look closely and about the long shadow colonialism casts on how we treat the land. Weaving science, philosophy and history, it's a reckoning with our past, and an urgent meditation on how we might change.