Set against a backdrop of Australia's central deserts, The Dingo's Noctuary explores themes of identity, belonging, and the fragile threads that connect all living beings. At the heart of the tale is a soul's dark night, the flight of a lady motorcyclist, in the prime of her invisibility, and her mongrel dingo Moon, into the Tanami desert. She's searching for a caravan of miraculous dog-headed beings, glimpsed in dreams and the dementia tales of an old desert lady.
The Dingo's Noctuary is an illustrated verse novel, complete at 70,500 words. It includes accurate hand drawn maps of the Australian central deserts, pressings of rare plants, and forty-seven lumachrome glass prints, afterlife portraits of animals and birds. The story unfolds through combinations of poetry and prose, alongside visual images- maps of land and stars, plant pressings, and forty-seven afterlife portraits of animals and birds. It is a single-authored book in which the images and texts are equally weighted. The book was written over thirty-seven desert crossings, sometimes on the motorcycle with the dog on the back. The entire second half of the book was written on a typewriter after a motorcycle crash (the unsuccessful 37th crossing) left me unable to use a computer. I made a motorcycle blog about one of the journeys in this book here https://judithnangalacrispin.medium.com.
Work from The Dingo's Noctuary has received a number of awards and prizes including the 2023 Sunshine Coast Art Prize and the 2020 Blake Prize for Poetry. It was highly commended in the 2023 Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize and shortlisted for the 2023 Milburn Art Prize, the 2023 and 2025 Ravenswood Prizes for Australian Women's Art, and the 2019 Olive Cotton Prize. Images and texts from this book were included in the Lunar Codex time-capsule which was deposited on the moon as part of the Blue Ghost mission in 2024. A mock-up of the complete book was shortlisted for the 2023 Arles Luma Recontres Dummy Book Prize.
About the Author
Judith Nangala Crispin is an acclaimed poet, visual artist, motorcyclist and volunteer firefighter, who lives on unceded Ngunnawal/Ngambri Country near Braidwood on the NSW Southern Tablelands. Her poetry has won the Blake Prize, been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and been shortlisted for many awards including the Peter Porter Prize. Her visual art has won her residencies, awards, and wide acclaim, here and overseas. She has published two collections of poetry,
The Myrrh-Bearers and
The Lumen Seed. Judith is a descendant of Bpangerang people from the Murray River and acknowledges heritage from Scotland, Ireland, France, Mali, Senegal and the Ivory Coast. She spends part of each year living and working with the Warlpiri, her adopted people, in the Northern Tanami Desert.
