★Join award-winning author and art historian Janine Burke in this enchanting and illuminating meander along forest trails within art, myth, history and present day.

The narratives in My Forests are a pleasure to read; like strolling down a meandering track through the trees, you never quite know what you'll discover around that next bend. Travel the ancient Incense Road with the Biblical Magi. Enjoy the dancing Olive groves of Tuscany and read of 'sleeping' Silver Birches. Witness the spectacular tree houses of the Korowai of West Papua. Visit tree sitter Miranda Gibson, whose 449-day protest against clearfelling in Tasmania's Tyenna Valley led to a World Heritage listing. In this enlightening and entertaining book, Janine Burke invites you to accompany her through forests, art and writing, cities and parks, deserts and gardens, rainforests and wetlands, exploring the connections between trees and civilisations, past and present. My Forests: Travels with Trees presents the role of trees in contemporary life in a world where most people don't live in the wild, and their acquaintance with nature comes from many sources.

Janine Burke
Janine Burke is an Honorary Senior Fellow, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music. An art historian, curator, novelist and photographer, she has published 20 books. In 1975, she curated Australian Women Artists: 1840-1940 at the George Paton Gallery, University of Melbourne. The resulting book remains a standard text in Australian art. Also in the 1970s, Dr Burke co-founded the Victorian Women’s Art Movement and Lip, the feminist arts journal. From 1977-1982, she was the foundation art history lecturer at the Victorian College of the Arts. Her novel Second Sight won the 1987 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. While a trustee of Heide Museum of Modern Art, she wrote books and curated exhibitions on the Heide modernist circle including Dear Sun: The Letters of Joy Hester and Sunday Reed (1994), Joy Hester (revised and republished 2001), Australian Gothic: A Life of Albert Tucker (2002) and The Heart Garden: Sunday Reed and Heide (2004). Janine published The Gods of Freud: Sigmund Freud's Art Collection (2006) and in 2014 curated Freud and Eros: Love, Lust and Longing for the Freud Museum London. More recently, her practice has focused on nature. Her book and curatorial projects have included Source: Nature's Healing Role in Art and Writing (2009) Nest: The Art of Birds (2012) and the exhibition Human/Animal/Artist: Art Inspired by Animals (2014). Her photographs are held in the collections of Heide Museum of Modern Art, Monash University Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Australia Research Library.

Elwood, My Forest 1
Trees as Home 19
Gardens of Eden 37
Trees of Jesus 55
Tree Worshippers 79
Naming Trees 93
Knowing Trees 103
Trees as Victims 117
Women of the Banyan 141
Fairy-tale Forests 155
Sentience 175
Trees as Witnesses 195
Epilogue 219
Notes 221
Bibliography 234
Acknowledgements 240
Index 241