Eight Moons to Midnight

While building a secluded retirement home in rugged, dry sclerophyll, natural woodland in central Victoria, David Chalmers began glimpsing fragments of strange stories written in the landscape. Stone walls and mysterious caves revealing evidence of long past human habitation, animal tracks through nearly virgin woodland and forest linking with wild animal behaviour, and other natural mysteries began pushing David to yet another calling and to new destinations. Those pathways were to become the storylines of Eight Moons to Midnight. Introducing his book, 'The Biggest Estate on Earth', Bill Gamage describes his discovery of Australia's indigenous people and cultures as like meeting 'people I never knew'. These are the same words David Chalmers would use to describe his experience. On the other hand, 'The Biggest Estate on Earth' is primarily a comprehensive 'scholarship of literature' that seeks to analyse much of what has been recorded (mostly in English) about Australia's indigenous people. In contrast, Eight Moons to Midnight describes a study applying 'scientific principles' to the remnants of the life and living of one indigenous clan, as that has been preserved in a myriad of ways in the living landscape, 200 years after that clan was driven away.