I knew, when I first heard about Jackie French’s upcoming work on the land, that the result would be much more than a book about the geographical elements that comprise our great country. I knew it would be very much about this, but I also knew it would be about spirit. About heart. About an almost ethereal human connection to the land that so many of us fail to feel, even after a lifetime.

And I was right. This is our land through the eyes of one who is deeply in love with every intimate part of its geographical structure, its history, its people—its soul.

Let the Land Speak is, in part, biographical. It is about one woman’s journey, from her oyster-shucking days in Darling Harbour as a child, fossicking along the rocks to find the abundant food available, just as it was when the First Fleet arrived, to the many hours she has spent with Aboriginal women in her later adulthood—women who have passed on innate knowledge and land-connection from millennia past.

It is also an historical account. Opening with the arrival of Captain Cook’s Endeavour, we are taken back in time to first see the ‘real’ Australia encountered by white man. We are introduced to five hundred years of misunderstandings as to how white man first approached this land and how it was subsequently settled.

And my goodness, it is eye-opening.

We are told of the Real First Fleet—the people who came by boat around 60,000 years ago. We are given a vivid picture of the land as it was then, and we are gradually transported to the land we have now. The drought-hardened, flood-ravaged, raw, wild, beautiful land new settlers tried with all their might to turn into the sweet green fields of England, dotted with fluffy white sheep and crops that would never stand a chance.

This is an extraordinary, comprehensive, information-crammed tome that is at once mindboggling in fascinating content, and extremely emotional to read. It made me realise that, like many Australians, I have lived a life more or less detached from the land. Growing up as a teen on the Central Coast of New South Wales, I felt more of an affinity with the ocean than I did the land, and then moving from city to major city thereafter, I again felt more connection to the manmade than I ever did to nature.

As a result, I felt profoundly moved to read of Jackie’s closeness to the land—her ability to predict weather patterns, rains and drought, simply by smell, the mating calls of animals, and the condition and flourishing of plants and trees each and every season in her beloved Araluen Valley in southern tablelands of New South Wales.

French’s book is a holistic view of the place we all inhabit—a land that is tough, has always been tough, and will continue to be tough to live on. It is tough to farm, tough to survive, tough to control—and Let the Land Speak asks us to look at the possibility of releasing this need to control. Of living in harmony with our environment, and allowing it to return to a balance and a beauty that has been—and continues to be—rapidly lost.

It is a cry for help. It is a call to action. And it will not fail to move you.

As we age and become more attuned to our history, and more aware of the possibility held in our future, returning to the land and developing a relationship with earth is an emotional journey. From the plight of the Great Barrier Reef to the life of our farming folk, from the earth-scourging mining industry to the perilous insistence we have to build homes where fire comes and where corroding coastlines will soon wash all into the sea, the overriding messaging in Let the Land Speak is in listening. Stopping. Watching. Becoming one with our land.

This is an important book, and a must-read for all Australians, for it contains messaging we simply can’t ignore. In the words of Jackie herself: “We need to listen to our land. If we fail, we will stumble into a future we can neither predict nor understand.”