Margie Orford

The lost world of the Karoo

Through the /Xam Bushmen’s tragic stories, Julia Blackburn describes how a region once teeming with wildlife has been reduced to an empty desert

//Hankass’o 
issue 30 July 2022

Julia Blackburn’s Dreaming the Karoo is the diary of a very bad year: from March 2020, when a research trip to South Africa was cut short by the sudden emergence of Covid, to March last year. Blackburn had gone to Cape Town, and then into the dry interior, the Karoo, to explore the lost world she had found in an obscure volume that she had once chanced upon in the London Library.

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