Rewilding the Urban Soul

September 27, 2021
Dunn (My Year Without Matches) puts roots down in the concrete metropolis, after a 10-year love affair with the Australian bush, delivering an introspective, confessional reflection on the structures of human consumption. Before returning to Melbourne, she lavished in the wild as a landscape surveyor, botanical hound, and shelter engineer. While longing for the untamed land she encountered in the bush, she reacclimates to such urban wonders as Melbourne’s IKEA and reconnects with nature through wilderness courses, learning local indigenous histories, and finding a community of folks whose values are centered on gardening, birding, and watershed maintenance. Like the grass hut she once lived in, “makeshift, inventive, and homespun,” Dunn’s prose is raw and often unwieldy. Her narrative oscillates between musings on “nature and culture and the way the two intersect,” her experience finding familiarity in the natural world around her new home (like the wood sorrel in her backyard and the kookaburra she meets on a kayaking trip through the city), and recollections of her time in the bush, but its diarylike meditations can sometimes border on mawkish (of Melbourne, Dunn asks: “The place is courting me, but will I accept?”). Still, those intrigued by the wildness just beyond their apartment windows will find this to be a gem.