Not many people would swim through a river populated with piranhas and electric eels while researching their first book, but Andrew Westoll isn’t your typical author.
The Canadian primatologist-turned-journalist travelled to South America to pen The Riverbones, which was recently published by University of Queensland Press.
The books traces Westoll’s love affair with Suriname, a tiny country in South America which has the largest tract of pristine rainforest on earth and was his home for a year while researching capuchin monkeys in 2001.
After returning to Canada he couldn’t shake his experiences, and looking for a new challenge decided to enrol in postgraduate studies in creative writing at the University of British Columbia (UBC).
“It was at UBC where I discovered the possibilities in creative non-fiction, which often takes the form of journalism. I was hooked,” Mr Westoll said.
“My most memorable assignment to date is definitely my visit to the mines of Potosi, in Bolivia, where I spent six hours deep inside ‘The Mountain That Eats Men’, interviewing the miners, drinking with them, and prostrating ourselves before El Tio, the devilish landlord of the Bolivian Underworld.”
Mr Westoll has now published dozens of travel features, with an award-winning piece on his first visit to Suriname providing the foundations for The Riverbones.
The book gives readers an insight into the former Dutch colony, its local inhabitants the Maroon people, and the scars remaining from civil unrest that shook the country in the 1980s.
Woven through the narrative is his hunt for the bright-blue okopipi frog – an extremely rare species that lives only in Suriname.
Mr Westoll said he hoped The Riverbones was a rollicking read which showed the importance of looking after what’s left of our planet.
“First, I hope readers enjoy the adventure. Second, I hope my book can somehow serve as a testament to Surinamese Maroon culture, a wake-up call for the Surinamese government to begin living up to the human rights treaties it signed long ago,” he said.
“But if nothing else, I’d like readers to learn and perhaps fall in love, as I did, with Suriname itself, a remarkable little land of rivers and jungles and monkeys and tiny blue frogs just north of the Amazon that may represent our last chance to save what remains of South America’s once-sprawling rainforest.”
Mr Westoll is appearing at the Melbourne Writers Festival next month and visiting Brisbane in September.
Media: Cameron Pegg at UQ Communications (07 3365 2049, c.pegg@uq.edu.au)
