Spiders – and the world of stories
Science writer and La Trobe postgraduate researcher Lynne Kelly’s latest book, Spiders: Learning to Love Them deals with the intriguing world of spiders around our homes and beyond.
A former arachnophobe, she overdid the cure and became totally obsessed with her eight-legged tormentors. For example, the chapter on sex is appropriately titled ‘No one does it like a spider’.
Through stories of spiders she observed in her home and garden, Ms Kelly explores the lifestyles of many species, including house spiders, wolf spiders, trapdoors, garden orb weavers and ‘intelligent little jumping spiders’.
Her book also illuminates the world of arachnologists who struggle with studying 40,000 classified species and many more yet to be described.
Ms Kelly is doing her doctorate in the English Department as a natural history writer. She says Spiders is her 14th book. Her previous one was Crocodile: Evolution’s Greatest Survivor.
‘Writing these books, I became aware that traditional stories from Indigenous peoples around the world encoded detailed behaviour of the species they were watching.
‘Aboriginal stories relating to the freshwater crocodile, for example, are significantly diff erent to those of the saltwater. And reading Egyptian stories about scarab beetles,’ she says, ‘added a whole new dimension to watching dung beetles roll up poo.
‘Artefacts from ancient civilisations demonstrate just how critical a detailed knowledge of natural history was to those who lived so close to the animals and plants they describe.’
Ms Kelly’s particular interest is in the extraordinary methods by which a vast repertoire of stories has been handed down to this day from a world before writing.