The Very Stinky Fly Hunt

The Very Stinky Fly Hunt

Andrea Wild

Karen Erasmus

CSIRO Publishing, 2025

32pp., hbk., RRP $A26.99

9781486318780

Long before Bryce Courtenay and company created the famous jingle about Louie the Fly in 1957  flies have been seen as pests in this country.  Especially if you deal with one, 50 000 relatives come to the funeral! 

And, who on earth, would spend their life actively searching for these creatures, especially when it involves spending more time than necessary in traditional long-drop dunnies?

Dr Keith Bayless, the fly hunter  – that’s who.  As a dipterist for the Australian National Insect Collection, it is his job to study Australia’s 25000 fly species which are so important to the environment’s sustainability as they pollinate flowers, and  recycle waste like poo, dead animals and dead plants to create new soil needed to nurture new plants.

This engaging book takes young readers, and especially budding scientists,  along on Keith’s journey to try to rediscover the Clisa australis , first discovered in 1966 but then not seen for 30 years. Known to feed on the poo of bat-wing bats that dwelt in the caves of Carrai National Park in north-east NSW, we are taken there to find that their entrances are covered and so uninhabitable,  to the public toilets where neither water nor chemicals are used to deal with waste.  It’s all left to Mother Nature. And, although some of Keith’s questions are answered, each discovery leads to new questions so…

It’s hard to imagine that a book about flies can be so appealing but right from the get-go where we see the difference between a fly hunter and a fly hunter (you need to see the pictures) both author and illustrator have created something special, and like so many other books for young readers from this publisher, we are taken into realms beyond the usual and become absorbed in something we never knew we would be interested in!  

And that is the beauty and importance of having a robust non fiction collection in print – despite the information, illustrations and animations we can find online, we still don’t know what we don’t know.  Yet a beginning-of-year display of picture books  (many of which have been or will be reviewed on this blog)  that offers the opportunity to explore something new, unusual and unknown could set a budding scientist up for a year (or a lifetime) of exploration.