Set against a backdrop of Australia’s central deserts, The Dingo’s Noctuary by Judith Nangala Crispin is an illustrated verse novel that explores themes of identity, belonging, and the fragile threads that connect all living beings.
At the heart of the tale is a soul’s dark night, the flight of a lady motorcyclist, in the prime of her invisibility, and her mongrel dingo Moon, into the Tanami desert.
She’s searching for a caravan of miraculous dog-headed beings, glimpsed in dreams and the dementia tales of an old desert lady.
The story unfolds through combinations of poetry and prose, alongside visual images – maps of land and stars, accurate hand-drawn maps of the Australian central deserts, plant pressings, and forty-seven lumachrome glass prints, afterlife portraits of animals and birds, placed on emulsion and developed in natural light. They are not paintings, they’re light-pictures, made of sunlight and decomposition chemistry.
Written over thirty-seven desert crossings, sometimes on the motorcycle with dingo dog Moon on the back, the entire second half of The Dingo’s Noctuary was drafted on a 1966 Olympia Splendid 33 travel typewriter, after a motorcycle accident (during the unsuccessful 37th crossing) left the author unable to use a computer. It is a single-authored book in which the images and texts are equally weighted.
This is a quintessentially Australian story that wrestles with questions of authenticity and family truth in a nation still divided by historical Stolen Generation policies. All these stories are true.
Work from The Dingo’s Noctuary received several awards and prizes including the 2023 Sunshine Coast Art Prize and the 2020 Blake Prize for Poetry. It was highly commended in the 2023 Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize and shortlisted for the 2023 Milburn Art Prize, the 2023 and 2025 Ravenswood Prizes for Australian Women’s Art, and the 2019 Olive Cotton Prize.
Images and texts from this book were included in the Lunar Codex time-capsule which was deposited on the moon as part of the Blue Ghost mission in 2024. A mock-up of the complete book was shortlisted for the 2023 Arles Luma Recontres Dummy Book Prize.
Judith Nangala Crispin is an acclaimed poet, visual artist, motorcyclist and volunteer firefighter, living on unceded Ngunnawal/Ngambri Country near Braidwood on the NSW Southern Tablelands.
Her poetry has won the Blake Prize, been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and been shortlisted for many awards including the Peter Porter Prize. Her visual art has won her residencies, awards, and wide acclaim, here and overseas. She has published two collections of poetry, The Myrrh-Bearers and The Lumen Seed.
Judith is a descendant of Bpangerang people from the Murray River and acknowledges heritage from Scotland, Ireland, France, Mali, Senegal and the Ivory Coast. She spends part of each year living and working with the Warlpiri, her adopted people, in the Northern Tanami Desert.
The Dingo’s Noctuary is published by Puncher & Wattmann and will be available at selected book retailers from 18 November 2025.
Image: The Dingo’s Noctuary – courtesy of Puncher & Wattmann