Deep water By JamesBradley, Melbourne, Vic.: Penguin Random House Hamish Hamilton. 2024

James Bradley is an accomplished Australian author, having written five novels and three books of young adult fiction. He was also the Editor of The Penguin Book of the Ocean. His latest contribution is Deep Water. The World in the Ocean. This is a massive book, spanning more than 450 pages, with a lot of fascinating and varied content. Deep Water encompasses many key topics. These range from the planet's origins and how the earth came to have so much water, to the deep-seated problems of over-fishing. The book is thought-provoking from the outset; for instance, given that the planet is approximately 71% water, shouldn't our planet be called ‘ocean’ not ‘earth’. Much of the book is beautifully written, as might be expected from such an experienced author, but also a person that has clear and very strong connections to the marine world. The descriptions of natural history, animal migrations, and animal social behaviour are brilliant. For example, the concept of how groups of social marine mammals use sensory arrays to operate almost like ‘superbeings’ rather than individuals was among the most engaging writing about the natural world I have read in many years. Similarly, the sophisticated social signalling and behaviour of fish was a revelation to me. Equally well written were the descriptions of remote beaches in the Cocos Islands literally covered in plastic, and the grinding poverty created by massive scale and often illegal over-fishing off the coast of western Africa. These latter images painted by Richard Bradley's writing, stay, rather hauntingly, with the reader. If I have one criticism of Deep Water, it is that so much of the book is deeply depressing. The collapse of marine biodiversity, runaway climate change and deep-sea warming, the collapse of ice-shelves, rapid sea-level rise, rampant over-fishing (coupled with on-board slavery on factory ships that never come to shore), widespread human noise pollution in almost all waters, and oceans (and beaches) full of plastic. There were points when reading this book, that I was reminded of governments in Australia in the 1960s proposing to not only drill for oil and gas on the Great Barrier Reef but also dig up living coral reefs and grind them into fertilizer to boost the growth of sugar cane crops. Fortunately this did not eventuate—but it very nearly did—in an act that would have been the equivalent of bulldozing the Sydney Opera House to make gravel for road base. The massive ecological and management problems in the world's oceans that are so eruditely articulated through the book became at times almost too hard to deal with—at least for this reader; others will likely also need to take breaks from the tales of senseless mismanagement of the world's natural environments and resources. On this basis, I suggest that a missing part of the narrative in many of the chapters in Deep Water, especially later in the book, is commentary on solutions. What can be done to try and fix, or at least partially fix, the sheer mess that humanity has made of the planet's oceans? What has worked where and why? I believe that it is critical to give readers hope, a pathway to success. What does a better pathway look like and what is needed to put that pathway in place? Deep Water is an important book to read, to comprehend how extraordinary the planet's oceans truly are, but also how poorly the planet is being managed. Having created this background, perhaps the next books on this topic need to be ones focussed on practical solutions to fix the disaster that humans have created. David Lindenmayer: Conceptualization (equal); investigation (equal); writing – original draft (equal); writing – review and editing (equal). No specific funding was used in this book review. The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose. No data were used in this book review.