Bill Morris is a writer, documentary film maker and musician based in Port Chalmers, New Zealand. He has worked extensively as a wildlife filmmaker for NHNZ, the BBC Natural History Unit and others, and is a regular contributor to New Zealand Geographic magazine. His passion for science and stories of the natural world informs all of his work.
Bill’s deep interest in geology and the movement of rocks across the globe and his equally deep interest in plants led him to follow the journey of one group of plants into the ancient history of the land he lives on.
Philip Hoare | best-selling author of Leviathan or, The Whale
“fabulous… the sort of thing I’d take out of the local library when I was a boy and which would plunge me into deep time”
James McConnachie, author, Sunday Times reviewer and editor of The Author
“Lyrical, dramatic and utterly readable – The Road to Gondwana leaps across continents and epochs with verve and scientific seriousness. A book to make you fall in love with geology, and the story of the earth’s deep time.”
National Geographic Traveller | UK’s most subscribed-to travel magazine – 25,000 subscribers, circulation almost 60,000 | November issue
-Featured in their Books page.
Geoscientist | member magazine of Geological Society of London with circulation of 12,000
“an original view of how Gondwana came and went yet still leaves its trace.”
The Linnean | member magazine of the world’s oldest natural history society- (Dr Paul Kenrick, Principal Researcher at the London Natural History Museum )
“This book is a great read. Morris is at his best when writing about geology and travel, and he succeeds in giving the reader a feel for the evolution of the supercontinent. I don’t know of a recent comparable book on the subject. I recommend it to the general reader and to students and academics as an engaging introduction to the evolution of Gondwana and its impact on Earth history.”
Otago Daily Times
“A geological jaunt“ Click here to read
Good Reads
“Morris is s a gifted writer and researcher and a warm human being. He has a light and sometimes humorous way of filtering heaps of scientific data, spiced with stories about the people whose geological discoveries contributed to the discovery of Gondwana. For me his ability to create word pictures was the best part of the book”
Schooldays Magazine
“Prior to reading this book I had no idea that geology and palaeontology could be so interesting, so fascinating.” Click here to read
OarFM – Morning Show
“A wonderful new book. Is a lovely looking book, it is beautifully designed. It would be a great Chrissie present” Click here to read
The Australian
“It is a scholarly and persuasive work, dazzling in its detail, but immensely entertaining and intriguing ”
The Senior
“The book is a fascinating read which takes the armchair explorer on a journey to a world which is long gone, step by step through eons of time.” Click here to read
RNZ – None To Noon “When you really love, really appreciate, really immerse yourself in the forces of nature, that is when you perhaps care a little more about our impacts on it. It’s important and powerful work” Click here to listen
Blue Wolf Reviews
“The Road To Gondwana should be in every home. It is written for all to understand, and with so many descriptive stories, from the girls picking out coal with their fingers in India to geologists exploring the seabeds. Immensely relevant today!” Click here to read
ABC South Australia regional afternoons with Narelle Graham
“a really enjoyable book. It reads more like a fiction book than nonfiction, despite being packed full of great information” Click here to listen
An immersive and fascinating journey into deep time, charting the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana through a billion years of Earth’s history.
‘Gondwana’ is a mystery of geological history; a lost supercontinent and a place woven into the consciousness of all who inhabit its scattered fragments. Today, the people who live in Africa, South America, India, Australia, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand and Arabia spend their lives walking around on what’s left of Gondwana. But what was life like when it was whole?
The Road to Gondwana traces the steps science took to find Gondwana, and the evolutionary journey of Gondwana itself. Our tour guide on this journey is Glossopteris – an extinct tree that dominated the supercontinent for 50 million years, before vanishing in the most devastating event ever to strike life on this planet, the Permian mass extinction.
This is a story about deep time and the challenges that face those who venture there. It’s about the importance of imagination in science, and the reasons that the journey towards understanding is sometimes more important than the destination.
