About the author
Daniel Addington
The person writing this book, and a short account of why it exists.
Why this book
Reading a place
whole
Adelaide is, by the numbers, the most legible collision of deep time, drought and clearance of any Australian capital — a place where the whole story of a landscape can be read in a single afternoon's drive.
A Coast Running Out of Water exists to read that story in the order it was actually built: the rift and the faults that raised the ranges and dropped the gulf, the Mediterranean summer-drought climate that then wrote the rules everything living here has to obey, the gulf-to-range gradient that demonstrates those rules in seagrass and stringybark and mallee, and finally the two centuries of clearing — and now, in patches, repair — that a city laid over the top.
It's written for the curious reader first — the Bryson test: could a genuinely interested non-scientist follow this and not want to put it down? Students of geography, ecology and environmental science come next, and land managers and restoration practitioners after that, because a landscape this cleared and this peri-urban needs people who can act on what they read, not just admire it.
The method
Tone is licence. Facts are not.
The book borrows its warmth from Bill Bryson — science told as narrative, not lecture — but holds a line Bryson himself never had to: nothing in it is invented. Every load-bearing figure is checked against a canonical facts register before it's allowed into a chapter, and where the record is thin or contested, the book says so rather than guessing.
That same rule governs this site. It draws only on the manuscript, the facts register and the author's own git history — nothing here is a marketing invention, and nothing is for sale.
Placeholder — author bio to come
[Author bio to come. This paragraph is a placeholder for the author to fill in with their own words — background, how they came to this landscape, whatever they'd like readers to know. Nothing has been invented here in its place.]
Work in progress. The full first draft of all eighteen chapters is complete. The manuscript is still being checked, chapter by chapter, against the facts register before anything is called final — and it is not yet published or for sale.
Get in touch
Say hello
For questions about the book, the site, or the writing itself, reach the author at hello@acoastrunningoutofwater.com.au. (A placeholder address — the permanent one is still to be set up.)