Stan Breeden is one of Australia’s pioneering natural history writers and photographers. He began his career in 1957 at the Queensland Museum where he established the photographic section. His aim, right from the beginning, was to communicate in both words and pictures the excitement of nature in Australia. His first story was published in 1960 in Walkabout magazine. Stan’s stories written in his relaxed, eloquent style have subsequently been published worldwide.

 

From the 1960s to 1988 Stan was an occasional freelancer for the National Geographic Society. During that period he worked in India for twelve years.  He made the National Geographic Special Land of the Tiger there for which he won his first Emmy award; for cinematography.

 

Stan’s first book, Life of the Kangaroo, was published in 1966. A score of books followed the latest being Into the Orchid House published in 2016. Notable among his earlier books was the series A Natural History of Australia. The first volume, Tropical Queensland, was published in 1970. This book came second in the Captain Cook Bicentenary Literary Competition. In 1987 Stan made another National Geographic Special, this time about Kakadu. It is called Australia’s Twilight of the Dreamtime. It won Stan his second Emmy award; for writing the commentary.

 

Stan has written books on many parts of the natural Australia including Uluru, Kakadu, and the wet tropics of Queensland, one of which, Visions of a Rainforest, illustrated by Bill Cooper, won the C.J. Dennis Prize for natural history writing in 1993/1994.

 

In the early 2000s, with his then partner Kaisa, he embraced high-end digital photography. They published four ground-breaking and incomparable books together, including the acclaimed Rainforest Country.

 

In his home in the rainforest on the Atherton Tableland and surrounded by cassowaries and birdwing butterflies, Stan recently completed his memoir A Feeling for Nature – Notes from a Golden Age, about his life in natural history.