AustLit

'His dreams of home are dreams of trees. Behind eyelids now modestly creased he summons dense woodland where in waking life there is none. It is in this way he dreams of a lover. Beyond the sudden borders of the town he knew as a child lies an all but treeless plain. Boulders - the bones of an indifferent batholith - crowd the hillsides. In the space between the tribal stones a flaxen speargrass meadow shivers. Of the few trees to be found here, most, now, are dead. Shallow-rooted pockets of candlebark, peppermint and snowgums once cadged bare life from the hollow. Trunk and branch they huddled against the frost, their foliage befouling the slopes in dirty green swathes. From a distance, these sparse stands appeared as something smeared onto the landscape. Now, for the most part, the trees are reduced to ashen corpses.' (Publication abstract)