AustLit

'Not too long ago, I spent a week at Varuna Writers’ House in the Blue Mountains outside Sydney, working on a book. One of the many treats Varuna offers writers is access to the nearby bushland. Before dinner one night, I took myself off for a long walk down into the forest near the house. The land in the Blue Mountains drops away from a huge plateau into deep dramatic valleys. Hundred-year-old paths with steps and railings descend into the depths. I couldn’t help feeling, as I followed one, that I was entering quite suddenly another realm of being, a quieter, older place or else the inside of a cut-open brain. A few steps beyond the redbrick cottage kiosk, the bitumen of the tourist road, the cricket field, the picnic tables, the new curved metal safety railings that sweep around the corner, I was into a shady netherworld, trickling here or there with water, like me, drawn irresistibly down, wanting to fall but be caught, splinter but reassemble in pools of glass, faraway, where the land bottoms out.' (Introduction)