AustLit

'When I left my job in the then National Industrial Chemical Notification and Assessment Scheme, that went by the rhyming and trivialising acronym NICNAS, at the usual departure afternoon tea, the Director — who knew I was writing a novel — said, with that curious inflection of half-worry half-anticipation, that she hoped I wouldn’t be writing about NICNAS. I had one of those eye-rolling ‘in your dreams’ kind of reactions. The novel I was working on was a coming of age love-migration story. I didn’t think of it as having any science content. But it did. Mary, the main character, is obsessed with collecting and identifying moss, she draws her specimens and is desperate to get a microscope. To me, that content – the morphology of moss sporangia, the hydroscopic reflex that launches the spores, the taxonomy of the time - was bread and butter. I didn’t see science as an add-on to literature but part of the world’s fabric to be gathered in to make real the imagined world – that is, science not so much leaked in but out. When I started writing, my prose was spiked with poems, and by the time I’d finished the novel the concision and intensity of poetry had become a daily habit.' (Introduction)