AustLit

'In 1910 a young Englishman, Elliot Lovegood Grant Watson, joined anthropologists A. R. Brown and Daisy Bates on a Cambridge University-sponsored expedition to Western Australia to record Indigenous marriage customs.

Profoundly affected by his experiences there - for him the desert was a frontier of rare and remote beauty - he also developed a deep respect for the people he encountered among its Aboriginal communities.

Back in Europe, and encouraged by such luminaries as Joseph Conrad and Gertrude Stein, Grant Watson began writing fiction.

Initially filtered through the analytical lens of his scientific training, his observations of the Australian landscape came to figure as a recurring metaphor for spiritual isolation and notions of the unconscious in his novels.

The Imago is a revealing portrait of this singular and intriguing writer, a pioneer of literary themes explored decades later by Katharine Susannah Prichard, Randolph Stow and Patrick White.' (Publisher's blurb)