Mark Tredinnick - The Blue Plateau: An Australian Pastoral
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The Blue Plateau: An Australian Pastoral: summary, description and annotation
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The author of The Lands Wild Music depicts Australias Blue Mountains through stories of the land and the lives within it.
At the farthest extent of Australias Blue Mountains, on the threshold of the countrys arid interior, the Blue Plateau reveals the vagaries of a hanging climate: the droughts last longer, the seasons change less, and the wildfires burn hotter and more often. In The Blue Plateau, Mark Tredinnick tries to learn what it means to fall in love with a home that is falling away.
A landscape memoir in the richest sense, Tredinnicks story reveals as much about this contrary collection of canyons and ancient rivers, cow paddocks and wild eucalyptus forests as it does about the myriad generations who struggled to remain in the valley they loved. It captures the essence of a wilderness beyond subjugation, the spirit of a people just barely beyond defeat. Charting a lithology of indigenous presence, faltering settlers, failing ranches, floods, tragedy, and joy that the place constantly warps and erodes, The Blue Plateau reminds us that, though we may change the landscape around us, it works at us inexorably, with wind and water, heat and cold, altering who and what we are.
The result is an intimate and illuminating portrayal of tenacity, love, grief, and belonging. In the tradition of James Galvin, William Least Heat-Moon, and Annie Dillard, Tredinnick plumbs the depths of peoples relationship to a world in transition.
Praise for The Blue Plateau
One of the wisest, most gifted and ingenious writers you could hope to find. Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food and The Omnivores Dilemma
Ive never been to Australia, but nowafter this bookit comes up in my dreams. The landscape in the language of this work is alive and conscious, and Tredinnick channels it in prose both wild and inspired. . . . Part nonfiction novel, part classic pastoral, part nature elegy, part natural history, the whole of The Blue Plateau conveys a deep sense, rooted in the very syntax of a lush prose about an austere land, that there can be no meaningful division between nature and culture, between humans and all the other life that interdepends with us, not in the backcountry of southeastern Australia, nor anywhere else. Orion
Absorbed slowly, as a pastoral landscape of loss and experiment in seeing and listening, the book richly rewards that patience. Publishers Weekly
At the farthest extent of Australias Blue Mountains, on the threshold of the countrys arid interior, the Blue Plateau reveals the vagaries of a hanging climate: the droughts last longer, the seasons change less, and the wildfires burn hotter and more often. In The Blue Plateau, Mark Tredinnick tries to learn what it means to fall in love with a home that is falling away.
A landscape memoir in the richest sense, Tredinnicks story reveals as much about this contrary collection of canyons and ancient rivers, cow paddocks and wild eucalyptus forests as it does about the myriad generations who struggled to remain in the valley they loved. It captures the essence of a wilderness beyond subjugation, the spirit of a people just barely beyond defeat. Charting a lithology of indigenous presence, faltering settlers, failing ranches, floods, tragedy, and joy that the place constantly warps and erodes, The Blue Plateau reminds us that, though we may change the landscape around us, it works at us inexorably, with wind and water, heat and cold, altering who and what we are.
The result is an intimate and illuminating portrayal of tenacity, love, grief, and belonging. In the tradition of James Galvin, William Least Heat-Moon, and Annie Dillard, Tredinnick plumbs the depths of peoples relationship to a world in transition.
Praise for The Blue Plateau
One of the wisest, most gifted and ingenious writers you could hope to find. Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food and The Omnivores Dilemma
Ive never been to Australia, but nowafter this bookit comes up in my dreams. The landscape in the language of this work is alive and conscious, and Tredinnick channels it in prose both wild and inspired. . . . Part nonfiction novel, part classic pastoral, part nature elegy, part natural history, the whole of The Blue Plateau conveys a deep sense, rooted in the very syntax of a lush prose about an austere land, that there can be no meaningful division between nature and culture, between humans and all the other life that interdepends with us, not in the backcountry of southeastern Australia, nor anywhere else. Orion
Absorbed slowly, as a pastoral landscape of loss and experiment in seeing and listening, the book richly rewards that patience. Publishers Weekly
Mark Tredinnick: author's other books
Who wrote The Blue Plateau: An Australian Pastoral? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
Mark Tredinnick
Charles Bowden
Robert Sorrell
Richard Edghill
Kai Kupferschmidt
McLennan
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Table of Contents
ALSO BY MARK TREDINNICK
The Lands Wild Music (editor)
The Little Green Grammar Book
The Little Red Writing Book
A Place on Earth (editor)
The Road South (poems)
Writing Well
The Little Green Grammar Book
The Little Red Writing Book
A Place on Earth (editor)
The Road South (poems)
Writing Well
For Maree and for Roland
I am what is around me...
These are merely instances.
These are merely instances.
Wallace Stevens, Theory
Nobody likes erosion anymore... now that all the scenery is made.
James Galvin, Fencing the Sky
PROLOGUE
SOME OF THE PARTS
I am made of pieces and of the spaces between them where other pieces used to be. I am a landscape of loss. Most of me is the memory of where else, and who else, and with whom, I have been and no longer am.
And so it is with the plateau; she, too, is a landscape of loss.
We are notnone of us, not I and not this placeever whole; we are never of a piece. Who we are is how whats left of us falls back toward some kind of coherence much older than we are.
The real book is the one you do not write, the one that orders the pieces that remain; and the real plateau is the work to which all the pieces almost amount, the order they all implythe heath and the ironstone, the escarpment and the late afternoon light, the valley wind and the early summer fire, the way the plateau came in and the way its going out again, the first peoples and the second, the time before men and the time of men and the time of no men to come, the falling water and the deepening drought, the sandstone and the black cockatoo and the gray kangaroo and the horse and the rider and the fifteen hundred kinds of plants and the birds that know the difference, and the valleys turns of phrase in the mouths of the women and the men, most of them now gone.
All we can ever know is some of the parts, and here some of them are, each an allusion to the same kind of truth, most of it eroded long ago and borne away east by slim and persistent streams.
THE CAST
KANIMBLA VALLEY
Jim Commens
Judith, his wife
George William, his father
Helen, his mother
George William, his grandfather
Julia, his grandmother
Grady boys, Julias brothers
Ron Flynn, stockman and friend of Jims father, mentor to
young Jim
Dave, Jims friend
Guy Teseirero, neighbor and captain of the Kanimbla Valley
Rural Fire Service
John Underhill, neighbor and member of the Kanimbla Valley
Rural Fire Service
Judith, his wife
George William, his father
Helen, his mother
George William, his grandfather
Julia, his grandmother
Grady boys, Julias brothers
Ron Flynn, stockman and friend of Jims father, mentor to
young Jim
Dave, Jims friend
Guy Teseirero, neighbor and captain of the Kanimbla Valley
Rural Fire Service
John Underhill, neighbor and member of the Kanimbla Valley
Rural Fire Service
KATOOMBA
Mark Tredinnick
M., his wife
M., his wife
KEDUMBA VALLEY
Les Maxwell
May, his wife
Norm, her son; Less stepson
Ross, Norms son
William Maxwell, Less grandfather
Mary-Anne, Less grandmother
George William (known as Billy), Less father
Olive Beatrice, Billys wife, Less mother
Jim (known as Jimmy), Less brother
Dan Cleary, Less boss and landlord, founder of the Kedumba
Pastoral Company
Bill, his son and Less boss and landlord, after Dan
Ken, Dans other son
Terry, a National Parks and Wildlife Ranger
David C., a boy who gets lost in the valley
David I., a second boy who gets lost in the valley
May, his wife
Norm, her son; Less stepson
Ross, Norms son
William Maxwell, Less grandfather
Mary-Anne, Less grandmother
George William (known as Billy), Less father
Olive Beatrice, Billys wife, Less mother
Jim (known as Jimmy), Less brother
Dan Cleary, Less boss and landlord, founder of the Kedumba
Pastoral Company
Bill, his son and Less boss and landlord, after Dan
Ken, Dans other son
Terry, a National Parks and Wildlife Ranger
David C., a boy who gets lost in the valley
David I., a second boy who gets lost in the valley
COXS RIVER
Oonagh Kennedy, leader of a party of riders in the Coxs River, August 1967
Clem, Mark, Lynne, and Margaret, the other members of the party
Bert Carlon, whose guesthouse and riding school in Megalong they left from
DARGAN
Henryk Topolnicki
Philippa, his partner
Philippa, his partner
I
VALLEY
WHAT IS ESSENTIAL IS INVISIBLE TO THE EYES
Les wakes before dawn and walks outside.
Its hard to say just when day comes to the Kedumba, for the valley is deep and it grows light long before the sun makes it up over the eastern rim. But if morning dawns slowly on the valley, it dawns all at once on Les, and he rises without question into the blue tailings of the night and the crying of the kookaburras and leaves the house as though he knows that morning will not come unless he gets up and goes out and walks the morning down.
Though the house has an inside toilet, Les never could kick the habit of going outside to pee. It isnt just for that, though, that he leaves the house and walks across the paddock to the creek or down the two-wheel track toward the woolshed or east to his grandfathers grave through the frost or the rising fog or the tepid blue-gray silence.
Les goes outside to remember who he is. He leaves the house to become the place againno longer just the lean old wreck of a man whos slept all night on the kitchen floor, or sometimes in the narrow bed, where he fell after midnight saturated with sherry. Every morning, as another man might dress, Les puts on the valley again.
So this particular morning Norm is not surprised to see Les in overalls and gumboots walking in the predawn like some condemned man across the paddock, making for the sheoaks on Waterfall Creek. A dozen roos and some Bennetts wallabies closer to the crossing have their heads down grazing, and when Les walks through, none of them raises its head, none of them shifts or shoots him a glance. Les passes among them like a ghost, like an understanding they share, an aspect of the mornings ritual. Norm watches from the window of the front room as Les walks to the river to check its height and to splash his face and wet his hair and to drink in that sweet water, and then Norm watches the old man come back the way he went out, straight through the animals, as though he were no one at all. At the top of the stairs Les kicks off his boots and comes into the house in his socks and clears his throat.
Yoused better rouse yourselves before the days half gone, Les calls out from the hall. Thought you said you wanted to catch some fish. This is for Norms son Ross and the woman hes brought here this time, and for Rosss goodfornothing mate whos snoring down the back. Then Norm walks into the kitchen in his shorts and a jumper and Les sees him and winks. Morning boy, he says.
While his stepfather fixes tea and cuts slabs of bacon and drops them in the pan on the stove, Norm decides to test a notion. He goes out to the hall where Les hangs his overalls and he pulls some on and rolls up their gray legs and arms and buttons them; he pulls on Less boots and he shuffles down two steps from the porch to the drive; he hitches up the overalls and straddles the top rail and follows Less trail across the paddock. Ten feet along, a dozen roos and nine or ten wallabies raise their heads and freeze. Norm slows and tries to shuffle in Less way, but hes fooling no one. Three more strides and twenty-one animals turn and bound away. Not panicked; more disappointed than anything. Norms been coming to the valley since Les cut the road in, but Norm isnt what the valley is and he knows he never will be. Hes a part-time predator in some ill-fitting pieces of the mornings clothing.
The roos disappear into the timber, and Norm turns for home. They can see you, boy. They can smell the big smoke on you, says Les, when Norm tells him whats happened. You gotta come from here like they do, before they stop actually seein you.
WHY I CAME AND WHEN
I came to the plateau in the winter of 98. A place a thousand meters in the air, a hundred ks west of the city. Not far west, but far enough. A world of sandstone and eucalypt and unregenerate weather, a place just fallen from the sky. The pitch of the night and the closeness of the stars within it and the sky asleep in the valleys at dawn: I came for that, and for the faces of the vermilion stone that no one would ever own. And I stayed because there was real estate here, nonetheless, in all this inalienable wilderness, that even I could afford.
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