In 1998, Tredinnick (A Place on Earth
) traveled into Australia's Blue Mountains to delve into the lives and lithology of “a landscape profound with geology.” He occupies the fringes of the lives he delineates, which include families with roots in the 19th century and a mid-1980s Polish refugee eking it out in a world of drought and devastating fires. Excerpts from a local woman's laconic “twenty pocket diaries, each smaller than a pack of cigarettes” and taped conversations with chattier men lend balance to Tredinnick's alternating tones: metaphoric, meditative and occasionally textbookish. Evocative as Tredinnick's imagery often is, American readers would have been well served by some photographs of the dazzling waterfalls, the awesome crags and crevices, the unfamiliar plants and animals, even the devastating fires. Tredinnick's book requires patience; readers may find themselves in a temporal thicket as several pasts mingle with an elusive present (“I'm going to tell some stories here... and what connects them is my living for a time among them on a piece of ground where they all meet”). Absorbed slowly, as a pastoral “landscape of loss” and “experiment in seeing and listening,” the book richly rewards that patience. (Oct.)
