The Blue Plateau: An Australian Pastoral

by Mark Tredinnick

Overview

At the farthest extent of Australia’s Blue Mountains, on the threshold of the country’s 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, Tredinnick’s 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 people’s relationship to a world in transition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781571313201
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	10/01/2009
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)

Editorial Reviews

“One of the wisest, most gifted and ingenious writers you could hope to find.”
—Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma

“Blue escarpment, floods in the bottoms, a “red steer” wild fire, logging, pasturing, sod walled homes, generations evolving and perishing—Australian writer Mark Tredinnick tells us a vivid weave of stories which add up to a story of homeland, his for some years, and along the way he illustrates the complex ways we come to a sense of place, rural or downtown. The Blue Plateau is a gift; a guide to understanding all of us, everywhere; one of those books you read slowly, so it will last, and this one will. This one will be around.”
—Bill Kittredge, author of The Willow Field and The Next Rodeo

"Absorbed slowly, as a pastoral “landscape of loss” and “experiment in seeing and listening,” the book richly rewards that patience." — Publishers Weekly (Oct.)

"In this exquisite meshing of landscape and language, Tredinnick gives voice to the spirit of a place where longing and change are writ large." —Donna Seaman, Booklist

"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

From the Publisher

Historical reflection and meditative celebration of a plateau in Australia's Blue Mountains. "This book is an act of wondering and guesswork about the life of a piece of country," writes Australian poet and writing instructor Tredinnick (Writing Well, 2008, etc.). The author makes some serious headway toward understanding as he takes the measure of the plateau and two of its valleys, Kanimbla and Kedumba. "The plateau is a slab of sandstone laid down by rivers, solidified, dead, buried, and risen again, and crazed by time and subsequent streams," writes Tredinnick. Geology figures heavily in this study, as do the people who have found their own bit of paradise in this marginal land. Take Les, for example, a denizen of Kedumba, who loved the valley, "but didn't spend too much time liking it. Les was in the valley the way the weather was . . . The way the light is in the air." The author offers many moments of lovely, compressed reflection, though he occasionally gets lost in wordplay-the plateau "turned itself into itself . . . by ceasing to be what it was"; "Home is the sayer and the said and above all it is the saying." On the whole, however, Tredinnick's snapshots convey an intuitive, emotional heft. The author is also a crack natural historian who knows a brumby from a bullock, out there in the scribbly gum and hanging swamps. Tredinnick may not have been born in one of the valleys' huts, but you would never know it from his elemental intimacy.

Kirkus Reviews