The Blue Plateau
A Landscape Memoir
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
'I came to the plateau in the winter of ninety-eight. A place a thousand metres in the air ... a world of sandstone and eucalypt and unregenerate weather, a place just fallen from the sky ...'
The Blue Plateau is a lyrical natural history of the Blue Mountains, and a memoir of one man's attempt to belong there. An inspired meditation on the contours of the land and its people, of time and place and family, the rhythms of nature and the rhythms of friendship, it is a book of many belongings.
Here you will meet the plateau's first people; you will meet Les and Henryk and Jim; you will walk the Kedumba and the Kanimbla in drought and fire and flood.
Evocative and deeply moving, The Blue Plateau is a poet's story of an astonishing place and a loving portrait of home.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
