The ABC reports that Aussie writer, Carrie Tiffany, is shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction for her debut novel Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living.

Tiffany’s book is about how people understand the land they live on. The Age reports that “Carrie Tiffany doesn’t see the landscape the same way as the rest of us.” She’s worked as a park ranger and in an interview for the Age she tells of a time she went to see an Mutitjulu elder in the heart of the Australian desert. She explains: “I was never going to understand this place like he does because he can feel it through the soles of his feet.”

One’s relationship with the land has occupied my thoughts too and I’m also writing about it in my novel, Palimpsest. At one point, the protagonist attempts to find some connection to the land of her ancestors and on a visit to one of the ancient shrines takes off her shoes and walks barefoot hoping somehow to mingle, as it were, with the land beneath her.

I’m in a unique situation to contemplate connection to land as I belong to two lands - the Australian and the Greek. My connection to the former is purely superficial - as a child of migrants invited to claim flat land, declared Terra nullius and to create a home. My connection to the latter is full and layered. There are connections everywhere, footprints, evidence of ancestors.

I wrote a poem with this in mind….

Seduction

For Nikos Kazantzakis

We threw culture at each other; a game, we flirted
with latent patriotisms. My country

was young; pronounced a fresh culture
of borrowed foods, cloned street names and epigonic
characters from everywhere but there,
in only two-hundred years.

You liked the freedom this gave me,
the bold optimism a chameleon must feel
when it makes foreign spaces home; the relief
of having so little history written.

Your culture was so
old: memories
everywhere; you couldn’t dig up a garden
patch without finding a brass ring, a puzzle
of pottery, a marble finger.

Even filthy suburban streets carried
the names of mortals who’d battled, like the gods
before them, and slipped
into your fat history books, forever.

In the city, hundreds of street corners surprise
you with the temple’s pale skeleton;
a sneak of cracked
column in the gap between
grey walls. Your past is also a gap
between your ancient and your modern.
Even history splits you in two.

I asked, how did you inherit all this?
I meant, you unworthy heir.
I wanted you self-made,
like the men in my country, slipping new identities
over terra nullius facades.

There is no gap, you answered. It’s a palimpsest.
To prove it, you invited me to your skin. I scraped
your neck and found Kolokotroni. I scraped
a little more, fragments of Alexander,
and more, some
Socrates.

…

Speaking of Australian authors writing about the land — I’ve lost touch with the Australian lit scene, but the last purchase of books interestingly resulted in three novels concerned with land and place and history.

1.

Nicholas Angel Drown Them in the Sea

From the back cover:

Drown them in the Sea tells a compellingly honest story of the challenges and hardships of farming life in Australia. In vivid, vital language, Nicholas Angel captures both devastated landscape and human desire in this powerfully authentic evocation of life on the land.

Available as an eBook and a real book from Amazon.

2.

Danielle Wood The Alphabet of Light and Dark

From the publisher:

Melding personal, family and colonial history, Wood’s evocative and lyrical prose explores the past and place, searching and belonging, love, loss and grief. The Alphabet of Light and Dark is more than an historical novel; it’s a novel about history.

Available from Amazon, Australian publisher Allen & Unwin, and from eBook.

3.

Andrew McGahan The White Earth

From the publisher:

Description : A grand, pulsating novel about the power of the land and the passions of people trying to make it their own. McGahan has written a major new Australian novel.

Available from Amazon and Australian publisher Allen & Unwin.