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Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-57131-320-1
Pages: 256
Publish Date: Dec, 2009
Genre: Nonfiction
The Blue Plateau
An Australian Pastoral
BY Mark Tredinnick
At the farthest extent of Australia’s Blue Mountains, at the threshold of the country’s arid interior, the Blue Plateau reveals the vagaries of a changing climate: the droughts last longer, the seasons change less, the fires burn hotter and more often. Here, Mark Tredinnick learned what it means to fall in love with a home.
Only by listening to both the people and the land did Mark Tredinnick discover the true soul of this transformative place. That soul resonates throughout.
The Blue Plateau as an intricate mixture of past and present. 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 eucalypt 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.
The Blue Plateau poignantly magnifies the liminal state of a landscape and its inhabitants. 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—Mark Tredinnick plumbs the depths of people’s relationship to a world in transition.
"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"One of the wisest, most gifted and ingenious writers you could hope to find."
—Michael Pollan"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."
—William Kittredge"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"Tredinnick's book requires patience; readers may find themselves in a temporal thicket as several pasts mingle with an elusive present. Absorbed slowly, as a pastoral 'landscape of loss' and 'experiment in seeing and listening,' the book richly rewards that patience."
—Publishers Weekly"Tredinnick’s mission in this strikingly beautiful testimony to the power of place is to convey the texture and ambiance of the Blue Plateau, and his spangled sentences glide like creeks around mighty eucalyptus, humble homes, and rough terrain marked by his neighbors’ stories of hard work, deprivation, stoicism, miraculous survival, and tragic death. . . . In this exquisite meshing of landscape and language, Tredinnick gives voice to the spirit of a place where longing and change are writ large."
—Booklist
