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.

Reviews

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.)
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