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.
From The Blue Plateau:
"Home is a verb. Home is the conversation we make with what, and
whom, we say we love; a conversation about who we are and always were.
Home is a word for the ecology of belonging, and it includes deposition
and erosion, the wet and the dry and the cold and the wind; it includes
the making and the unmaking, the coming and the going, and it isn't
always happy. Sometimes it rains, and sometimes it burns, and sometimes
it falls and you fall with it."
Read a new excerpt from The Blue Plateau at Terrain.org
Author's Bio:In collaboration with authors such as Barry Lopez, Michael Pollan, and Richard Nelson, Mark Tredinnick has produced numerous anthologies, guest-edited literary journals, and presided at international conferences on writing and the environment. His honors include the Newcastle Poetry Prize, the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, the Calibre Essay Prize, the Blake Poetry Prize, and the Wildcare Nature Writing Prize. His credits include two books on writing: The Little Red Writing Book—published in the U.S. and U.K. as Writing Well (Cambridge, 2008)—and The Little Green Grammar Book; and two books on environmental literature: The Land's Wild Music (Trinity, 2005), and A Place on Earth, (Counterpoint, 2005). He lives in Burradoo, Australia.
Quotes:"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
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Price:
$ 16.00
Binding: Paperback
Availability In Stock: 249
Available Immediately
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published: 2009
Size: 5.5 x 8.5
Genre: Nonfiction/Nature/Memoir
Pages: 256 pp
ISBN: 9781571313201
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