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When the Spanish translation of Romulus, My Father was published, I gave a talk at the University of Barcelona in which I tried to explain how my sense of the landscape of Central Victoria affected the entire mood and tone of the book, even perhaps the rhythm of its sentences. A modified extract from that talk forms the core of what I have to say today. Understanding about deep things often comes slowly. My understanding of what I wrote five years ago is still deepening. In large part that is because I am now more deeply replanted in this area. 

Since I gave that talk in Barcelona, I have returned more frequently to this part of the country, at first as a visitor, staying at Nuggetty Cottage, a beautiful stone building owned by Al and Marjorie Smidt and built by Al. I stayed there often, twice for five-week periods, when I wrote The Philosopher's Dog, a book about our relationships to animals and to nature more generally. Nuggetty Cottage is set amongst granite boulders. To the north the Rock of Ages rises dramatically; to the east and more gently, a wooded hill known (I think) as The Commons, which borders the Maldon golf course. At Nuggetty  Cottage I came to appreciate, to a degree I had not before, the kind of landscape that one would, I suppose, call rocky, grassy woodland – woodland because the trees are not dense enough to be called a forest. 

As a I child I had played on the treeless hills that rise to the north east of Waldron’s Lane, between Maldon and Baringhup, hills that belonged then to the Waldron family. They were a marvelous playground for children of primary school age, but their beauty was invisible to me, partly because I was only nine or ten years old, and partly because I felt that many of the local farmers were contemptuous of them. They called Alan Waldron Dukey Waldron because he had studied at Dukey Agricultural College, a fact that inspired disdain rather than admiration in them. They seemed to believe that rock farming – as they called what Alan did – was about all that such a qualification was good for. 

During one of the five-week periods I stayed at Nuggetty cottage, I swam in Cairn Curran almost every day until the algae became so noxious that I could no longer stand it. My favourite spot was just under the marvellous boulder strewn hill that stands opposite the smaller wall of the dam and rises above the ugly car park that was recently built near to the boat ramp. It was the same hill on which, as a boy of eleven, I awakened to the beauty of nature. Later I will say more about that. For the moment I want only to say that when I was a boy of eleven on that hill, wonderstruck by nature's beauty, my eyes turned repeatedly away from the hill across the, then expansive, waters of cairn Curran to the Moolort planes where I lived. But when I swam under it over forty years later my attention was on the hill and its grasses and boulders. Of course I had always known – as everyone does – that Central Victoria is not just one landscape, but swimming under that hill, then returning to Nuggetty Cottage, I realised in my heart as well as in my head, that central Victoria is made up of at least three wonderful and different landscapes: the plains, the small rocky hills, relatively bare of trees, and the larger, wooded rocky hills of which the Rock of Ages and Mount Tarrengower are locally the most loved examples. Perhaps the more verdant gentle hills that reach from Clunes to Ballarat should constitute a fourth. There are, I am sure, more scientific ways of determining the varieties of landscape and of setting the boundaries of central Victoria. For many people, however, the landscapes that I have described, different though they are from one another, constitute an aesthetic and spiritual unity that determines their sense of central Victoria. 

You will understand, then, how lucky my wife, Yael, and I felt when, just over a year ago, we built a house on a hill that divides the plains from the rocky outcrops to the west of Tarrengower. Garry Orchard and Guy Peters, both fine builders, built it. In my experience only my father has proved a better craftsman than Garry. How we came by that land, sold to me by Beth Roberts nee Beth Thomas, with whom I went to Baringhup Primary School, is itself marvelous a tale of serendipity, but one to be told on another occasion. Each day we are on the land, Yael and I wonder afresh at its beauty. Living there, we understand only to well the profound contentment to be derived from caring for the land, from restoring to it vegetation, and eventually, we hope, bird life, as  though they were children that had been lost to it 

Because, Yael and I live here for part of the year I have thought more about the people of the region – not just in themselves, but also in their relation to the landscape – how they shaped it and were in turn shaped by it and how that reciprocal shaping affected me, growing up among such people. Most of them are dead, but let me nonetheless recall some of their names. Ken Bryant and his wife Margery many times offered to look after me, growing up as I did without a mother. My father always declined their offer, but he was proud and grateful that it had been made. Their son John, with whom I went to school, and his wife Sally now own the land on which lie the ruins of the house I grew up in. They show good-natured tolerance of the school children and others who visit the ruins now that the book is on the VCE list.  Keith Laity often drove my family – especially my mother - from Maldon to Baringhup in his FJ taxi and his wife Moira, still very much alive, sometimes did the same. Neil Mikelson told me with tears in his eye, outside the church in which I had delivered the eulogy at my father’s funeral,” “Every word you said was true, Your father saved my life”. Tom Lillie allowed my father to use his blacksmith shop in which my father made wrought iron furniture. Tom’s wife Mary and her sister Jane Collard were wonderfully kind to me when I  was much in need of a woman’s attentiveness.  Greg Lillie, admittedly a distant relative to Tom, but a relative nonetheless, now farms much of our property. Roy Allan and his wife were very kind to my father. He always appreciated it. Their son Terry, with whom I went to school, and his wife Thea, generously followed my fortunes over the years and kept in touch. Terry, one time farmer, designer extraordinaire of feeders for life stock and local poet, honored me when he told me that reading Romulus, My Father had transformed his sense of the summer landscape. Dear Louis McPherson sheared sheep on the property on which I lived when I was a boy, and last year cut wood for us, the first batch for our new home.

Last November I published a book length essay, Breach of Trust: Truth, Morality and Politics, in which I recalled these and other people, though not by name. I did so as part of a protest against some commentators in the Murdoch press – The Australian, the Sun Herald, the Daily Telegraph in Sydney – whom I regard as trouble makers because they exploit, exaggerate and harden a division between people whom they call the elites – sauvignon blanc and latte drinking, inner city left liberals and people whom they call ordinary Australians. Knowing that they classified me as belonging to the former group, I devoted a chapter of my essay to how deeply I had been formed by my boyhood in Central Victoria.  Most of the values that informed the essay, I wrote, were values I learnt then. 

Some of those values - honesty; loyalty, courage, charity (taken as a preparedness to help those in need) and a capacity for hard work- are universal, but here, in Central Victoria, they are lived in the colors and spoken in the accent of the landscape as that nourished and marked indelibly the souls of many who have loved it. The matter is complicated in my case, in a way that I will try to explain later, by the fact that I saw the landscape through the eyes of my father's European fatalism.  

More often than not I’m described as an Australian philosopher. There is a trivial sense in which that is true. Though I’ve lived in England for as many years as I have in Australia, I’m an Australian citizen. In the sense in which people mean it, however, it’s false because insofar as there is a distinctive Australian philosophical tradition, it is alien to me and I to it. My philosophical roots are much more European, modulated by the English analytical tradition which I hope makes my work more rigorous and more plainly written than the work of most Continental European philosophers. But there is another sense in which it is true – very deeply true - that I am an Australian philosopher. Commenting on my work, many people have remarked that it speaks with a distinctive voice. That voice was formed here, growing up as I did in this landscape, with my father, with his friend Pantelimon Hora and with the people of central Victoria.  

So it is this complex, mysterious, certainly profound, interaction between the human spirit and the landscape that I have again been thinking about since I became re-rooted here in Central Victoria.  When Viv Markham invited me to speak at the Winter Festival, I agreed because I wanted to share these thoughts with you, to seek your opinion on them in discussion, but I confess I also had a gently polemical reason. With some anxiety I’ve noted the degree to which the impulse to extensive tree planting threatens to transform radically the landscape of the region  - to transform parts of it (the long sweep of grasses and the relatively bare rocky ridges, for example) beyond recognition. If I am even half right about the connection between landscape and sensibility, between landscape and the locally inflected character of the people who live in it, then the radical transformation of this central Victorian landscape will change the people of the region. 

Many of the reasons why people want to plant trees – even why they want to plant lots of them – are worth applauding. I don’t want to talk about them in detail today, and anyhow, I freely confess my ecological literacy is not very impressive. I confess it because its true and I confess it freely because I came here, not for combat, but for discussion. To that end, I want to suggest to you that the reasons why people plant trees will look different according to the perspective from which one sees those reasons. There are many perspectives, but today I want to talk about only two of them. They are, I think, the most important, and at the crux they clash irreconcilably.  

The first is a perspective from which it looks to be an ideal to restore the landscape, as near as reality will allow, to what it was in the late 18^th century. It’s a powerful ideal – for many people, romantic and intoxicating. In its light, attempts to restore the landscape to what it was in, say, the days before settlement, can look like the expression of the only true love for the landscape because it tries, as much as it is possible, to see the landscape independently of human concerns and interests.  It can seem like the only perspective from which love can rightly be seen as truly responsive to the independent character and needs of the beloved. People whose emotions are aroused by seeing things from this perspective are understandably angry about the arrogant and ignorant exploitation of the earth and its creaturs by human beings. Sometimes they talk about the rape of the earth. Then a touch of misanthropy often disfigures their recommendations. Everyone recognizes, of course, that it is impossible to restore the land to its state prior to settlement, even if we could be sure how it was then, but for people whose thoughts and emotions have been captured by it, the ideal that I have sketched is a standard in whose light they judge our aspirations and efforts. 

It is an interesting and difficult question: how should we properly characterize what it would be to have a concern for nature that is not distorted by our human concerns and interests - whether it be a concern for animals and birds and insects or for the land itself? In The Philosopher's Dog I wrestle with this and suggest that we should not be tempted to talk of the rights of nature –of the rights of trees, for example. Instead, we should look closely at what it means to love the natural world, or some part of it. But it is, I believe, a false conception of a love of nature that is not exploitative or otherwise disfigured by human interests, to think that it requires us to restore it to how it was before it engaged our complex concerns and needs - as false as thinking that a selfless love of human beings – or animas for that matter - is possible only when one ceases to need them. The second perspective – the one that I recommend to you - starts with a love of what there is. True – let me state this loud and clear - it is a love of a wounded land. Real love will tenderly seek to heal those wounds. And just as it would be a travesty of love for a man to tend the wounds of his beloved only because they make her ugly in his sight, so it would be a travesty of love for the land to care for its wounds – wounds caused by erosion and salination, for example – because those wounds make the landscape offensive to look at. It is equally a travesty of love, however, to try to make the beloved into someone else – her great grandmother for example. The argument, then, between the two perspectives I have sketched, is largely over whether attempts to transform the landscape to how it was before settlement are attempt to allow the landscape to be most truly herself, or whether they are misbegotten attempts to make her like one of her distant ancestors.  

Be that as it may: I hope that it is now clear that when I speak of a love of the beauty of the land, I do not intend to contrast that with a love of the land. I am not recommending a narrowly aesthetic enjoyment of it. But like many loves, the love of the land is mediated by a response to its beauty. That is why caring for it - restoring natural grasses, controlling weeds, planting trees, for example - engenders a quiet joy that could never be captured adequately just by talk about the visual consequences of all this. But from this second perspective, the lover of the land, like the true lover of a natural language, will occasionally welcome and absorb foreigners. 

For reasons, I don’t understand, the first perspective seems to find more favor in Australia than in Britain or Europe. Could one imagine the English wanting to reforest the bare hills of the Lake District or the Tuscans wanting to do the same to the hills around Florence? And can one imagine the English without their distinctively humanized local landscapes, or the Italians without theirs? For them, to live in radically reforested lands would be like being uprooted from their lands, as if they had been forced to live elsewhere, in exile. 

I want now to speak more concretely about how the landscape of this region shaped my sensibility. First, however, I must sketch the outlines of the story I told in Romulus, My Father. 

My father was born in 1922 in a Romanian speaking part of Yugoslavia. When he was thirteen he fled his home and trained to become a blacksmith. Just before War II broke out he went to Germany where he believed he could best practice his trade. Trapped there by the war, he met and fell in love with my mother, Christine, at the time a girl of 16. After the war they immigrated in 1950 to Australia because they had been wrongly advised that the climate would relieve if not actually cure her severe asthma. 

Already on board ship and later in a migrant's reception camp in northern Victoria, my mother had affairs with other men, in part at least because she was already suffering from a form of mental illness – manic depression – of which promiscuity is often a symptom. Because my father was told that I was running wild, he called for me to live with him in a migrant workers camp at Baringhup where he was working on a project to build Cairn Curran reservoir. There he met and befriended two brothers, Pantelimon and Mitru Hora. Pantelimon, whom I called Hora as my father always did, became my father's dearest friend and a second father to me. Mitru, of whom I was also very fond, became my mother's lover and the father of my two half sisters. He and my mother had a desperate relationship, which ended in his suicide in Maryborough, in 1956 at the age of 27. Two years later, my mother killed herself on the eve of her thirtieth birthday. My father and I lived for ten years together in Frogmore, a derelict farmhouse, six kilometers west of Baringhup. It had no electricity, or running water. For all the time we lived there we cooked on a one-burner paraffin stove and read by the light of a paraffin lamp. Rats lived under the house when we first moved there and not long after long brown snakes, amongst the most poisonous in the world, ate the rats and lived under the house in their places. Only when my father started a poultry farm, did the snakes leave, frightened off by our free roaming hens. Most of the dramatic incidents of the book occurred when we lived there. The film of the book -they hope to start shooting next January – will be entirely of that period, not the latter period of my father’s life in Maryborough. It will be shot on location. Because the town is almost unchanged from the time of my boyhood, Maldon will figure prominently in the film. 

I wrote the first draft of Romulus in a rush, in three very intense weeks, without really thinking of what I was doing. I just wrote furiously. When I came to revise it and to reflect on what I had done I thought of what I had written as a kind of tragic poem. In the book I say something about tragedy as a literary genre and I link my sense of it as a young man to the landscape I grew up in. Pleading for your patience I’ll try to explain why  

I was four when I came to Australia with my parents in 1950. At the time, assisted passage was granted to European immigrants provided they agreed to work wherever they were sent and at jobs of the government's choosing. My father, as I said, was sent to Baringhup to dam the Loddon River. There, he and I lived in a camp for a year or so until we moved to Frogmore where we lived for the next ten years.   

My parents were hostile to the landscape and were ill at ease in it. This is how I describe the landscape and a characteristic European response to it early in the book. 

Although the landscape is one of rare beauty, to a European or English eye it seems desolate, and even after more than forty years my father could not become reconciled to it. He longed for the generous and soft European foliage, but the eucalyptus of Baringhup, scraggy except for the noble Redgums on the riverbank, seemed symbols of deprivation and barrenness. In this he was typical of many of the immigrants whose eyes looked directly to the foliage and always turned away offended. Even the wonderful summer smell of eucalyptus attracted them only because it promised useful oil.

My mother disliked the landscape even more than my father did and she was never at ease in it. It was alien to her and she seemed alien to it. A troubled, intense, passionate and cultured city girl from Central Europe, she showed form the beginning signs of a psychological illness that would prove tragic. It was foolish for my father and me to hope that she could settle in a derelict farmhouse in a harsh landscape that aggravated her torment. She tried a number of times to kill herself before she succeeded. I describe her return from hospital after one suicide attempt at Frogmore.  

The road from Baringhup to Moolort was 500 metres from Frogmore, connected to the house by a rough track. The taxi that brought my mother from Maldon left her at the junction of the road and the track, probably at her request. I first saw her when she was 200 metres or so from the house, alone, small, frail, walking with an uncertain gait and distracted air. In that vast landscape with only crude wire fences and a rough track to mark a human impression on it she appeared forsaken. She looked to me as though she had returned from the dead, unsure about the value of the achievement.

She made light of her attempted suicide to me, but her vivacity was gone. Preoccupied and uncommunicative, she lay in bed most days except for an hour or two when she went for walks. One evening when she did not return from her walk, my father and I searched the paddocks calling to her, but heard no answer. Again my father ran to Lillie's from where he phoned the police in Maldon. He feared she had killed herself. Later that night I stood knee-deep in the waters of a nearby swamp lit by searchlights as the police, my father, Lillie and others searched for her body. They did not find her and at about 3 a.m. everyone went home. In the morning she came home, bleeding from a deep triangular cut in her shins. She said she had injured herself falling over a log and, dispirited, had spent the night sleeping beside it. She went to bed offering no explanation, then or ever. 

Like most children, I think, I had little sense of the aesthetic character of my surroundings. That changed dramatically when I was eleven. 

I liked living in the country and especially liked farm animals, but not in the way farm boys did. Conscious of this and of the fact that I was the only boy in the area who did not kill rabbits even though they were a terrible pest, I took the Bantam motorbike and my father's rifle and went to a hill on the far side of Cairn Curran to shoot rabbits for our dinner and for the dog

I reached the hill in the mid-afternoon. For the first time in my life I was really alive to beauty, receiving a kind of shock from it. I had absorbed my father’s attitude to the countryside, especially to its scraggy trees, because he talked so often of the beautiful trees of Europe. But now, for me, the key to the beauty of the native trees lay in the light that so sharply delineated them against a dark blue sky. Possessed of that key, my perception of the landscape changed radically as when one sees the second image in an ambiguous drawing. The scraggy shapes and sparse foliage actually become the foci for my sense of its beauty and everything else fell into place - the primitive hills, the unsealed roads with their surfaces ranging from white through yellow to brown, looking as though they had been especially dusted to match the high, summer-colored grasses. It seemed to have a special beauty, disguised until I was ready for it; not a low and primitive form for which I had to make allowances, but subtle and refined. It was as though God had taken me to the back of his workshop and shown me something really special. It was inconceivable to me that I should now shoot a rabbit. The experience transformed my sense of life and the countryside, adding to both a sense of transcendence.  

My feel for the beauty of the countryside was, I suspect, intensified by the freedom I enjoyed in it. 

Riding the motorbike that summer, through the hot yellow grasslands of central Victoria and around the expansive waters of Cairn Curran, wearing only shorts and sandals, crystallized in me a sense of freedom that I possessed earlier, but never so fully, and which I always associate with that time in the country. I felt I could do anything provided I was respectful of others. The law and other kinds of regulations seemed only rules of thumb, regulative ideals, to be interpreted by individuals according to circumstances and constrained by goodwill and commonsense. From my father and from Hora I had already acquired a sense that only morality was absolute because some of its demands were non-negotiable. But I was too young to be troubled by that. I was eleven years old, riding my father's motorbike to collect the mail and visit friends, yet no one was troubled by this breach of the law. It left me with a sad, haunting image of a freedom, impossible now to realize, and which even then the world could barely afford.  

In 1972 I went to live England and was immediately struck by its humanized countryside, the hedgerows, the dry stonewalls, the pretty, sometimes beautiful, villages. It could hardly have been more different from the landscape through which my mother walked when she came home from hospital in Maldon. At first it seemed strange – in the way it does to Australians, small and too pretty, but it didn’t take me long to become attracted to its humanised quality, even though I longed for wilderness that had created a deep impression on me in my early twenties in Australia. I was a climber in those days. In summer I would go to wild places to find cliffs to climb and in winter to even wilder places in the mountains on the mainland and in Tasmania, in usually fruitless searches for ice on which to practice ice-climbing technique. Even when I climbed, as I did often, in Scotland in winter - ferocious though the actually climbing was, some of the technically hardest routes in the world, just iced up rock climbs really - for some years it seemed to me to be a joke to call even the remote parts of Scotland wilderness. If you were lost in winter you had only to take a compass bearing in any direction and you would find civilisation provided only that you didn’t walk off a cliff or succumb to exposure.  In summer you could follow a sheep. In Australia it was quite different.  Range after range of forested mountains, with their dense undergrowth, would exhaust one within a couples hours were you unlucky to get tangled up in it. In winter you had almost no chance. In The Philosophers Dog, in a chapter entitled Sacred places, I compare the dramatic savagery of the European with the far more dangerous savagery of the Tasmanian wilderness in winter. 

As well as climbing various parts of England and Scotland I went for long walks, as the English often do, in Yorkshire, Kent, Sussex, and The Lake district, through farmers fields, stopping to look at a beautiful church, to have lunch in a fine pub, to amble through a beautiful village. I marveled at how deeply the English loved their land and was impressed by the fact that intellectuals, writers and artists, often lived in small villages throughout England.   

At the time most Australian intellectuals were ill at ease in their country and with its people. Many would have found it unthinkable to live in a country town. To my surprise (because before I left Australia) I was somewhat hostile to England and things English - I quickly grew to love England. Although my father was Romanian and my mother German, I am sure my love of England and the English countryside was partly an expression of the fact that, despite my childhood love of the central Victorian landscape, my parent’s estrangement from it had made a deep impression of me. I suspect it was also because as 'New Australians’ they were sometimes the victims of humiliating condescension. Their manifest awkwardness in their environment that made them so visibly outsiders probably encouraged it. 

In 1979, 7 years after I had left, I returned to Australia for a visit and was dismayed to find that I had become estranged from the Australian landscape. I felt uneasy in it and realized that I had to some degree come to see it as my parents had, except that my response to it was conditioned by the uncanny realization that it was the landscape I had previously loved. I came really to dislike most Victorian country towns. On drives, even - or perhaps especially - in areas whose beauty no one could deny (the Great Ocean Road or Wilson’s Promontory in Victoria, for example) I longed to see a lovely village as we turned the corner, as one would in England or Europe. When I reflected on my alienation I remembered something from my childhood. Each year I used to go to the Maryborough New Year Day show where Jimmy Sharman's boxing troop was a regular feature. Local lads fought with members of Sharman's troop, who were often punch drunk Aborigines. The locals were fit and strong, it being harvest time when many of them had been humping sacks of wheat onto trucks. Almost always they knocked the hell out of those poor punch-drunk boxers. I remembered this and concluded that the brutality and the landscape were all of a piece. That distorted judgment is an indication of how much I had become alienated from the land and its people. 

After that first visit in nineteen seventy nine I often returned to Australia and was here, on leave from my work in London, for six years from 1993. Slowly I came again to appreciate Australia's delicate beauty. Not until I wrote Romulus, My Father, however, did I again see beauty in the countryside of Central Victoria. To write the first draft of the book I rented a cottage in the grounds of Palm House in Maldon, owned at the time, much to my benefit, by Albert and Anne Borg. A couple of days into my stay I visited the remains of Frogmore where I sat for some hours, remembering and thinking of what I would write. As I was driving back to Maldon, around four o’clock on a late February afternoon, unexpectedly and suddenly, I fell in love again with the countryside of my boyhood. I remember the point exactly. Roughly half way between Baringhup and where Frogmore stood there is an old windmill on a property owed now by John and Sally Bryant. Just above it, there is a small gentle hill, one of the most beautiful I have ever seen. On the Moolort side, it is almost bare. A plantation grows on the side of it that faces Cairn Curran. That year, the grass on it grew high and golden and was especially beautiful that afternoon as the wind joined with the sun to transform the hill and the paddocks below it into waves of moving grass, golden and tipped with silver. Quite suddenly the landscape seemed to me to be exquisitely beautiful just as it had when I went to shoot rabbits on the hill overlooking Cairn Curran. 

It was a joyful experience and it taught me how profoundly the landscape had affected my sensibility. I don't mean just my aesthetic sensibility. Perhaps I can convey what I do mean if I quote a passage from the book in which I describe my response to seeing my father for the first time after he had admitted himself as patient in the Ballarat Psychiatric Hospital. I was fifteen years old and Hora was with me. I hope that you will excuse me for quoting at length.

The hospital represented a foreign world to me; one whose beliefs were shaped by ideas I instinctively felt to be in conflict with those that had enabled me to understand the events of my childhood. I could no longer see my father's illness just from the perspective of our life at Frogmore. Strange though it may sound, my sense of that life, of the ideas that informed it, was given intensity and colour by the light and landscape of the area. The hills looked as old as the earth, because they were rounded by millennia and also because the grey and equally rounded granite boulders that stood amongst the long yellow grasses, sharply delineated at all times of day by the summer sun, made them look pre-historic. More than anything, however, the glorious, tall, burnt-yellow grasses (as a boy they came to my chest and sometimes over my head) moving irregularly against a deep blue sky, dominated the images of my childhood and gave colour to my freedom and also to my understanding of suffering. In the morning they inspired cheerful energy of the kind that made you whistle; at midday in partnership with an unforgiving sun and alive with insects and other creatures, they intimidated; but in the late afternoon, towards dusk, everything was softened by a light that graced the area in a melancholy beauty that could pierce one's soul . . ..

Religion, metaphysics or the notions of fate and character as they inform tragedy, were suited to that light and landscape. The assumptions of psychiatric medicine, affected as they are by psychiatry's debunking of metaphysics in its long struggle to become accepted as a science, were not. Life at Frogmore, in that landscape and under that light, nourished the sense, given to me by my father and Hora, of the contrast between the malleable laws and conventions made by human beings to reconcile and suit their many interests, and the uncompromising authority of morality, always the judge, never merely the servant of our interests. For that reason tragedy, with its calm pity for the affliction it depicts, was the genre that first attracted my passionate allegiance. I recognized in it the concepts that had illuminated the events of my childhood. They enabled me to see Mitru, my mother, my father and Vacek living amongst his boulders, as the victims of misfortune, in their different ways broken by it, but never thereby diminished.

That is why my heart broke when I saw my father in the ward before he saw us, in a room full of visibly disturbed people, some obviously insane, and he shrunken and bewildered. He had been given shock treatment and was one of those who felt it as a humiliating assault. Not everyone feels that way, but many do even when they concede that it is necessary. His pitiable state was increased by the effects of large doses of largactyl. He had not been expecting us and greeted us with surprised hesitation, ambivalent about my presence, pleased but mortified and, I think, humiliated. He protested that he was fine, that he was not really ill because he could 'speak normally' whenever he made the effort. I suspect he was quite oblivious to the pathos in that claim, because he repeated it many times to protest that he was not as ill as he might appear to be. I left the hospital changed. I had absorbed past sorrows against the sure confidence of my father's strength. I knew that, whatever was to come, I could never do so again 

I won't try to explain all that I mean in that passage, for me, one of the most important in the book.  If I did, I would fall into obscurantism. I would not write that way in a book of philosophy. Yet I am quite certain that if the landscape had not been so important to me, if I did not love it as I do still, I could not have written the book that I did. It's not just that I could not have written the passages describing the landscape with the same feeling. The entire tone and mood of the book would have been different.  

My father disliked the landscape. I loved it. But the way I loved it was determined by how he saw the world. Because I accepted and made my own his distinctively European fatalism, the light and the colours of Central Victoria became for me the light and colours of tragedy. Metaphysical doctrines of determinism are far from my mind when I speak of my father's fatalism. I mean that for him the human condition was defined by our vulnerability to misfortune. But now, when I think of it, I realize that his demeanor to the whole of life was shaped by something like the same attitude. Certainly it was to the animals he raised and cared for. He took great pleasure in them, but always his attitude to them was coloured by pity for their vulnerability and especially for their vulnerability to human cruelty. His pity extended to all of living nature, to the trees he cared for when they were stricken with disease, and even to the countryside when it was parched by drought, the grasses normally golden in summer bleached white and the earth with large cracks in it, some as wide as six inches and as deep as ten feet. Perhaps it sounds absurd, but I hoped that the story I told would be one whose events and characters would be bathed in the light and colours of that landscape. I hoped that in the telling of it I could achieve the same calm pity that I attributed to tragedy as a literary genre. 

Copyright Raimond Gaita.

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