The Blue Plateau

July 20, 2009
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.

August 1, 2009
Historical reflection and meditative celebration of a plateau in Australia's Blue Mountains.

"This book is an act of wondering and guesswork about the life of a piece of country," writes Australian poet and writing instructor Tredinnick (Writing Well, 2008, etc.). The author makes some serious headway toward understanding as he takes the measure of the plateau and two of its valleys, Kanimbla and Kedumba."The plateau is a slab of sandstone laid down by rivers, solidified, dead, buried, and risen again, and crazed by time and subsequent streams," writes Tredinnick. Geology figures heavily in this study, as do the people who have found their own bit of paradise in this marginal land. Take Les, for example, a denizen of Kedumba, who loved the valley,"but didn't spend too much time liking it. Les was in the valley the way the weather was…The way the light is in the air." The author offers many moments of lovely, compressed reflection, though he occasionally gets lost in wordplay—the plateau"turned itself into itself…by ceasing to be what it was";"Home is the sayer and the said and above all it is the saying." On the whole, however, 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.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

October 15, 2009
Poet and teacher Tredinnick moved west of Sydney, Australia, to the Blue Plateau in 1998. Newly married, he was profoundly curious about the human and natural history of this place of mountains, valleys, and the glorious, light-catching plateau; this land of wind, storms, fires, and droughts growing more severe as climate change accelerates. Tredinnicks 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. Tredinnick is an ardent listener and observer, attentive to animals, people, and weather as he reads deep time in the narrative arc of stone, immerses himself in old photographs and diaries, senses that the land wants to be known, and muses over the dream of belonging. In this exquisite meshing of landscape and language, Tredinnick gives voice to the spirit of a place where longing and change are writ large.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)