Warning: A big old whinge ahead, so if you’d rather not read it, skip to the next paragraph.
The world is awful. The weather is awful. My back hurts, and I have a toothache and a root canal to look forward to. I have a book on the go, but it stops and starts and stops again. I am low-key vaguely miserable for no good reason. Actually, there is a good reason. It’s been a very grey winter. Usually in Castlemaine we have a fair few frosts followed by bright, sunny, cold winter days, but not this year. So for the past month or so, my pile of new novels is gathering dust, and I’m going through a phase of what I can only describe as ‘restorative reading’. Not comfort reading, which is a pot of tea and too many biscuits while lying on the couch; undemanding, familiar, maybe a bit cloying and sweet, my bestsellers of yesteryear and Elizabeth Goudge. No, this is more like sitting up straight with a bowl of nourishing soup.
I re-read three of May Sarton’s diaries, Journal of a Solitude, The House By the Sea and At Seventy and Monty Don’s The Jewel Garden and My Garden World. Kate Grenville’s Unsettled counts as well. These writers made me want to sit up a little straighter, look at the natural world around me, and to think about my home – house, garden, my home town of Castlemaine, the area of Central Victoria. They encouraged me to finally investigate the signs of spring, even getting outside on the odd occasion when the rain held off. I walked around the block, into town, did the circuit of the
Botanical Gardens. I pulled some weeds, I bought some dill and chive seedlings. Now I am scouting out new growth, the flowers and blossoms and green shoots; I am trying to encourage myself into a few green shoots as well.
I can’t report on any finished books right now. It’s time to get cracking on my two book group novels, though I know I will be forgiven if I don’t make it to the end. I’m taking my time with Alan Garner’s Powsels and Thrums and The Voice That Thunders. Each essay deserves a little break between the next, time to think and reflect. And Roger Deakin’s Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees and Vita Sackville-West’s Sissinghurst by Vita Sackville-West and Sarah Raven demand pauses as well.
There’s a common thread here, which is a strong sense of place, and that place is England. After our book group discussion of Unsettled, I was talking to Norman, one of our members, and I commented that the landscape in which I feel most at home is right here. The undramatic hills and valleys, the creeks, the paddocks and farms and tracks are set in among tracts of native forest, but you’ll see many non-native – and I guess, feral – trees and plants when you drive along the country roads. Hawthorn, wild 
plum, briar roses, gorse, broom, clumps of jonquils and daffodils. There are occasionally magnificent oak trees in some of the paddocks, and of course cypress windbreaks. Even the bush, which has regrown after the mining era, is only wild-ish, because it so often contains mine shafts and mounds of disturbed soil and rock, rubbish dumps and the ruins of small dwellings.
I said to Norman that I’d been wondering whether it is some atavistic thing, inherited along with hazel eyes and skin that burns in the sun. He offered another explanation.
He said that we were probably in the last generation of children brought up almost exclusively on English culture. When I thought about it, I agreed. My early diet was fairy tales and English children’s books like The Wind in the Willows, The Secret Garden and The Railway Children. When I could read for myself, it was The Weirdstone of Brisengamen, The Dark is Rising trilogy, the Old Knowe series and so many more. Did they form my inner landscape?
Something to think about…