Claire Nicholls

What can you tell me about the relationship between drawing a map and power?

And I guess it's the same case for Ireland, right?

It's the British forces who are in charge of these maps.

They're in charge of what things are named.

It's about taking away the language as well, right?

algebra it involves art cartography history linguistics folklore you know it's an incredibly complicated you had to be a renaissance man to be working on it in those times I love seeing the way your face lights up when you're talking about maps Maggie and I just think this is so amazing because five years ago you and I were talking about Shakespeare and Hamnet and now you know you've found this whole new area of interest I mean what a life you lead

Look, you're with fellow neeks here on the book show, so you're in safe hands.

So your novel is Land.

It opens in 1865 on a peninsula stretching into the Atlantic Ocean.

We have the father, Thomas, and the son, Liam.

They're out there mapping the landscape.

And then this dad character, he encounters a spring or a toba.

Is that how you pronounce it, a toba?

Tuba, yes.

What happens when he comes across this well of water?

He was calling you a neek again.

Okay, so Tomas has this experience with this well and he comes out of the cops declaring that he is going to change the way he maps the landscape.

What is the way he now wants to map and why is it so subversive?

I think this book is going to speak so much to readers here in Australia, Maggie, where we're undergoing our own project of reaching back to Indigenous names for places here in Australia, and we really are looking at our maps in a new way.

So it's fantastic that this novel speaks across continents like that.