Maggie McKellar

Obviously, the fact that the dictionary is in there is kind of the backbone of it.

But it feels like an enormous act of generosity to be given the Aboriginal names of the places and the beings, the birds.

And I really loved all that.

The

smell of the rain hitting the earth and the sounds of the black cockatoos.

And yeah, it's a really wonderful evocation of place, which in some ways, as we might talk about later, has a lot of connections with my brilliant career, what Miles was trying to do in 1901.

Yes, exactly.

I thought that it was very clever what she was doing.

It's like she was stating a truth in using terms like the Massacre Plains and Prosperous and Southerly House.

And I found that very effective.

And also, interestingly, it picks up again on the way that Miles Franklin does a similar thing.

She's very playful with place names.

And so though there was a deadly seriousness to it, it also brought a kind of, I think you mentioned before, there's a lightness to this novel.

So there's Vegemite Valley, I think, and the suburb of Minty.

And I think the effect of it was,

on me anyway, was to show how paper thin one culture's understanding of place was compared to another's.

And, yeah, I think that goes back to that sense that we're being allowed to understand a layer of history that...

that it's a privilege to gain an insight and knowledge into.

Yeah, and it also could be any place in Australia.

So that although the Wiradjuri words are so specific to place, the history in not saying this is Wagga or this is Dubbo or this is Parks or wherever, the history, you can read it across the whole landscape, I think.