A middle-aged businessman whose marriage has failed realizes the emptiness of his life, and in an effort to find himself he goes back to the Western Australian wheat country where he had once been happy. Working alone at a siding where wheat is stored, he is at first content with his solitary existence in the heat and silence of the lonely countryside. His only near neighbours are a storekeeper and his wife, and he finds himself drawn to the woman by an instinctive understanding, and by his sympathy for her unhappiness with her brutal and unfaithful husband. The love between them grows in depth and tenderness, but the situation carries within it the seeds of violence and disaster.
This is an unusual and compelling novel, distinguished by the qualities that have already won Peter Cowan recognition as a short-story writer. Combining a quiet poetry of the earth with a sensitive exploration of human relationships and of the forces within them that fulfil or destroy, it leaves a deep and abiding impression on the mind of the reader.
Epigraph:
The picture land, the unpainted land,
Mask and bones no nearer to man that man....
-- D. B. Kerr
