I’m starting with Virginia ...

I’m starting with Virginia, who was, and sometimes still is, a feminist icon. She was also both a damn good writer and commentator on writing, even if occasionally in both her fiction and her essays her narration can be on the turgid side.

“The art of writing … can be learnt of course to some extent by reading—it is impossible to read too much; but much more drastically and effectively by imagining that one is not oneself but somebody different.” Virginia Woolf, ‘A letter to a young poet’, 1932

I’ve just returned from throwing my mother a party for a big birthday (she turned 95, is very likely to have a bigger birthday – she’s still out walking literally kilometres every day). My partner and I drove up from the Blue Mountains to the edge of Brisbane via the ‘coast road’ - which is no longer related to sand and sea but mimics an extended, misplaced airport runway completely devoid of any residual romance that attaches to swift, seemingly impossible winged travel. Driving and driving, we listened to Kate Holden’s ‘The Winter Road’.

In ‘Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown’ - one of my favourite essays ever – Woolf suggests that there’s no pre-given formula for writing, that, as times/cultures change, writing - its tools, its ways of perceiving, in particular its manifesting of character - will, or must, change. Unlike Woolf, whose metier was character, I’m a landscape person, a place person. It’s not simply the different appearances places can have – seaside, mountain, desert, city, town, isolated rural, etc. The sounds, the smells, the movement of creatures and wind, the

touchable textures, the nuance of foliage or building, the light, oh the light … these are what most effectively inspire me to do as Woolf suggests, to imagine myself not as myself, but as someone who might think, act, feel, behave, love, hate, read and be read in a different way.

The Winter Road – ‘it is impossible to read too much’ as Woolf also says – is a book worth plugging if you’d like to experience both landscape and character differently from every previous perception you’ve held dear.

My partner and I returned inland, wending through tiny towns, arguing companionably enough about who got to drive the more difficult stretches, and detouring to the scene of the central incident in The Winter Road. A dirt track, a fence, a few spindly trees patchily secreting the most desolate, most monocultural, least creature-rich, most enormous paddock I could ever have imagined. Did the comparatively tiny space where the terrible incident happened have an energy? It felt like it did.

The Winter Road changed forever how I will perceive the landscape around Moree, NSW. It’s changed forever my understanding of the intersection of large scale, industrialised ‘farming’ and environmental and climate desecration. And it’s introduced a new way of thinking about characters who are not me. Congratulations to Kate Holden. And read it, readers!