Barr Smith Library

I call myself a speculative fiction writer. For me, that term covers fantasy, science fiction, and horror mainly, but also magic realism, surrealism, Utopian fiction--anything, basically, that diverges from the real in a significant way, or asks the age-old question: "What if?"

I write, therefore, about things that might exist, don't exist, can't exist, will probably never exist, and often should never exist outside my head. Some people are puzzled by this. Me, I'm puzzled in return. Becoming so engrossed by an imaginary space that you forget the world around you is not only for children. We all do it; we are human because of it. Imagination is a natural and wonderful thing, and much has been spoken of it before, by brighter minds than mine.

"All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy," said Carl Jung. "What right have we then to depreciate imagination?"

Robert Heinlein was equally blunt: "To be matter of fact about the world is to blunder into fantasy -- and dull fantasy at that, as the real world is strange and wonderful."

But what we imagine is intimately entangled with what we know, what we experience. All artists are influenced by the world around them--inevitably, essentially, for that is where we get our ideas. Information comes in via our senses, rattles around in our minds for a while, then emerges again, reassembled into something new. There's no magical process, no secret trick to it. We are not inventing from scratch. It's just a matter of throwing stuff into the melting pot and letting time and chance do its work. The job of an artist is to separate the good from the bad out of what inevitably emerges, and to polish it up in order to present it in its best light.

Imagination, creativity, fantasy, is then an illusion, a magic trick. We are master jugglers, hypnotists, armed with the real and willing to use it. To render the fantastic believable, we dress it up in the quotidian: make-believe worlds that look like medieval Europe; space fleets indistinguishable from World War II navies. It's like following a recipe for a curry, containing just enough chilli but not too much. You don't want to overpower your audience.

So although I write about things that aren't real, where they come from and are steeped in the real, otherwise they simply wouldn't work. It's a complicated dance. One slip and you'll end up tangled in your own legs on the floor, looking and feeling like a fool. It's further complicated by the fact that the real world already contains books about unreal things. The temptation is very real to embed your work in this comfortable, second-hand reality--and there are plenty of books relying on such assumed knowledge. It is, in fact, a criticism of science fiction (and Capital-L Literature too, for that matter)--that you can't understand it unless you already know what the jargon or the context means. Perhaps that explains why, now at least, fantasy is the most popular of the speculative triplets. Mass-market fantasy doesn't rely on an assumed knowledge of the genre, or science, and it isn't designed to be scary. You might say, were you in a cynical frame of mind, that it's comfortable dream-fodder for the masses.

Where, then, does the Wasteland fit in? Everyday philosopher Robert Fulghum writes that, "there are places we all come from -- deep-rooty-common places -- that make us who [we] are. [...W]e disdain them or treat them lightly at our peril. We turn our backs on them at the risk of self-contempt." The wasteland I want to talk about tonight is not the usual sort of "blasted plain" found on the maps in fantasy novels, or the post-Apocalyptic wilderness of a lot of old-style SF. It's nothing other than our fair city of Adelaide, South Australia, and the life I've had here. I say this knowing full well how it's going to come across. I don't mean to sound disrespectful, although if I do, I'm not the first. Many here will have heard of Salman Rushdie's visit to Adelaide for Writers' Week in 1984. He wrote of the "grim enigma of Adelaide" in the Tatler, saying that: "Adelaide is an ideal setting for a Stephen King novel, or horror film. You know why all those films and books are always set in sleepy, conservative towns?" he asked. "Because sleepy, conservative towns are where those things happen. Exorcism, omens, shining, poltergeists. Adelaide is Amityville, or Salem, and things here go bump in the night." This is an interesting aspect of Adelaide's history, and I'm sure Mr Rushdie would only feel supported in his view by the Snowtown Murders, the horrific attacks on Adelaide Zoo animals and other sensational crimes, as written up in Susan Mitchell's recent book, All Things Bright & Beautiful: Murder in the City of Light.

However, I am not referring to this aspect of Adelaide's history, although I have used it in such stories as "The Hunting Ground," published last year in the multi-nominated collection Southern Blood.

I'm not referring, either, to the oft-quoted factoid that Adelaide is the driest city in the driest state on the driest inhabited continent on Earth (although you wouldn't think it this winter). I'm not even referring to the Adelaide many people experienced as a teenager--one in which nothing seemed new or interesting, where everyone already knew everyone else, where all the really cool stuff was happening a really long way away. I sometimes felt like I was the only person of my generation who didn't want to move to Sydney or Melbourne the very second I finished school.

I like it here. I really do, and always have. It's my home. Yes, I occasionally destroy it in my stories, but we always hurt the ones we love. My story "Ghosts of the Fall" depicts Adelaide as a flooded ruin. In it, an earthquake sets swinging the clapper of Great Fred, St Peter's cathedral's largest bell; its tolling foretells the end of the line for the city's shrinking band of survivors. In "White Christmas," a witness to an alien invasion, that looks like snow, stands at the summit of Mount Lofty and watches in horror as the State Bank building (no longer) melts away like ice-cream under the hot sun.

I'm not always so malicious. "Reluctant Misty and the House on Burden Street" sees Adelaide more realistically, through the eyes of woman obsessed with a particular house: the lush, green streets of North Adelaide; the shadowy, echoing recesses of the State Library where she digs through old records for information; the century-old newspaper stories she finds about the city when it was young. This is the Adelaide we live in, and the one I prefer to visit, when I can. As Robert Fulghum goes on to say: "There is a sense in which we need to go home again -- and can go home again. Not to recover home. No. But to sanctify memory."

We write our own histories. Our heads simply aren't big enough to contain every memory we have ever laid down, so we keep the ones that are relevant and bury the rest. We are inevitably shaped by the past, but in turn we shape the past we carry around with us. The way people tell the story of their lives is as important as the lives themselves. Would we rather live in David Copperfield or Annie, or The Sword in the Stone? To a large degree it’s up to us.

My story begins in the Whyalla of the 1960s, a very different town to the Whyalla of today. My father was a schoolteacher in a busy community; a country boy from Victoria, he met my mother in the next town south: Cowell, a tiny place now known for oysters and the massive black jade deposit lying dormant beneath it. After a short stint in Wirrabarra Forest, they came to Whyalla to start a family.

The truth is, I don't remember a thing about Whyalla from back then. We didn't stay long. Shortly after my sister was born, we moved to Ararat and Stawell and elsewhere, following my father around from job to job. Later, I would get to know Whyalla as a place to pass through on the way to see my grandparents in Cowell or as a venue for family engagement parties and weddings. It was a waystation in the process of becoming somewhere else itself; shrinking and desiccating, a place of strange chimneystacks and dusty roads; I don't claim to know it well, and I've never considered it home.

If I had a home back then, given all the travelling my family was doing, it was that little town south of Whyalla that I've mentioned a couple of times now. My mother's uncle had taken over the family farm while I was a child, so visits to that end of the world were divided between my grandparents' house in sleepy Cowell and the farm just out of town. Now, Eyre Peninsula is a dry, flat place. That the farm was named after, and boasted a geological feature called Mount Ghearty, makes it sound more dramatic than it was. Mt Ghearty is a pimple, really, compared to the sort of mountains they have elsewhere. It's quite climbable, even by small children, and I don't think anyone's ever fallen to their deaths from any of its faces. But it has its own ancient, ground-down charm; it's a survivor, a relic of times long-passed. Climbing it, you can just make out the shadow of ancient mountain ranges that might have stood there, before the sea came in and ground them down. You can practically smell time when you plant your feet on its summit and breathe in deeply.

The farm was a wonderful place to be as a kid. The sound of wind hissing through trees when I'd go outside after midnight to take a leak... The endless promise of rain, which never came... Dry creek beds lurked like giant orange snakes in the stubble of wheat and barley... I have a very clear memory of one of my uncles telling me to watch out for kangaroos while climbing Mt Ghearty. They can grab you around the throat and gut you with one kick of their hind legs, he told me. I was mortified. Until that moment, kangaroos had meant Skippy and stuffed toys. From then on, they were vicious killers. ( I've never wanted to know just how much of this was just a joke on a city boy, just in case it's even partly true.)[.1]

Cowell and the farm were where I chose to go on school holidays, if I had a choice. I would rather stay with my grandparents than fight with my sister over who was taking up more of the back seat on a driving holiday of New Zealand,or whatever else was on offer. There was plenty to see and do there, if you looked for it. For hours, I would watch my grandfather cut and polish jade in his workshop, burning the sound of diamond-bladed saws and the smell of polish into my brain forever. The sleepy main street shops were full of all sorts of nooks and crannies that contained things that hadn't sold for decades. One of them even had an old pneumatic tube system for sending change backwards and forwards overhead. Not far south of Cowell is a stretch of sandhills my grandfather used to take me to, and to which I have returned in my fiction as frequently as I have Adelaide.

It was in Cowell that I first tried my hand at writing. It was in Cowell that I first fell in love with Gustav Holst's "The Planets Suite." It was in Cowell that I saw my first shooting star (on the night of my 10th birthday), and where I learned to drive. I've never lived in Cowell, but it is the still centre of my universe. As long as I know it's there, things are the way they ought to be.

After a couple of years in Mt Gambier, and a four-year stint in Adelaide, during which my mother trained to be a teacher, subjecting my sister and me to an endless series of tests and experiments designed to see if Piaget's theories still held water (apparently they did), we ended up in Darwin. Here Dad acted as a liaison between the education department and various aboriginal communities. I don't think I truly appreciated, until later, what an opportunity this was--for anyone, let alone a pre-teen boy in love with the notion of the alien firmly embedded in science fiction. I have vivid memories of coming home from school to find a dozen tribal elders sitting in our living room, passing around a jar of honey ants preserved in their own sticky syrup. (Delicious!) I remember being backstage at the Festival Theatre where, as part of a cultural exchange program, the menu consisted of pie floaters and witchetty grubs. I remember my family going on camp into the outback with 60 full-blood kids and learning about traditional dances, how to use a woomera, and where to find crocodile eggs. I grew up taking these things for granted, and I am left with the conviction that every child in this country should do the same. To our great shame, we ignore a heritage as rich as the ones we brought with us from overseas. I hope that one day this divide will be crossed, and the best of every culture will be allowed to coexist and flourish.

Obviously, we were having amazing times up in Darwin. I hated the weather, but I think apart from that, and one other very important reason, we could have stayed up there forever. That other reason was my father, who had, I learned in 1979, always wanted to be a priest. Chucking in what seemed a perfectly good job in order to enter a profession that is poorly paid and high-stressed probably seemed insane to everyone around him, but to his credit he followed his dream. So off we went, back to Adelaide, into a series of houses that changed every couple of years, depending on where Dad was posted.

I entered High School at the same time my father started his divinity degree. The idea that one studied religion outside of Sunday School was probably new to me then, but it seems natural now. These things bear close examination, whichever side of the ideological fence you're on. My father devoted himself to that study with the same sort of manic, contagious energy that drove every other aspect of his life. I retain vivid memories of him bursting out of his office, as anyone studying for exams will do, overflowing with knowledge that might evaporate if he didn't constantly bring it out for inspection. Mixed up in my head with my own algebra and English assignments are pop quizzes about different sorts of poetry in the Old Testament and definitions of "faded myth". I would pore over the different editions of the Bible I found in his office, fascinated by the way something I had taken completely for granted could come in so many different forms. It was like picking away at the mortar in a wall and discovering that some bricks are made of cheese, while others are completely hollow. It was disorienting and wonderful at the same time.

The sad fact is that by exposing me to an education in religion, my father probably sowed the seeds of my own irreligious leanings. Sometime early in 1985, as I waited for the curtain to go up on my first ever appearance as an actor on stage, I came to the abrupt realisation that I was an atheist. Life just seemed so much simpler that way, with the Bible and other texts reduced to the level of good stories rather than internally inconsistent dogma. Thus I have remained ever since, although my taste for such stories remains.

And so too have I remained in Adelaide. I've lived at all points of the compass: from Colonel Light Gardens to Burnside; from Elizabeth Downs to Torrensville. I currently live at the centre of the compass, in that strange no-man's land south of Carrington Street that is neither business nor residential, but which city planners seem hell-bent on forcing to be both.

When thinking about this talk, I was surprised by the number of metaphorical and literal wastelands I found in my life. It is here in Adelaide, in a sort of urban wasteland, that I sit and contemplate the peculiar directions my life has taken--or so it seems sometimes to people on the outside looking in. I live in Adelaide, and I write books. I was frequently asked when I first started out whether I intended to move to Sydney or Melbourne in order to further my career. That was where writers went to make their fortune, apparently. I had no such intentions. I liked living in Adelaide. And a story was a story; what did it matter where it was written?

I was equal parts naïve and prescient. Not long after I started writing, the Internet boomed and it was suddenly possible to conduct business in the publishing world with anyone, anywhere, at any time. When it came to making deals, editing, communicating with readers, it genuinely didn't matter that I lived a long way from the publishing Mecca of New York, or its satellites, Sydney and London. It even made sense to live somewhere like Adelaide, which had a very low cost of living and a supportive arts funding body. With the money I saved on rent and groceries--and good wine--I could easily afford several trips east to press the flesh, when it was necessary.

And it is necessary. We are by nature social creatures. No one wants to do business with a faceless stranger forever. And the importance of community should not be underestimated. One of the best ways for writers to learn is from their peers. The principle of "paying forward"--passing on what you've learned to the next person in line rather than trying to pay back the person you got it from--is one firmly enshrined in the SF world. Without such help in my early days, I wouldn't be where I am now--and I make a point now of getting out of the office as often as I can, to pay forward and to remind everyone I work with that I am in fact a real person, not a machine for churning out books.

Adelaide, in terms of the SF writing community, was something of a wasteland when I first started out, or so it seemed to me. Most of the action seemed to be talking place in Melbourne and Perth. The few contacts I did make here, such as my first publisher Peter McNamara and my collaborator Shane Dix, were to be treasured.

That's one metaphorical wasteland. Then there's the wasteland of Economics. Somehow, shortly after finishing high school, I came to the conclusion that I should get a good job first, then worry about writing second. I enrolled in an Economics degree here at Adelaide University and set off on a career that would, I hoped, see me earn enough money to retire young. This apparently foolproof plan was stymied almost immediately when it became very obvious, even to me, that I didn't like Economics very much, and wouldn't even see out the end of the degree, let alone retirement. So midway through the long, dark tunnel of third year, during which I pursued the bold strategy of not going to lectures or tutorials at all, without withdrawing from the course, I had to confront the most basic issue we all have to deal with: what do we want to do with the rest of our lives?

Luckily for me, the answer was obvious. I wanted to write. I'd been scribbling away most of my life, writing novels when I should've been doing homework, so doing more of it wasn't unappealing. It just took a bit of convincing to believe that I could actually make a living from it. I knew by then, you see, that writers earn a pittance and work bloody hard for it--even harder than Anglican priests. Did I really want to embark on a career that might see me get nowhere? I decided that I did. I would rather be poor and fulfilled than rich and hollow. If it would take hard work, that was fine: I can work hard at something I love. It's working at something I hate that's hard.

I was worried about how my parents would react. I shouldn't have been--because Dad had obviously been through that very wasteland himself, and he had come out the other side a happier man for it. It's a matter of odd timing that, at the same time I was going through this premature mid-life crisis, my father was going through a very real health crisis--one that would, seven years later, just after my first novel was published, finally claim his life. I'm not one who believes in meaningful coincidences, but there's no denying that this smacks of plotting. It would be tempting--and reassuring--to believe that someone out there is drawing a story arc across my life, giving it meaning and structure instead of the usual chaotic ramble. That I still can't believe in such a thing has perhaps more to do with my stubbornness than any pretence of rationality.

Wastelands, like deserts and polar regions, aren't dead places. They are vital and vigorous in their own ways. Sometimes, like my father did, we need to cross the wasteland in order to get where we want to be. Sometimes we get halfway across and realise that it's right here, in the wasteland, that we belong. Instead of blots on the world, mistakes that need to be rubbed out or ignored, wastelands are as much a part of the world as we are. Nature has many faces, none more correct than any other. The Star Wars model of world building--that planets can be characterised by a single adjective, such as "forest" or "ice" or "desert"--is simplistic and perhaps a little wishful. If only the real world was so simple!

The truth is, we need wastelands. They inspire us, provoke us, or invoke in us aspects of our characters that may not have a chance to flourish otherwise. They are mirrors we hold up to ourselves, like science fiction is purported to be. I wander through my personal wilderness, where faith is as scarce as water, pursued by the ghost of a religion that doesn't make any sense, and I find inspiration all around me. The stories told down thousands of years about how the world was made and how humanity was given a place in it, stories from hundreds of cultures, living and dead, have currency in this wasteland. People didn't make up these tales for fun; such narratives gave their lives meaning; they explained the world; they helped people like my father cope with the unknowable. What, I asked myself, if anything, could lie behind these stories? If they are smoke signals from more numinous lands, what fire created them.

My latest novel, The Crooked Letter, is an attempt to answer that question, and is, arguably, my most autobiographical novel in that sense--a map I've made of that personal wilderness. It begins with two ideas: the first is that, if the soul exists, how does it fit into the world we see around us? Nature, as we understand it, is all about eating and being eaten. What kind of creature could possibly eat the soul?

The second question concerns life after death. If we start with two identical twins, connected, as some people believe, by a kind of psychic force, what happens if one of them dies and goes to hell? How will his experiences impact on the surviving twin, here in this world?

That's where The Crooked Letter started. It ends with an attempt to build a religion that makes sense to me--one that, given the assumptions that souls and some sort of life after death are real, might underpin the world we live in. To build that idea, I've lifted ideas from everywhere: the notion some cultures have that humans possess two souls, plus the idea of reincarnation. Add the Faculties of Plato: id-ego-superego, or kether-chokmah-binah, or brahma-vishnu-shiva. Throw in the Gilgulim of the Kabbalah, then it began to take shape: two heavens, and lives curling back on themselves like snakes eating their own tails, like Uroboros.

I've sometimes thought that, if the writing lark fell through, I could instead try forming a cult around this idea. I wouldn't be the first speculative fiction writer to do that. But this isn't the wilderness for me. I've got nothing on the people who take this sort of stuff seriously--the kind of people who spend billions of dollars campaigning against evolution and stem cell research, or throw firebombs at abortionists. It's an interesting place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

I live in Adelaide. Living in Adelaide is about more than affordable rent, and high quality restaurants and wine. It's more than the SA Writers' Festival and WOMAD. It's more than the dry climate and the reputation for weird murders. It's more than all the churches and the pubs, and the pubs that used to be churches.

We have Thinkers in Residence here, an idea I like even if it's a flawed one. (Why don't we listen to the Thinkers who live here already? Why import someone to reinvent the wheel, or ignore them if they do happen to point out something profound?) When describing recent Thinker Charles Landry's opinion of Adelaide in August's Adelaide Review, Peter Ward wrote: "One of the problems [...] Landry has always had about Adelaide is that it's too long, and when not too long, too flat and wide, and altogether lacking the close knobbly bumps and kinks of Old World cities."

And there, I think, lies one of Adelaide's key charms. It's not a faux New York like Sydney, or an echo of London like Melbourne. It's nothing like the Old World cities our forebears left behind. I don't think it's even a city at all. I think it is, at heart, a small town, and the more it tries to convince people otherwise, the more foolish it begins to look--like a younger daughter trying too hard to ape the glamour of her older sisters, completely failing in the process to see that the awareness of one's limitations is the essence of beauty. Adelaide is like nowhere else in this country, and trying to be something it's not will only diminish the charm it does have. We should own our differences, not bury them--or our heads--in the wasteland over our fence. We do so at our own peril.

Not that something nasty is going to come crawling out of that desert, some metaphorical giant lizard grown big and mad on radioactive waste, intent on stomping as all to Armageddon. Nothing so dramatic. Desert environments are traditionally defined in terms of an absence of water--as, arguably, they should be, since everyone knows we need to be careful with such scarce resources, otherwise we might run out. But that focus on absence ignores the presence of the desert itself, and the opportunities we might miss if we ignore it.

Let me tell you something of the sort of landscape I write about. Fantasy is all about landscape; one of things it does best is create secondary worlds in which new stories can take place, stories that can't exist today. These secondary worlds can be based on historical worlds (Lian Hearn, medieval Japan), or mythical worlds (David Gemmel, Atlantis), or a mixture of both (Marion Zimmer Bradley, Mists of Avalon). Or they can be completely made up (Tolkien, Middle Earth). Anyone who has read J.R.R.Tolkien will recognize the dense forests, snowcapped mountains, and tumbling rivers that overflow from the fantasy genre's larder. Did Tolkien kick-start this medievalist trend, or was it always there, just waiting to be popularised? You might argue that the landscape of The Lord of the Rings is part of the cultural baggage of the British Empire, which the colonies look fondly back to as we face an increasingly uncertain future. Perhaps we find this stylised Europe comforting. Certainly, we find it familiar. I have personally never seen snow, but I've read descriptions of it many times throughout my life. Fantasy novels hark back to a natural era that probably never existed as we imagine it--but which perpetuates itself with its own kind of momentum. It's not just the European landscape that we find familiar, but European myth, too. Elves, dwarves and giants are tropes that every western child learns about as they learn to read. Serious treatments in more mature writings prolong and expand the experience of those myths... Readers of these works go on to become writers, and so the cycle begins again. The mode is self-perpetuating.

Even I, who has never been to Europe, found myself succumbing to it. When I first tried my hand at writing in the fantasy genre, the natural thing to do was to follow the established form. Naturally, it didn't work. Since I knew nothing about these landscapes except second hand, I could never write honestly about them. I had to write about somewhere else instead.

It's a landscape that has changed dramatically since its creation. It's wandered many thousands of kilometres across the face of the world, at the whim of forces the people living upon it may never truly understand. Its nature has changed many times, too: rugged mountains once stretched across it, bearing mighty sheets of ice on their backs. Later, jungles sprawled from side to side, home to human-sized, warm-blooded lizards with eyes adapted for night vision. The remains of these long-dead creatures have opalised, creating powerful reminders of the fragility of existence in such a mutable world.

In other ages, active volcanoes erupted along the land's coastlines, as seas advanced and retreated in cycles too long for humans to comprehend. Temperatures rose and fell as dramatically as the coastlines, and with each cycle of flooding and drying the land baked a little more, gradually withering as though cursed by a vengeful god. Where salt lakes and deserts now exist once stretched vast expanses of arable land. Warm, wet forests have become layers of mummified leaves in ancient mud. Ripples on desert rocks show that sediments were laid at the bottom of a creek that dried up long ago.

Vast stretches of open grassland spread in the wake of the forests, inhabited and grazed by large running avian species that have also become extinct. Forced between extremes of ice and fire, life evolved in unique directions. Monsters once walked the land, monsters that are remembered in legend by the people who settled there and hunted them to extinction. Clever, two-legged marsupials still travel as fast as horses through patchy scrub. Humans have given landscapes that no longer exist exotic names like the Eromanga Sea, the Murravian Gulf, Lake Bungunnia. These words that carry the hint of legend and promise a million stories, as though by naming them we can hope ever to understand them, contain them, own them.

This is the land of The Stone Mage and the Sea, the first of my Books of the Change. I've set four novels in this world now, and there are two more to come. Europe is a long way away from this world. There isn't a forest in sight, not a single snowflake, and no rivers; instead, there's the sea, the sun and the sand; there's space and dryness and the terrible struggle to survive.

I didn't make up this wasteland. Everything I've just told you about exists, and surrounds us now, where we're sitting. South Australia is an amazing place; all I had to do was dress it up a bit. I've tried to capture the essence of this land--this land I've grown up in and love--and convey it to the reader anew. I haven't appropriated Aboriginal myths any more than I've used the usual European legends. I've tried to make it my own--to create a secondary world to which I instinctively respond. That readers respond to it too tells me that I'm onto something--not something new, necessarily, because story-tellers in this country have always struggled to deal with the vast reality that we have taken for our home--but something honest and real, and common to us all.

Just because I've found inspiration in this world, just because I don't get the Eurocentric thing, that doesn't mean that others on a different path are misguided. There is room in the world for many different stories. We are limited only by our imagination and our reader's willingness to run with us. If people want yarns in which Europe is the Other, give it to them, I say, because fulfilling that desire is part of what fantasy is all about. Fantasy that doesn't give us what we yearn for or expect risks failing on a fundamental level.

But it still surprises me. Most fantasy novels by local writers are written in the European mode. Are such writers missing out on an opportunity to mine the land we know and love for inspiration? Is Adelaide and South Australia the wasted land of the speculative field, rather than a wasteland per se? Or are we only beginning to find our way through the cultural minefield that is appropriation and land ownership? Perhaps we're still too young as a nation to feel at home with the land we occupy, like the early colonial painters who got the colour of leaves and sky completely wrong. Perhaps in a couple more generations we'll be mature enough--or integrated enough--to feel comfortable with looking outside the cities and farms for the deep heart of our environment, and to hear what it has to tell us.

Here's a statistic: my novels are published by HarperCollinsAustralia under its Voyager imprint. There are currently more authors signed to that imprint living in Adelaide than anywhere else in Australia. Melbourne has two; Sydney has two; Perth has two; Alice Springs has one. Adelaide has six. It's obviously doing something right.

My feelings on what that something might be are now on record, having been quoted in a recent Adelaide Matters. Part of it has to do with Adelaide's isolation. I know Perth is technically more isolated, but Adelaide is the city that traditionally misses out. Bands still skip Adelaide on national tours; we still don't have an Ikea--although that at least looks set to change soon. Adelaide is the Other, the outsider, and everyone who lives here feels it.

And for all its marvellous antiquity, it is pretty flat and dull, topologically speaking. Mt Lofty isn't all that lofty and Torrens River isn't so much a river as a creek. So we have to fill the blanks in the landscape with something else. For some people, it's Festivals and Fringes and Grand Prixs. For others, its fantasy. We imagine distant lands and magical worlds that offer us what we don't have right here.

Some of those lands are inevitably wastelands. As I said at the beginning of this talk, what we see around us inevitably feeds into our creative lives. The blasted lands of fantasy, the post-apocalyptic ruins of science fiction, the sleepy small towns Stephen King employs to great effect in his novels. They may not have literal existence in our world, but they are drawn closely from reality, just as the experiences of our characters are based on from those we ourselves have had, especially when concerning issues of vocation, of community, of destiny, of god. Storytellers plumb the depths and heights around us for signs of meaning, and reveal glimpses of something that might, however briefly, pass as the truth.

I see nothing at all wrong with that. As the great Iris Murdoch once said: "We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality."