My emphasis on Winton's evocative range of allusion – and these are only a few examples – is not a case of reviewer's twitch. This allusiveness grows from his sharing an intensity of concern with the natural world – the world of natura naturans that moved Wordsworth and Blake, in particular, among the Romantics – and with 'place' and the vast sky arched indifferently above the places he seeks, describes, and wonders at. Above all, it is Randolph Stow, 'sensitive to landscape', Winton says, 'in a way few other prose writers, of any country, have been', who remains 'the marker for me ... the distant knoll by which I take my bearings'.

This landscape memoir begins in County Offaly, Ireland, under a pressing black sky in a squall-wrapped cottage where, out of the storm at last, Winton, his wife, and four-year-old son enjoy warmth and hot chocolate and look at 'snapshots of home pinned to the wall. All the sun-creased faces of friends and family. Baggy hats and bare chests. Dogs in utes. The endless clear space behind people, the towering skies and open horizons.' Earlier, they had lived in Paris with beauty and wonderment 'everywhere you looked' but a winter cold enough to freeze the fountains into 'candied cascades' and to engender the 'churning agitation' of 'physical confinement and an absence of wildness'. When his son says, 'When we get home, we're getting a dog. In a ute ... What he hankered for wasn't really a pet,' Winton says, 'or the car it came in, but what they stood for – his Australian life. And the wild spaces that made it possible.'

So begins the landscape memoir. Winton clearly enough is setting up an argument here, an amiable confrontation of Europe and Australia. He loads the dice just a little. Never having seen 'places so relentlessly denatured', he strikes chords in most Australians who have travelled with a series of deadly accurate observations: '... it seemed that every field, hedge and well was named, apportioned and accounted for. It was a vista of almost unrelieved enclosure and domestication.' And yet, one might suggest, the imagination works as powerfully on such well-trodden scenes as it does on Australia's rocky spareness and mirage-warped distances. 'Low breathings' pursue the guilty Wordsworth 'sounds / Of undistinguishable motion', and 'huge and mighty forms' trouble his dreams when he exploits rather than respects Nature. When Andrew Marvell, for example, writes, 'And now to the abyss I pass / Of that unfathomable grass,' he is merely entering a meadow, but the manner of the telling transforms the experience.

'This allusiveness grows from his sharing an intensity of concern with the natural world – the world of natura naturans that moved Wordsworth and Blake'

Winton's realisations of his landscape experiences are just as memorable and as striking. Like Wordsworth, he understands and feels the 'abiding power' of certain places. Like Marvell in his abyss of grass, he encounters 'places that feel uncongenial for reasons you know are irrational. Sometimes it's more about being alone in them that's suddenly giving you the creeps.' Paradoxically, Winton's natural world – seemingly more silent, emptier, more resistant than the northern hemisphere equivalents with which he opens his memoir – is brimming with activity, sheer process. It 'fizzes' and 'pops' and 'sighs' and 'rattles'. Taking a break on a long drive, he stops 'beside the vast tidal mudscape of King Sound, near Derby'. Watching the maelstrom of the ebbing tide, he 'just listened'. 'The place was teeming. I heard far off the wings of a brahminy kite. Then, closer, the sudden ka-boosh of a barramundi monstering a mullet in the channel. And finally ... an unsettling chain of whispers [from] ... a leafball of green ants ... a steady chickering noise like gossip.'

Tim-Winton

The trick is to have the language for these immense silences, fugitive sounds, massive and minuscule terrestrial and celestial upheavals, tracts of archaeological and cultural history eons long. Winton, needless to say, has little trouble in finding the words, tone, and rhythms, but even he seems to rejoice at times in the freedom of the memoir. Where the narrative of fiction must be sensitive to the demands of character, atmosphere, plot and so on, the writer of memoir can be triumphantly personal, quixotic, eccentric, risky, and daring. In Island Home, Winton is all of these. This most exquisite of prose writers eases stylistic discipline out a notch or two because natura naturans is simply too rich, too extravagant to be contained by stringent style or rules or rhythms. Here is Winton entering an antipodean version of Marvell's abyss:

As we mow down the wall of grass and vines, grasshoppers, moths, dragon flies and birds peel upward from it in vivid rushes. Bugs and grubs, mantises and spiders gather in our hair ... The whole plateau is choking with life and we chug against this mad plenitude like a boat in a sluggish, druggy sea. Everything around us fizzes and swirls psychedelic on the wing. The country feels too warm, too thick, too wild and rich to be real.

Threaded through Island Home's episodes – each one introduced by or associated with a remembered place, a landscape – is the memoirist, Tim Winton the small boy, the teenager, university student, neophyte writer, and, importantly, the committed, though at times reluctant, environmentalist. It is in the latter incarnation that Winton himself begins to predominate in his story, and this is because the celebration of his island home, so jubilant and irresistible, inevitably in our time calls up its opposites – 'landscape [regarded] as property, territory, tenement. Otherwise, it's open space, a species of vacancy, another form of untapped potential awaiting discovery and exploitation [the implication being] that there is no intrinsic value to the earth beneath our feet.'

The last chapter of this inspiring, sometimes painfully frank, wonderful memoir is called 'Paying Respect', and it brings into the light shadowy figures and resonances that have been there all along – Aboriginal figures and their voices. Its clarion call is Blakean: everything that lives is holy.