I am one of four Australian guests – with David Malouf, Richard Flanagan, and Frank Moorhouse – of the Auckland Writers’ Festival. Auckland’s festival has only been running for three years; Wellington is the ‘arts’ city. There is a sense of freshness in the theming of the festival (around the idea of the city this year) and the enthusiastic crowds, which migrate in the slow lifts between the top and bottom of the Hyatt. I am delighted to be here. We know so little about New Zealand’s writers: I have found it shamefully difficult, counting off the authors I can name, to get past the fingers of one hand.

My room in the Hyatt looks across the docks. Awake, feverish with insomnia, I watch the dozens of fork-lifts slide back and forth between the shipping containers on their fixed trajectories, orange ant-lights blinking. It makes me think of the compound in Mad Max.

In the morning, the light on the empty headlands is Byzantine. The light of mosaics – murky blues, grass greens, flashes of gold and white.

It is weird to live and eat and perform in the same place; the rain has arrived with the first day of the festival, and does not stop. Trapped indoors, I begin to think about how the undifferentiated landscape of hotels is suited to the globalisation of the festival circuit. It is possible now for writers visiting from overseas to string together a whole chain of Australian and New Zealand festivals. Some, like Sarah Waters, do so with terrific grace; others, like the international writer who limply shakes my hand before our session, eyes fixed on the far end of the room, stay in the transit zone. For the rest of the festival, I cannot see this writer without thinking of the Duracell rabbit, shuffling onwards with its eyes glazed, drumsticks clutched in its rigid fists, beating on that drum.

A barbecue, a launch, a dinner. We begin to meet some of the New Zealand writers: Peter Wells and Stephanie Johnson who, with Penelope Hansen, are our smart, diligent, and ever-present hosts – why don’t writers run festivals more often? Charlotte Randall, a refreshingly blunt performer during question time, whose novel The Curative is tipped alongside Johnson’s Belief for the Montana, New Zealand’s equivalent of the Miles Franklin; Kapka Kassabova; John Cranna; Lloyd Jones. Jones’s novel The Book of Fame, one of those modest stories that capture a whole history, is my great discovery this festival. Recounting the story of the All Blacks’ first visit to England in 1905 – ‘In the first few days we were like shy crayfish’ – its remarkably sparse form holds the men’s feelings and dreams like captured light.

The Listener announces the results of its column-writing competition. Subjects chosen by readers include bird sanctuaries, Limp Bizkit, going to sea and brothels, living in a dog kennel, and the abundance of men with mullets in Nelson.

A long dinner, in one of those narrow laneways. Writers talk about their favourite books. Moby-Dick is my favourite novel. The greatest love story of all time? My insomnia is beginning to worry me. I don’t feel well. I’m afraid that I can only think of Moby-Dick.

Reading with Maurice Gee and Joanne Harris (‘Around the World in One Hour’), Frank Moorhouse and I are taken aback to be described by our chair as writing of the ‘outback’. I’m not really sure where the outback is, I say, but I’m sure it’s not Katoomba. Or Nowra, for that matter. The outback is less of a place than an idea. It depends where you are standing. Perhaps, for the northern hemisphere as it watches the Olympics and Survivor, all Australia is the ‘outback’.

Richard Flanagan, in another session, points out that the history of novels is the history of writing from the edges: Flaubert in Normandy, Joyce in Trieste, Marquez in Mexico City. He quotes Flaubert, on Paris, to Maxime du Camp: ‘Only there, in Paris you tell me, is the breath of life. I do find that it often carries the smell of decaying teeth, your breath of life. The laurels that are gathered there, they appear to be smeared with shit, do they not? … Humanity is to be found everywhere, my dear sir, though there is more claptrap in Paris, I grant you that.’

Via e-mail, friends nominate the worst Duracell rabbits they’ve encountered.

In the early hours of the morning, drunk, we find ourselves at the bottom of a steep street in a bar with Belgian beer on tap. The walls are dark, the high wall behind the bar has dark drawers cut into it, there are dark banquettes along the walls. It’s the chowder house from Moby-Dick! Nothing but mussels on the menu: pots of mussels, mussel soup, mussels with lobster bisque and brandy, mussel platters occidental, Provençal, Paulette …

Lloyd Jones, in an essay in Landfall, on Wellington: ‘It is as though one day in the recent past our parents just awoke to their current surroundings and circumstances, and set about laying the drive and setting up the trellis for the passionfruit.’

Peter Wells, in another session, suggests ironically that Ingmar Bergman created New Zealand – ‘and this has led to a corrugation, a kink in the New Zealand soul, a lilt or tilt towards the idea that we are a darkly Gothic culture’ – while Fellini conjured up Australia. Geographies shift again: I notice that he speaks of Tasmania and New Zealand, as if they are part of the same country, in one breath.

The closing dinner, and Naomi Wolf stands in for Glenda Jackson, who had to remain in Britain because of the elections. ‘Ethical leadership’ is the topic. She unhooks the microphone from its stand – ‘because I’m a pacer’ – and roams like a talk-show hostess around the ballroom. Would anyone like to share with us a key figure from their childhood? People shrink visibly behind the tables. There is no eye contact. A turbid silence. At last, someone volunteers a football coach, a grandmother, a father. It is like prising open oysters. And so patronising. Sometimes, Wolf says, you have to ‘swallow your own truth’ to hear someone else’s. Have we heard of Rosa Parks? A man at one of the furthest tables heckles. Someone at my own calls out, or perhaps it is simply a low animal moan, the sound of a mammal in distress. I look around the room and every writer is frowning, slumping forward, head in hands. I feel proudly, unitedly, antipodean. The skewed geographies elide.

After the festival, I drive up the west coast of the ‘twin discovery’ route towards the Bay of Islands. This is the ‘kumara capital of the north’, apparently. ‘Did ya get ya kumara?’ the billboards ask as I leave each town. I am particularly taken with the picture of a leering farmer, cradling what appears to be a giant purple turd, in both his hands.

It is the green that feels most foreign, and the wetness. I pass eerie little churches, spanking white and steepled, perched on swarded hills. The land is cut through with rivulets of pale brown water. The grass feels as if it will peel away like fuzzy felt and float away, as if it’s barely anchored. The forests are ruffled: thick and tufted. Luminous tree ferns stick out of the darker, clumping bush. Storm clouds press down. The trunks of the kauris seem to give off blue light. I think of a picture in my father’s atlas of a prehistoric forest, the green and purple, almost humid, ink.

The Bay of Islands: the islands are grey dream-shapes in the rain. Golden mud washes through the mangroves. I kayak to the Haruru Falls along the inlet of the river. The weather service reports ‘waves of polar-chilled air migrating directly from the Antarctic ice shelf’.

At Waitangi, at the treaty grounds, I feel the continents grow closer. It’s all that sea, a Kiwi friend says later, you can never forget you’re part of the Pacific. And all the characters in common: Samuel Marsden, the escaped convicts and American whalers, Captain Cook. I can taste salt in the rain which blows through the spruce front hall of James Busby’s house as I look out to where the Treaty of Waitangi was signed by Maori chiefs and the British Crown in 1840: here, in the past, New Zealand is 160 years ahead.

At home, I watch the weather on the television. My eyes strain to the east, past the weatherman, looking for New Zealand on the map.