‘They are less dense than the walls,’ she explains.

‘But how do you know that?’ I persist. ‘Is it that the sounds coming in through the glass are clearer? Or can your eyes pick up a slight difference in the intensity of the light?’

‘No, you don’t understand. You’re still thinking in terms of the senses you use. This is a different sense I’m talking about. I can sense the density of things. I’ll show you what I mean later when we go for a walk.’

On the walk, she amazed herself:

At a certain point along the track, she pauses and says decisively, ‘I’m getting three points of density: one there, one there and one over there.’ With the end of her stick she indicates three very large, thick tree trunks, the only ones in sight, pointing directly at them, even though two of them are several metres away and all are completely surrounded by other, thinner trees. When I tell her this, even she is surprised.

‘I didn’t think I could sense things at such a distance.’

Since these are walks through the mind as much as the bush, Timms continues with a discussion of the skin as a sensory organ. Towards the end of the walk, Rebecca suddenly exclaims, ‘Ah! I can smell water.’ They are nearing a pond. I have seen it written that water has no smell and that the tales of drovers trying to control cattle as they race towards distant water after a perish are untrue. Experienced drovers know that they can smell water from a considerable distance. When unloading truckloads of cattle that I had bought at distant sales, I never had to show them where the water was in a paddock of a hundred hectares or so, and I always had to unload them slowly so that there was no dangerous crush at the troughs.

The walks take place in the Brown Range north of Melbourne, a part of the Great Divide known affectionately as the Tallarook Ranges after the small town at their foot. It is not a serious offshoot of the very long range: Mount Hickey, the highest local mountain, is 800 metres above sea level and not much more than a hill. But Timms and Robert Dessaix, his partner, own thirty hectares there with a mud-brick cottage and a garden where they escape the city for two or three days a week.

It took Timms some time to learn the country. It seemed restricted. He had spent several years on a cattle property in northern Victoria where the horizon was distant and the sky huge. He knew the marvel of assisting a cow to give birth and of watching ‘the intricately choreographed ballet of a farmer and his dogs rounding up a mob of sheep’. Unknown bush had little meaning. It was bewildering monotony until he learnt it.

He terms the first walk ‘Origins’. His experiences are much like my own when I was learning the Pilliga forest for A Million Wild Acres. Like Timms, I did not know the names of any of the plants. After the Royal Botanic Gardens identified hundreds of specimens collected during thousands of kilometres of driving along narrow, sandy logging tracks, and hundreds of kilometres of walking through the trees, the forest became so much a part of me I began to feel that I had grown it.

Timms cites Flaubert for this experience: ‘In order for something to become interesting, all one need do is to look at it closely enough.’ He treasures the dozen Necklace Ferns cascading down rocks and regularly visits them to check on their well-being. During dry summers they shrivel up, seemingly dead. Rain pours life into the roots and pinheads of green soon unfurl into long tendrils. He looks forward to the day when he can identify the many sedges, and glories in listing the descriptive common names of twenty-six. It reads like plainsong, ‘tall club sedge, tall sedge, short-stem sedge, fen sedge, rush sedge, flat sedge, drain flat-sedge’.

He finds that once he learns the name of a plant, especially one he thinks to be rare, they suddenly come up so thickly it is difficult to avoid walking on them. Familiarity breeds, not contempt, but a better eye.

Timms spent most of a day on his knees with a magnifying glass while a lichen specialist introduced him to their magnificent variety. For hundreds of millions of years, lichens have been making soil out of rock, bark, ice, sand, anything that will give them support. They are not plants, they are not individuals, but a community of fungi, algae and cyanobacteria.

The stack of bricks that will some day make steps down the slippery path are ‘a veritable apartment block’ for ants, spiders, scorpions, centipedes, cockroaches, ‘an astonishing array of residents’. He contrasts this with the stack in the backyard of their city home which might harbour a single slug. ‘Wherever humans are dominant, they are remarkably successful at eliminating everything else.’

The second walk, ‘Usefulness’, yields contrasting opinions. The neighbour, a sheep farmer, regards weeds as any plant that his sheep will not eat. Timms hopes that pragmatic romantics (he and his neighbour agree that blackberries are a curse) will supersede diehard utilitarians. He refers to the poetry of Major Thomas Mitchell’s prose and his enthusiasm for scenery as he describes the country he explores, and goes back to Herodotus and other Greek and Roman explorers who saw only what was useful to mankind. Although the Aboriginal Australian attitude to land is exploitative, it is nevertheless romantic because it is the embodiment of spiritual ancestors who are still with them. They use the soil as they use their hands, it is part of them.

The third walk, ‘Worldly Fortunes’, takes us into a pine plantation: ‘You look down on it as you would on an oddly shaped tablecloth or bedspread; dense, sharp-edged and bright green, in contrast to the relaxed, blue-grey native forest surrounding it.’ He finds it without landmarks and without character, a bleak means of making money. Even the wind avoids it, singing cheerlessly above the foreign ceiling.

‘Views’, the fourth walk, looks at local history as well as landmarks. The height of a lookout presents the world like a model. The term ‘commanding view’ gives a false sense of power. He does not like plate glass. Plate glass provides habitation of the view.

The sixth walk, ‘Being Alone’, is built around the unsociability of the self-sufficient local wombats. It is a cold night. Timms is sitting on a log near a wombat burrow waiting for the creature to show itself so that he can identify it as the owner. It begins to rain. He sits on, getting colder and wetter. He considers the pragmatic Buddhist approach to animals where an individual avoids treading on an ant while feeling no concern about agricultural use of insecticides. Despite the discomfort, he is glad to be where he is without interruption. He tells of the American ‘Solitude Management’ which the Forest Service is trying to introduce in the Mount Hood National Forest in Oregon. Visitors would have to apply for access six months in advance so that they could be allotted camping places well clear of others.

I cannot tell you what the book looks like. My review copy was ‘Uncorrected page proofs’, but they were in excellent order. I found one thing that I hope was corrected. The introduction of dingoes 4,000 years ago somehow became 41,000 years. I do not expect that the many species names will have their correct capitals. It is an idiotic convention of modern editors to use lower case, too often making it impossible to know what is being talked about. If one finds reference to a little penguin, for instance, one cannot tell whether the bird is a Little Penguin or a small penguin of another species.

In this book, it is a minor matter. It is a learned work in exact, musical prose. The concluding sentence is: ‘Most of all, I feel connected.’ And that is an excellent state to be in.