The China Garden, Olsson’s third book, is set in a coastal town in northern New South Wales. It begins when Laura returns home, after many years living overseas, to make arrangements for the funeral of her estranged mother, Angela. She regards the townspeople and the subtropical landscape through a veil of grief, which is intensified when she learns of a dark secret from her mother’s past. Her perceptions are muddied further when she meets Cress, an elderly woman whose memories of Angela draw from Laura an unanticipated empathy. Quietly observing all of this is Kieran, Cress’s thirty-five-year-old grandson. He has an unspecified intellectual disability which sees him obsessively watching children’s quiz shows and compiling a handwritten dictionary of words that appeal to him. Taciturn, he spends his time wandering around town, but his inner life is rich and articulate. He observes and appraises the people he encounters. He had a strong bond with Angela and her death has upset him deeply.

The novel emphasises the descriptive over the dramatic. Olsson’s prose is rich and fragrant, uniformly written with a quasi-poetic sheen. There is no one or nowhere to go in the novel without profound resonance. There is no gradation of feeling. The narration is weighed down by a misplaced understanding of what characters in a novel should be doing, saying and feeling at all times. They are all strongly attuned to their natural surroundings, the verdant tangle of the rain-forest, the thump and salt of the seashore, and the astringent wind of the headland. So much attention is given to the characters’ intense inner lives that the plot often lies neglected and lost. There is a pervasive heaviness to this book. It adopts a tone that is all vibration, without striking any clearly sustained notes.

There is a symbolic core to The China Garden, but it is far too obvious. Laura has deliberately removed herself from the place of her childhood and all that it represents to her. She works as an arborist among the orchards of Umbria, but her sensitivity is such that she is moved to tears when she prunes fruit trees. Her profession, which seeks to tame and cultivate nature, is symbolically opposed to the novel’s depiction of the bush surrounding her home town. These descriptions are vital to the atmosphere that Olsson is trying to create. This is a languid yet forceful environment, humid and stormy, where grasses, flowers and vines grow heedlessly. But the effect is lessened by the author’s insistence that we look at it again and again, sometimes in almost molecular detail, to little or no purpose. A lighter touch might have struck the intended balance between fecundity and menace.

The Diamond Anchor, Jennifer Mills’s first novel, is set in the fictional coastal town of Coal, south of Sydney, but north of the Bulli Pass. May is the local publican. Her hotel, the Diamond Anchor, is known locally as the Danker and sits precariously on the windy headland above the town. She was born in the pub, grew up there and took over its running when her parents grew too old to manage. She is now in her sixties, widowed and growing tired. When she receives a letter from her childhood friend, Grace, after many years of estrangement, May writes a long letter in response, which forms the substance of the novel.

Grace’s letter provokes a flood of memories. Mills is good at writing vivid set pieces that immerse the reader in the time and place of the novel. The story is saturated with material detail: the tables and chairs of the bar, the fireplace, the crockery, the kitchen, the cleaning, the cooking, the serving. In a way, Mills is more meticulous with these small things than she is with her characters, but it works beautifully. She sets the scene and then moves her characters in to inhabit it. They are what the place makes them.

May ruminates late in the novel:

I’ve spent so long forming relationships that begin and end at that wooden line, friendships that close at eleven. Even when I’ve known someone all my life I don’t let them jump the bar. I like to keep the world at that precise distance.

Her character is interesting because the author allows her this reticence: she is not the mouthpiece for a particular thematic preoccupation. The epistolary form gives the novel a quietly confessional air. Its reflection upon the past is never laboured because it suits May’s character. Realisations occur incrementally, not in dramatic epiphanies. Every time May remembers a particular walk along the beach with Grace, or a childhood game among the bracken, we get a sense of how well she knows the place, how well she knows her friend and how well she comes to know herself. This is done without sentimentality or false profundity.

Mills understands the ebb and flow of small town populations, how communities can expand and contract over the years, depending on economic and social trends. She makes it clear that the town nurtures some residents, but stifles others. Grace leaves as soon as she can, winning a scholarship to Sydney University, but May remains, marrying a local boy and settling into a life not unlike that of her parents. When Grace tells her of her decision to leave, she is bereft, yet she cannot follow her to the city: ‘I felt the undertow pull at me, and thought about letting go. Pulling anchor and drifting out. But I am a strong swimmer. I know where my shore lies.’ Their estrangement after such an intense, romantic friendship is painful and Mills writes with great restraint and sensitivity of May’s loss.

It is difficult to write about stories and storytelling as abstract ideas within a realist novel. May has a local reputation as a raconteur, which she has inherited from her father, a rascally Irishman. This becomes her way of appearing to give others something of herself, without really giving anything much away. All of this fits so well into our understanding of her character that it is a shame Mills feels compelled to overlay May’s sincere articulations on why she constructs stories in her head – ‘The world as I choose to shrink it’ – with florid attempts at theorising about the nature of storytelling and the veracity of memories, for these ideas come out subtly and naturally as May reflects upon the past. It does not ring true that she would have to spell them out in her letter to Grace. It is the only faltering step in this assured début.