The lucid and erudite contributions from historian Alan Atkinson, one of the editors, are among the book’s highlights. In ‘What is New England?’, he details the backgrounds of some of the early white settlers and discusses the New State Movement, which was founded in the 1920s and which gained momentum in the lead-up to the 1967 referendum. This was a separatist group, led by a number of local professionals and businessmen, as well as by influential members of the squattocracy. They aspired to transform New England into an economically prosperous centre of education and culture, distinct from both Sydney and the Bush. This ambition, Atkinson argues, was based on long-held notions of ‘a dominion resting, like the balancing rock at Stonehenge, on “circumambient air” – of a detached high country held up and overshadowed by mountains’. Atkinson nimbly teases out the levels of meaning in the name New England, which continues to hold sway in the local imagination, concluding that it is ‘too easy to represent the history of New England as something like a single story’.

The title is taken from one of Judith Wright’s best-known poems, ‘South of My Days’, and the poet is a compelling presence throughout the book. Wright grew up on Wallamumbi station, east of Armidale. Her family were established graziers with substantial landholdings in the region, and she was educated at the New England Girls’ School, still one of Armidale’s most exclusive private schools; but her subsequent career as a poet and activist for environmental awareness and indigenous rights did not conform to the expectations of her social class. Her poems are cited in several essays. Her literary sensibility becomes a way of entering the past. Wendy Beck’s ‘Aboriginal Archaeology’ begins with the opening stanza to ‘Bora Ring’; the essay by Atkinson and John Atchison, ‘Travelling and Communication’, refers to the well-known but often misunderstood poem ‘Bullocky’; Martin Auster’s lively and esoteric meditation on heritage and geography makes use of ‘Wildflower Plain’.

Wright is important to High Lean Country, not only because she is the region’s most eminent literary export but because she expressed the conflict between her upbringing and her consciousness. Her genuine connection with the land was tainted with a distinct uneasiness that she voiced in her writing. In With Love and Fury: Selected letters of Judith Wright (2006), for example, a letter to her nieces, written in 2000, refers to the eviction of the Wright family from their property. Wright states, ‘I am glad I am not there, I don’t think I could bear it, which shows that if I had been Aboriginal and had to leave that country it would have been the death of me’. The irony was not lost upon her. The heritage and the land are replete with conflicting meanings.

This book is brave in its acceptance of a poetic sensibility in both its interdisciplinary structure and its themes. The recurrent references to Wright indicate a deep respect for the cultural importance of the poet. Julian Croft’s elegant contribution to High Lean Country, ‘Imagining New England’, explores the perspectives of the poets who have drawn inspiration from the region. He borrows the image of the vestibule to identify a common expression of in-betweenness, a dual reality to which outsider and local alike are only ever partially admitted. We are always waiting in the hallway: ‘Where the coast might promise release and escape and the inland immensity and spiritual transformation, New England only reinforces the insecurities of apparent homelands.’

High Lean Country is an excellent cultural symposium. It takes all the passion and subjectivity of a local history and elevates it with meticulous and thorough scholarship. There are thirty-two fine essays collected here, all of them attempting to identify the events, people and places that have in some way shaped the physical and cultural environment of New England. All of the contributors have strong reputations in their fields, and write with authority, not only on the details of their local area, but on how that reflects on a national scale. At a time when history and literature are politically contentious, it is pleasing to read a book that embraces many aspects of the past and endorses the value of multiple perspectives. That this is a regional impulse, one emerging from a traditionally conservative pocket of Australia, gives me great hope. It makes me want to move back there.