It must have given your publisher, Simon and Schuster, a few headaches.

They were extremely good about it. There came a point where the original deadline was approaching, and I was faced with having to do an overnight hack of the material just to get it down to length, without worrying too much about the structure. I had a meeting with the publishers and said that if it was going to be more than just a scissor and paste job, I had to have more time. And the other thing I was concerned about was that if I did it badly, nobody else would be able to tackle the same topic again because the book would exist, and would be a spoiler.

How did the division between Wilderness and Settlement take place?

It formed itself. I started writing the book with a couple of mental headings: wilderness, pastoral images, the coast and so forth. I collected material and made notes and let it fall into its own pattern, and there was a distinct division between urban and country, bush or wilderness writing. It created itself.

You say in the introduction that it’s not going to be a chronological division, that you’re trying to document something else. When you were reading all these books, what kinds of references were you looking for?

I suppose ideas about the landscape, something more than just description. If any writer said something about his or her relation to the landscape or any philosophical conclusion they came to from observing it – I looked out for that sort of thing. People who had ideas rather than just writing lyrical descriptions.

Were your discoveries about the way writers approached landscape predictable?

I found a few surprises. I was delighted to discover E.L. Grant Watson who in the early part of the century, twenty years before Patrick White’s Voss and Randolph Stow’s To the Islands wrote about the possibilities of man developing a spiritual awareness of himself by immersing himself in the desert – himself in his case – and who actually made the connection between Taoist philosophy and the desert. I think the thing that surprised me the most was this incredible dichotomy where the bush writing was so totally sexless and passionless and so male, in the bush myth way, and every single example I had of – what would you call them – I suppose love scenes, they were all in this one folder. There was nothing I did to control that. As I was writing the book and I thought, don’t any Australians write love poetry? Don’t any Australians write about the relationships between the sexes? And I suddenly discovered it was all in this one folder labelled ‘the Coast’.

The other trend that I found interesting was that while the bush has more or less disappeared out of our prose it still remains very strongly in poetry, so there’s something about bush landscape that lends itself to poetry whereas it’s gone totally out of fashion among fiction writers, unless, of course, they’re taking a postmodern view, or a satirical view, and sending up or re-examining the bush ethos.

While things shaped themselves into chapters, you had to follow through many writers. Did you find yourself wanting to synthesise all the differences?

I actually didn’t find it as difficult as it might seem. Once I had the time, the book wrote itself. I didn’t feel I was struggling to make connections. The connections were born of themselves, and revealed themselves. I found the whole process of writing it fascinating, a bit like those people who write novels and say that they come to a point when the characters write themselves. I’ve never experienced that but this book really did start shaping itself.

Did you find the writers you read to be challenging the accepted visions of the landscape, or recreating it? Was there a celebration of the historical sense we have of place?

I found a very distinct break between the sort of writing that was nationalistic and celebratory to modern prose. Today there’s a fascination with using the land as a metaphor for the imagination. The idea of making it something beyond what it physically is. I’m an atheist myself, so I don’t look for this myself particularly, but it’s interesting, there seems to be two approaches to this. One is to discover the soul that the Aboriginal culture feels is inherent in the land. Soul isn’t the right word, but spiritual presence. One is to come at that from a European point of view. And the other is to cope with the perceived emptiness by turning it into a spiritual metaphor. Two slightly different approaches; and one could write a whole book on that subject.

You must have had to read huge amounts of writing for this project.

I’ve been a fanatical reader ever since I was a child, one of those children that mother had to tell to go out and do something instead of reading a book. A lot of things, it was simply a matter of going back to. I hate to have to admit, but I’d never read Henry Handel Richardson before I wrote this book. She was always someone I’d intended to read but never had, and of course it was an absolute delight to read Richard Mahoney. Before I started the book I made myself a reading list, jotting down my own ideas, and I skimmed though a couple of literary histories to get a sense of who came where and what I thought I should read and that came to thirty pages. And I did look at everything on that list. I hate to admit it, but things like the explorers’ journals I tended to skim.

Did you intend to stay with the mainstream, with writers who are well-known?

What I did regret was that there wasn’t more of an Asian presence in the book, I didn’t find that many Australian Asian writers who dealt with the landscape. I probably did try to redress the balance as far as women writers are concerned. Basically, I didn’t have time, it took me all my time to cover the ground. I don’t think I’ve stuck entirely to the mainstream, I’ve tried to put in less well-known writers, but they possibly do get drowned out by the mainstream.

Possibly all writing could be relevant to this project, especially the way you define landscape, since you talk of expanding the definition.

Well this is it. I didn’t start out to write a literary history but when I got to the end of it I realised that basically that’s what I’d done. Frankly it terrified me, because I thought that I was going to be massacred by more academic critics for skating over the surface of whole areas that should have been the subject of more in-depth studies. I wanted it to be an accessible book, that anyone could dip into at any point and find interesting. I rather hoped that everyone who read Australian literature would find interesting to read.

It’s not really a critical study, in the sense that it might find fault with the literature it’s discussing.

The faults I have found are the fairly obvious ones; the negation of the female sphere, and until recently a lack of awareness of conservation and environmental values. Rather than demolishing any contemporary or past literary beliefs, what I was trying to do was to make a few connections that mightn’t have been made before. One of them is contained in the coast; a few tiny things, such as the Balmain school of writing, such as it is, the early Wilding, Moorhouse, Sydney Push type writing and the Melbourne equivalent, Oakley and inner city male comedy, which was a modern version of the bush ethos, in that it espoused a lot of the same values: mateship, alcohol, exclusion of the female unless it was for one purpose only. To my knowledge no one’s mentioned that before.

I’ve made little connections that I hoped the general reader might find interesting, although a lot of this ground has been gone over in critical and academic studies. I think of this book as a sort of road map of Australian literature.