To explore this, Probert employs the triple treat of academia, bibliophilia, and gardening nous. Perhaps leaving Melbourne will make her feel more congruent with the country, an impulse that sees her, in her early sixties, buying a rural property in the Otways. Or maybe, despite the wealth of knowledge she gains there, it won’t.

The book’s title and main investigative line are taken from the late Australian landscape writer George Seddon, whom Probert quotes: ‘The enduring form of possession is imaginative possession, which is fed by knowledge, understanding, associations, stories and images, affections and, finally incorporation of the environment into the self, until it becomes part of our sense of personal identity.’

Although Probert concentrates largely on Victoria, an intertextual dialogue with the Fremantle-focused Seddon continues throughout, as does an interplay with the work of historian Bill Gammage and writers such as memoirist Kim Mahood, whose work is situated in the Northern Territory. The fiction writers referenced range from Joseph Furphy to Chloe Hooper. Despite the diverse contexts, these are writers for whom the Australian landscape, bellicose or bucolic, exerts a hypnotic pull and raises a common, if sometimes implicit, concern: how to feel settled in a settler society that itself remains unsettled by the facts of its founding.

The metaphor, never heavy-handed, is clear: whether plants, creatures, or people, the unintended, often disastrous consequences of introduced species spread like weeds, the intercontinental transplantation of entities and ideas presaging not only environmental degradation but an arrested development of the imagination. Rather than continue in this way, Probert suggests that it may be time to acknowledge, in Seddon’s words, that ‘We are here, and not somewhere else.’

Her own preference for the reminders of her childhood in Kent, and the changing of those attitudes over time, is fascinating – the slow, informed appreciation for Australian native birds versus introduced species such as starlings and blackbirds; the belated admiration for trees such as the mountain and alpine ash, whose gumnuts have evolved to release their seeds only under the ‘atomic heat’ of bushfires, versus the helicopter-seeded sycamores of her youth; an increasing esteem for the kangaroo and echidna versus heavy-hooved non-native livestock.

The separation of what is from what was underscores the gap between Australia’s pastoral ideal and its agrestic reality, as argued through cross-analysis of the work of Arthur Streeton, whose paintings such as Land of the Golden Fleece (1926) conjure a postwar Victorian idyll. Seddon, Probert informs us, believed the near-mythical golden light infusing that work was caused by dust blowing through plains ‘denuded of vegetation, the topsoil pulverised by sheep and cattle and blown to the coast’.

Given the focus on settler society, it is perhaps unsurprising that first-hand Aboriginal contributions to the Australian imaginary come late in the book, via the agricultural insights in Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu (2014), which, for the first time, present the ‘lived history of Victoria’s Indigenous population as something [Probert can] relate to directly’: ‘Everyone can imagine someone else making a fish trap and catching eels, or growing and harvesting yams. It is not so simple to understand why other people believe in skin and clan totems, or re-incarnation or the resurrection, come to that.’ And yet for every Patrick White and Katharine Susannah Prichard it is easy to cite examples of contemporary First Nations writers who do exactly what Probert seems to be craving throughout, authors such as Melissa Lucashenko, Alexis Wright, and Tyson Yunkaporta, who are deeply invested in poetically specific, imaginatively expansive renderings of the land.

Though a nature lover, Probert is no bleeding heart. Nonchalantly, she steals, boils, and furtively returns blackbird eggs to nests to limit the population of new birds – a certain steeliness perhaps inherited from her Tasmanian-born maternal grandmother, ‘Mrs. Charles Russell’, who left Australia as a war widow to run, and lobby vociferously for, the Associated Country Women of the World.

Probert, though, is a disarmingly friendly guide whose investment in her subject matter makes for a rewarding read. That she struggles to unearth a definitive answer in her Otways garden to the big question of belonging is ultimately reassuring. Instead, she considers possibilities beyond the colonialist mindset, within which real or imagined dominion over the land is no prerequisite for feeling at home. In this she takes heart from an account by Lebanese-Australian sociologist Ghassan Hage, who recounts visiting the garden of his Lebanese immigrant grandparents, who had settled in Bathurst in the 1930s. Seeing trees planted by his grandfather half a century earlier leaves Hage ‘feeling more Australian than ever’, as if the trees’ roots, ‘paradoxically’, were ‘an extra pair of wings’, offering him a glimpse of belonging ‘in opposition to the narrow territorial way of being rooted’.

Australia is neither its ancestral past nor its settler present but the still-evolving result of horticultural grafts and latitudinal shifts, much like the elm trees now synonymous with Melbourne that have outgrown their European ancestors (more than twenty million of them died from Dutch Elm Disease in the 1960s and 1970s). We are here now, endemic or otherwise, and have to survive, adapt, and contribute.