Author(s): Murray Bail

Fiction

At dawn, two women leave Sydney to drive over the Blue Mountains, into the dry outback landscape and the home of the late philosopher Wesley Antill. A man who thought his name too light for a philosopher, and his ears outlandish. Erica, a philosopher herself, has been asked by her university to review Wesley's work, to read his notes - the pages. They are as Wesley left them, unread, untouched, at the rural property run by Wesley's sister Lindsey and brother Roger. Sophie, a psychologist whose professional skills in listening seem to be confined to her patients, accompanies her friend, painting her toenails in the passenger seat and reeling off her opinions of the various qualities of her current man. At the homestead, Roger Antill manages the feed, water, fencing, and shearing requirements of 10,000 merinos, and Lindsey dresses in dark velvet for dinner. And the pages, far from lying in order in a philosopher's study, are piled amongst handfuls of wool, wheat sacks and a discarded bottle of tomato sauce in the woolshed.