Ironbark and stone: Place and
belonging in the nature novels of Inga
Simpson

Jane Frank
j.frank@griffith.edu.au

Abstract

This article discusses Sunshine Coast writer Inga Simpson’s nature writing in
three recent novels, Mr Wigg (2013), Nest (2014b) and Where the Trees Were
(2016c). It addresses Simpson’s self-categorisation as a nature writer, and shows
how the recurrent motif of sacred trees allows three introspective protagonists
to reach new understandings of universal themes: loss of love and innocence,
ageing, inheritance, childlessness, sexuality, death, ancient cultures, cultural in-
tegrity and preservation of the environment. The article considers Simpson’s
‘anti-Gothic’ approach to landscape in her novels, yet also shows how her ‘real-
ist’ depictions of place evoke unease surrounding the issue of white belonging
in Australia. Simpson’s metaphoric self-identification with trees, particularly the
Australian ironbark, is pivotal to the quiet power of her fiction’s exploration of
belonging in the Australian landscape.

Landscape as witness, literature as place
In three novels published in less than five years, Mr Wigg (2013), Nest (2014b)
and Where the Trees Were (2016c), Inga Simpson explores and ‘listens — to the
world beyond the merely human’ (Tredinnick 2007: 1), both to engage readers and
also to locate herself in the ‘landscape’ of her past and present. Simpson’s nature
writing is inseparable from the places in which it is set and from their natural
history. Characters in her novels, like Simpson herself, are fused with the landscape,
particularly the trees that inhabit it. The story of each character is linked to trees
in fundamental but distinct ways: in Mr Wigg, a fairy-tale thread centred on the
personified fruit trees of Wigg’s imagination mirrors the central storyline; in Nest,
a fragile narrative of loss and betrayal is woven together through the idea of nesting
and the healing power of trees; and in Where the Trees Were, unresolved tensions in
black and white Australia are examined through an encounter with Wiradjuri burial
trees discovered by children on a Central Western New South Wales property. In
each case, trees represent both sacredness and spiritual wholeness.

Simpson’s ‘tree change’ to the Sunshine Coast hinterland in 2006 coincided
with a dedicated shift to nature writing, or the literature of place, and she has
insisted that ‘writing place well’ is at the forefront of her creative agenda. In her

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Volume 24 | Issue 2 | 2017 | pp. 229–241 | c© The Author(s) 2017 |

mailto:j.frank@griffith.edu.au
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Jane Frank

essay ‘Triangulation’ (2016b: 295), Simpson links trees with her subjective life:
‘Ironbarks are my heartwood. They cling to the hilltops and paddock edges in the
dry land of my childhood.’

Ironbarks as their name suggests, are tough trees. Their outer covering is thick,
rough and deeply furrowed. Dead bark is not shed but accumulates. As it dies,
it is infused with kino, a dark red sap or gum. The kino ensures that the bark is
impervious to fire and heat, protecting the living tissue within — one of the many
adaptions of eucalypts . . . In places, deep red oozes through like blood. Ironbarks
grow in tough country, tolerating the dry. Their grey-green narrow leaves, turned
sideways to the sun, are one of the features the early white explorers and settlers
found so dreary and monotonous. (2016b: 295)

The presence of ironbarks form a backdrop to each of the novels to be discussed in
this article.

Simpson’s use of scientific names for trees and animals typifies her treatment
of flora and fauna, revealing a close understanding of arboreal particularities and
Australian landscape ecosystems. She shared with her father, a grazier and pho-
tographer, an interest in the microscopic details of the landscape and the science
of trees, birds and other wildlife. Her father took close-up photographs of the
ironbarks and other features on their rural property. He even built their family
home from a huge ironbark he felled on their land. Simpson’s appreciation of the
landscape is thus tied to particular family connections, but also to more general
notions of freedom and independence:

From twelve or thirteen, I camped out alone with the rocks, trees and stars . . .
There was a flattish site for a tent and a large stone fireplace overlooking crop
and grazing land . . . After sundown, my ironbark sentinels faded into dark . . .
By day, I wandered, collecting itchy seedpod boats from beneath kurrajongs to
sail on the dam, where mistletoe-infected trees admired their own reflections . . .
I explore[d] the shade loving ferns and mosses and orchids — a secret world of
green (2016b: 295)

Simpson’s work fits within a nature writing tradition that traces its beginnings to
various works of natural history from the later eighteenth century and through the
nineteenth century, including Gilbert White’s Natural Histories and Antiquities of
Selborne (1789) (Mabey 2006: 2–6) and the poetry of William Wordsworth, a close
student of the physical environment — plants, animals, geography and weather —
but also an imaginative shaper of sensory experience. Nature writing, however,
came into its own as a genre when Henry David Thoreau began writing of life in
his cabin on the edge of Walden Pond in his Life in the Woods (1854). For the
first time, ‘nature’ was at the centre of a vision of the American psyche, prompting
numerous other American authors to embrace the non-human world as a subject for
description, analysis and reflection. Like Wordsworth’s and Thoreau’s writing, Inga
Simpson’s fiction tells us about Simpson, her reading and her subjective life just as
much as it provides an objective vision of the natural world. But it certainly inherits
from the natural history tradition an interest in a precise geographical location,
its flora and fauna, and the seasonal changes, offering a close and meticulous
observation made over a period of time. Simpson sees the landscape as a witness
to history.

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Nature writing and ‘unsettled settledness’
Simpson’s childhood, steeped in the sclerophyll of the inland, is embedded in the
often tough, yet not untender, syntax of her writing. This style denotes an unease
that perhaps stems from a dilemma common to many non-Indigenous Australians:
an intense love of land twinned with concerns about the consequences of their
presence in it. Simpson’s work challenges the way we live in, and on, an inher-
ited landscape. Murray Bail (2013) argues that such unease in landscape-oriented
Australian fiction is part of a coming to terms with place that is characteristic of
New World experiences. This ‘unsettled settledness’ (Jacobs and Gelder 1998: 25;
Offord and Haebich 2008: 3) is most evident in Where the Trees Were (2016c),
but is present in Simpson’s other novels too.

In Where the Trees Were, Jay[ne] — who, Simpson has said in a personal
interview (Simpson 2016a), is a version of herself — is one of a group of primary
school children growing up in the Lachlan Valley of New South Wales, who discover
a stand of yellow box gums on her family’s rural property:

There was one tree for each of us. As if they were for us. What breeze there
was had been stilled. The birds and insects paused. For a moment, there was no
sound . . . I pushed past the others, to touch the ledge between the bark and
the carved surface of the largest tree. The cuts were deep and wide, right into
the heartwood, like fingers making a river. Scrolls and diamonds filled the space
around it. It all meant something. It meant a lot. We knew straight away . . . and
we knew that we all felt the same, without having to speak. It was as if the trees
said everything for us. (Simpson 2016c: 11)

One of these trees is an ‘arborglyph’ with intricate designs carved into the heart-
wood by the Wiradjuri people. Arborglyphs represented a map for a warrior’s
departed soul to navigate the afterlife.1 The discovery of the grove of trees, and the
promises made by the friendship group there, connect the characters from Jayne’s
childhood throughout their lives. Simpson draws on the sacred power of the trees
to symbolise shared promises, friendship and attachment to the landscape.

We learn in this novel, however, that the presence of such trees was regarded
as a threat to land ownership and the living of white Australian farmers, and at
the time of Mabo they were regarded as a threat to be destroyed. In the alternating
interplay of present and past, Jayne, who has become an arts conservator based
in Canberra, has committed an art crime — the return of an arborglyph from a
Canberra museum to its rightful Indigenous owners — in order to somehow right
the wrongs perpetrated by her family (but also by white Australia more broadly)
in removing these living temples of Aboriginal culture from sacred groves across
Western New South Wales. Jayne’s efforts to overcome the mistakes of childhood
put her career and relationship with Sarah, a senior member of a government
department, at risk. The question the novel asks is not whether Jayne is guilty —
because she is: it is whether the author can employ the broader context in such
a way as to balance Jayne’s acts against the nature of the world through which
she moves (Williamson 2016: 2). The novel is also about reverence and respect for
trees and our collective responsibility as guardians of culture in the face of those
wanting to tear down trees symbolic of ancient magic and rituals. Simpson’s use of
landscape, and the symbol of the sacred tree, is evidence of her working towards a
correction of the complex, multi-faceted relationship of people with rural Australia.

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Jane Frank

My conversation with Inga Simpson took place soon after heated debates about
cultural appropriation had erupted, sparked by American novelist Lionel Shriver’s
polarising opening address at the 2016 Brisbane Writers Festival. I was interested in
Simpson’s views on this issue since she walked out of the speech, which she consid-
ered ‘off-note, acerbic and rude’, and as displaying an unawareness of the particular
issues in play in contemporary Australia. In this same interview, Simpson revealed
that when writing Where the Trees Were, she was intrigued by articles and drawings
by early Australian writer, botanist and illustrator Louisa Atkinson, published in
the Sydney Morning Herald and Illustrated Sydney News in the 1850s and 1860s
(Simpson 2016a). Atkinson’s views were ground-breaking for their sympathetic
references to Australian Aboriginal people and for advocating conservation. Simp-
son undertook her own research into the existence of arborglyphs and, when the
novel was complete, sent a draft to Dr Lawrence Bamblett, a Wiradjuri academic
specialising in representations of Wiradjuri culture. Simpson wanted her account
in the novel to deal sensitively with a ‘tricky subject’:

Dr Bamblett didn’t go out of his way to teach me about the trees, but he was able
to correct mistakes and misunderstandings I had made from referencing the work
of white anthropologists, and directed me to the use of material that was accurate
and authentic. (Simpson 2016a)

Simpson considers that it is important for all Australians to be able to participate
in conversations about land and cultures, and that ‘these conversations are not
separate (black/white) conversations or monologues’, so this was an important
story to tell. Simpson well remembers the conversations she heard as a child about
the Mabo judgment, and the Four Corners program referred to in Where the Trees
Were (2016c: 100–2) that worried white Australian landholders. She refers to the
impact of native title in an author’s note to the novel:

Many arborglyphs were destroyed as part of the initial dispossession and clearing
of Kamilaroi and Wiradjuri land for farming. Some were later cut down and
removed for display in gardens, museums and galleries. There were still many in
place as late as the 1960s. While some would have been lost to natural causes,
as a child of the 1970s and 1980s, I remember some of the conversations around
the introduction of Native Title. I can imagine what happened to the rest of those
trees. (2016c: 300)

While these are complex issues, Simpson feels she is ‘on firmer ground to write
from a white settler point of view, as opposed to attempting to write characters
from an Indigenous viewpoint’ and that her ‘story comes from lived experience,
having experienced no consciousness about colour’ as a young person growing up
in Central Western New South Wales. The Wiradjuri boy in Jayne’s fictional friend-
ship group drew on Simpson’s experiences of her time at school spent with both
Wiradjuri and white children, a distinction that Simpson says was not discussed at
the time, so she ‘did not know these children were Wiradjuri’ (Simpson, 2016a).
As an adult, she feels a sense of guilt at ‘how blanked out [she] was as a younger
person to the cultural rift between black and white’, and this sense permeates the
story. In a review of the novel, Rhyll McMaster (2016: 2) comments that while
‘Simpson skirts around the edges’, her intention is to convey an ‘idea of guilt, as-
suaged through resuscitative action on behalf of [I]ndigenous people who remain

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Ironbark and Stone: Inga Simpson

strangely mute and without agency’. McMaster describes Simpson’s characters as
‘passionless, disconnected and existential’, and the narrative as precariously ‘weav-
ing a bloodless tale around the ongoing dispossession of a people’. I take issue with
McMaster’s conclusion that there is no ‘leap from exposition into reflection’. In my
view, Simpson does succeed in shedding light on a story not widely enough known
about the rights and wrongs involved in the removal, but also the repatriation, of
Wiradjuri objects of significant cultural value.

Simpson’s ‘anti-Gothic’ stance
Simpson’s writing evokes a sense of freedom in the face of the land that runs
counter to the alienation and strangeness evident in many other Australian novels.
Her landscape is a positive force. In our interview (Simpson, 2016a), Simpson
used the word ‘realist’ more than once to describe her work, specifically distancing
herself from so-called ‘Gothic’ treatments of life in rural Australia in novels like
Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth (2004), Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging
Rock (1967), Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright (1961), Evie Wyld’s All the Birds,
Singing (2013), or even Barbara Baynton’s short stories of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, which depict bush landscapes as alive and hostile.
Simpson finds these treatments ‘foreign’ and ‘works against them’ because ‘this
is not the rural Australia I know . . . this imported artificial landscape of human
drama. The characters are not at home there’ (Simpson, 2016a). Such Gothic
representations of rural Australia do not reflect Simpson’s own intimate experience
of the landscape.

Yet her story-motifs do sometimes have a slightly Gothic feel. Nest (2014b),
for example, is a novel about the mystery of two missing children, as well as a
book exploring the psychology of love and grief and the role of the natural world
in healing. Its main character, Jen, is a reclusive middle-aged ex-teacher and artist
who has returned to where she was raised in the Sunshine Coast hinterland. Simpson
confesses that there is a good deal of herself in the character. While Jen’s day-to-
day encounters with birds in the landscape take centre stage, it is outside events
— particularly the disappearance of a local schoolgirl — that mirror for her the
disappearance decades before of a close school friend as well as the unexplained loss
of her own father. These events, together with the loss of a primary relationship,
undermine her efforts to establish a peaceful and idyllic life. When writing this
novel, Simpson herself was affected by the disappearance of Woombye teenager
Daniel Morcombe and its impact on the community (Brown 2015; Simpson 2016a).

The theme of the lost child has been a particular obsession in Australian literature
and art since the time of white settlement, as detailed by Peter Pierce in The Country
of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety (1999). This important book examines
this theme in Australian narrative as part of a broader cultural pattern through an
analysis of certain key texts. Australian fiction has tended to transform this motif
into elements specific to Australia’s distinctive imaginative space. In Lindsay’s Picnic
at Hanging Rock (1967), for example, several schoolgirls disappear with one of
their teachers while picnicking at Victoria’s gloomy and forbidding Hanging Rock.
Their disappearance is followed by further tragedies and violent deaths, which
transform the innocuous small community of Appleyard College into a place of
horror and scandal. This motif of children being lost in the Gothic landscape of

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Jane Frank

settler imaginations (Steele, 2010) contrasts with Simpson’s approach, where the
landscape is a force for good:

I wanted South East Queensland and the forested area where I live to be a major
character. Like Jen I hear birdsong all day where I live. I didn’t want to paint the
bush in a Gothic way despite the disappearance. I wanted it to be a benign place
where the main character is very comfortable. (Simpson, in Brown 2015: 2)

In Nest, the lost child plot reflects not only Jen’s painful memories of the past —
her missing childhood friend Michael and the suspicious simultaneous disappear-
ance of her father — but also a broader social anxiety about an uncertain future.
However, there are also constant reminders in Nest of the power of the landscape
to overwhelm human existence. Jen maintains her house on the forest fringe, imag-
ining that if she ceased in these efforts, her house ‘would soon rot and fall and
begin its own journey back into the forest’ (Simpson 2014b: 226).

Yet the forest is ultimately a place of recuperation and healing rather than of
threat. At the beginning of the story, the gentle presence of trees is personified:

The trees gathered round, their trunks a steady grey-brown. Sometimes, she sus-
pected they shifted closer during the night, just an inch or two, rearranging their
roots around rocks and soil. (Simpson 2014b: 4)

Jen has fled to this remote location for healing from her troubled past, broken
relationship and childlessness:

Now she was just a husk of a woman. Orphaned. Childless. Little more than bone
and sinew and skin without feathers to hide beneath or a song to sing. (Simpson
2014b: 201)

Living close to the forest and watching and sketching birds at close range, Jen
escapes into the natural world. She sets up a ‘spider rig’2 (Simpson 2014b: 199)
as a means of flying like a bird and becoming one with the landscape and birdlife.
As Jen moves ever closer to the treetop canopy, the reader accompanies her on a
journey to self-acceptance and peace. The writing is laden with bird imagery of
empty nests and birds leaving, as well as Jen’s own metamorphosis. Hanging like a
bird in her own nest constructed of vines and bark, she realises that

it was a moment that approached, a shift in time. She stared at the tree’s dead
heart while she listened, and at last she understood she carried something dead
inside her too (Simpson 2014b: 238).

It is this union with nature that brings Jen her weightlessness: ‘She was breathing
with the forest. She was forest’ (Simpson 2014b: 244).

Thus, in Simpson’s work, the reader is protected from the savage inhospitable
land where characters are overcome by the menacing shadows and deep depression
that figure in so much Australian Gothic fiction set in the bush. Simpson’s land-
scapes are, instead, imbued with a sense of hope and characters draw on the power
of their surroundings to overcome loss, death and injustice.

A hinterland identity
Simpson identifies as a nature or landscape writer in the same tradition as Tim
Winton and Gillian Mears. Mears’ capacity with the sentence, her lyricism and the

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imagery in her representation of rural landscapes coaxed Simpson towards realism.
Mears’ The Grass Sister (1995) and The Mint Lawn (1991) were particularly
influential, feeding Simpson’s own hankering to write (Simpson 2016a). Winton’s
treatment of the ocean — particularly the liminal space between land and sea —
had an impact too. Winton’s work also speaks of his interest in ‘spiritual retreat
and contemplation in nature’ (Winton 2015: 131). Like Winton, Simpson writes
of places she knows and uses the vernacular. As I read Simpson, Winton’s words
were vivid in my mind:

I began to write about Albany and the people and places along the south coast.
This was as much a matter of making do with what I knew as it was an ongoing
act of homage to somewhere I loved. But in retrospect, I see I was trying to
find a language for the presence of the past. I was coming instinctively to an
understanding of the way geography shapes us, but also tacitly giving credit to
the weight of time. When they move in and across a landscape, humans are wading
through a shared past, surrounded at every turn by events and processes that will
never be over . . . (Winton 2015: 137–8)

Asked whether she regards herself as a regional writer, Simpson suggests instead
that she is a hinterland writer, quite liking ‘the idea [of hinterland] — that we are
related to the coast but separate from its highways, malls and spreading estates’
(Simpson 2016a). Her idea of a hinterland identity plays on the notion of a hin-
terland of thought (Simpson 2011). Nest (Simpson 2014b) alludes to the mix of
a strong alternative community in the Eudlo/Palmwoods area, comprising a grow-
ing number of ex-professional retirees and traditional farming families and timber
cutters, such as Jen’s father. Organisations like Landcare, to which Jen and her
friend Lil are committed, unite nature-loving community members in a venture to
preserve the natural beauty of the hinterland, reflecting Simpson’s own interests.

Simpson’s move with her partner to a rural property in the Sunshine Coast hin-
terland, where she has been able to explore nature writing, has allowed her to find
a ‘path back to my true self, my best self’. Reading many male narratives in their
cabin in the woods as part of a PhD in English literature ‘fostered certain hermetic
ways’, and for a time this limited her sense of what was possible. However, Simp-
son’s decision to write a lesbian protagonist in her third nature novel, Where the
Trees Were (2016c) was a conscious move to portray lesbian characters heroically,
and to:

write against stereotypes . . . story allows us to reimagine our lives, alternate
futures, other possibilities — more generous and inclusive societies. And as is
the case for all minorities, literature empowers us, gives us visibility. We need
more lesbian characters on the page, and we need them written in our own voice.
(Simpson 2015: 3–5)

Reviewers of Simpson’s novels speak about her ‘light touch’ (Pierce 2016: 2) and
‘acute powers of observation’ (Middleton 2014: 1). Geordie Williamson describes
Simpson as a ‘graceful, limpid writer; her sentences clean up after themselves,
neatly laying out their mimetic wares.’ (Williamson 2016: 2) However, Simpson’s
subtlety makes her moves ‘through the ethical thickets’ of her novels poignant for
the reader, who is left pondering issues — environment, gender, sexuality, race —
that have risen organically to the surface. However, it is the lyrical authenticity of

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Jane Frank

the places where the characters of Simpson’s novels live that resonates. Places, and
particularly trees with all their intricate details delivered, are in fact characters in
each of the novels.

The Tree of Life
In Simpson’s first nature novel, Mr Wigg (2013), the tree motif is used to connect
the reader to a rich vein of metaphor in European fairy tale and fable. Simpson’s
work is heavily influenced by the wishing trees and sacred trees of folklore, history
and literature, and her vivid fruit tree imagery links clearly to the iconographic and
literary language of trees represented by the motif of the Tree of Life, often depicted
in Renaissance culture, particularly the botanical and horticultural paradigms of
sterility and fecundity related to pruning and regrowth, life and death. Simpson
explains the importance of formative literature to her writing, including the rich
tree-laden symbolism of The Lord of the Rings. There are references, too, to other
books about fruit and fruit trees Simpson recalls from childhood: Tales of the Ara-
bian Nights read beneath the pomegranate trees (2013: 107), the Greek myth of
Hades tricking Persephone into eating six pomegranate seeds while in the Under-
world (2013: 107) and Mr Wigg’s recollections of his own wedding and of eating
quinces with allusions both to Edward Lear’s The Owl and the Pussycat and to the
quince (commonly identified as the ‘golden apple’) that Paris awarded to Aphrodite
in ancient Greece (2013: 93–4). Simpson draws on this tradition to symbolically
link Mr Wigg’s life to the lives of spiritual and fairy-tale trees — the Peach King in
particular — owned and tended by characters from a mythological royal kingdom,
who appear in his dreams. These visions offer him respite and retreat from a rapidly
changing world and provide him with glimpses of seasonal eternity in the final year
of his life as his health declines.

This novel is Simpson’s favourite, because its main character is the one furthest
from herself. Mr Wigg documents the last year in the life of a kind and sensitive
country man — a widower mourning for a wife lost to cancer, for an estranged
daughter living in the city and for his strained relationship with his son. The novel
is set in 1971, on a small farm in the heart of stone-fruit country: all that remains
of his family’s once extensive New South Wales property. Yet the small details of
Mr Wigg’s life — tending his orchard, preserving fruit, welding, inventing, keeping
chickens and enjoying visits from his grandchildren — connect him to his past and
make life bearable. Simpson based the story on her childhood experience of visiting
grandparents with an orchard: she remembers the richness of childhood, when
there was freedom and a lack of fear, delicious home-grown food and quiet times
spent watching the cricket interview (Simpson 2016a). The story is permeated with
nostalgia for this simpler and slower life in step with the seasons and punctuated
by pleasurable daily rituals that help to overcome loss and hurt. In a brief memoir
published in the Queensland Writers’ Centre journal, Writing Queensland (Simpson
2014a: 8), she observes:

The landscapes of childhood offer a rich vein to mine when writing place . . .
Specific smells and sounds, school yards, streetscapes and paddocks are imprinted
on us. They are part of who we are. And yet so long ago (for me anyway) that
it is almost a foreign country, taking on mythical proportions. Our memories are
not necessarily complete or accurate but they go deep.

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However, Simpson consciously avoids ‘pin[ning] the place down too much’, so a
series of impressions is created, and the reader is able to populate the landscape
of the story with their own childhood recollections and emotions (2014a: 9). She
is committed to placing readers in her book’s settings. In this sense, Simpson has
taken her cue from American writers like David Vann, whose stories testify to
deep emotional connections with places linked to his early life and family history,
and Annie Proulx, a place-based writer who develops story by asking herself what
people do for a living in a particular place, and connecting the characters in her
novels with authentic livelihoods and place-based emotional truths (2014a: 8).

To convey place, Simpson uses evocative imagery, layers of symbolism and
metaphor, and personification — particularly of trees. She is interested in the mag-
ical properties of trees. In Mr Wigg, each variety of fruit tree in Mr Wigg’s orchard
is personified. For example, the Mulberry Tree is cast as a wise tree, a little like Mr
Wigg himself:

It would be fair to say that the mulberry tree was a bit aloof. He was physically set
apart from the others — position always determined so much about a tree — and
their youthful boasting didn’t interest him much. They might have sought advice
from one who had grown for much longer, seen many more seasons, but this is
the way of the young, thinking they know it all. The Mulberry, too, might have
shared his rumbling thoughts on the meaning of bearing fruit year after year, or
stories of some remarkable things he had seen. Instead, he stayed silent, having
learned younger trees lacked the patience to listen. (Simpson 2011: 8)

There is a fine line between dream and reality for Mr Wigg, who talks knowingly
to the trees as well as to his dead wife as he goes about the rituals of pruning and
picking fruit. Magical elements are reflected in his character from the Peach King
and Orchard Queen fables he dreams; he is an inventor who tells magical stories
and knows the recipes for delicious childhood treats. He takes a year to weld the
Peach Tree that wins the Fruit Festival Sculpture Award. It links his orchard life to
lost love and a time forever gone, but also leaves a legacy for the future.

Simpson uses the tree metaphor to refer to Australian settlement, emphasising
that the majority of Australians have been migrants or the descendants of migrants.
Mr (Alneaus) Wigg’s pastoral visions represent the dream of many Australians of
European lineage who had never experienced at first hand the European landscapes
of their forebears. Wigg was the name of Simpson’s French great-great-grandfather
(Simpson 2016a), and she recognised that her own grandfather in 1970s Australia
‘was living that French village life that’s centred on food and communal spaces even
though he had not ever been there or experienced it’ (Simpson 2016a; Simpson in
Metcalf 2013: 2–3). In the novel, Mr Wigg sips tea and imagines villages and
orchards in Europe — ‘His family’s chalky hills lined with vines’ (Simpson 2013:
244) and the ‘substantial’ stone walls adorned with woodland strawberries that
appear in his Orchards of the World book (2013: 254). The children of immigrants
like Mr Wigg felt torn between the family traditions and imagined relationship to
the places of their family’s past, and their own yearning to belong in Australia. The
orchard symbolises this link between two very different cultures.

There is sadness for the past in this novel and an aching nostalgia for simpler
times when there was a stronger connection with the land and the seasons. Fre-
quent references to food — whether corned beef sandwiches with pickled beetroot,

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Jane Frank

homemade chutney or the fruit desserts with meringue, pastry or custard that
remind readers of their own slower childhoods — also tie in with Simpson’s ob-
servations that the pendulum is swinging back in locations like the Sunshine Coast
hinterland, where small pleasures like growing fruit trees and enjoying organic food
experiences are part of the area’s ethos.

The self-sufficiency of which Simpson speaks reminded me of Kate Llewellyn’s
A Fig at the Gate (2014), which was motivated partly by the author wanting a
‘garden that would feed me and my friends; back to what almost everyone had in
their childhood, which was a garden that would partly sustain the family’ (Llewelyn
2014: xv). Both Simpson’s and Llewelyn’s books celebrate human kindness. Thus
Mr Wigg gives fruit to his son and the grape-growing Traubners next door, feeds
his grandchildren nourishing food and even gives away bottles of peaches to the
young electrician who comes to repair the wiring in his dilapidated house.

Simpson reminds us of trees and the orchard as a metaphor for life (2013: 158)
and describes marriage as a garden with a life of its own, but sadly for Mr Wigg,
‘no one had much advice when it was gone, though, nor could they help you with
the pain. It just had to be borne, like a terrible winter, or drought. One that didn’t
ever end’ (2013: 273). Mr Wigg is a book about confronting change, especially the
unsettling experience for the elderly as they adapt in a rapidly altering world. Both
the actual and fabled stories stem from the painful loss of a loved one. We feel Mr
Wigg’s inability to cope with loss:

How were you supposed to live without someone after fifty-odd years? The
thought had seemed worse than death at the time, still did some nights, when
he lay staring into the dark, but here he was all the same. Life had a way of going
on whether you were interested or not, and then you felt yourself taking pleasure
in a few small things, and a few more. (2013: 36)

In the face of this loss, the orchard is a place of safety. The swirling world of change
outside is delivered via the radio and the television or by visiting the neighbours.
Australia’s national soundtrack of the 1970s — the Vietnam War ‘Death Lottery’
(2013: 63), the election of Idi Amin as president of Uganda (2013: 66) and the
politicisation of cricket — with the cancelling of the South African cricket tour as
a protest against apartheid (2013: 251) — plays in the background of Mr Wigg’s
life. Age-old farming traditions are disappearing in the face of modern technologies
and new machinery. Yet, amidst these happenings, the seasons follow one another
in the orchard as they have always done — although, as Mr Wigg ages, he loses his
driver’s licence and is forced to give up playing bowls, while advancing Parkinson’s
disease makes his hands tremble. Simpson has said:

There is a history to our land, going back to settlement like Mr Wigg’s and being
carved up over time, and not always amicably, among sons and brothers . . . It
feels like a decline, something sad, like the landscape in itself being farmed to
death. (in Metcalf 2013: 3)

While social realist elements draw the reader’s attention to the way we treat the
elderly, the indignity of growing old and the injustices of inheritance, the stories of
trees in the landscape as metaphors for human experience are the central theme of
the book.

238 Queensland Review



Ironbark and Stone: Inga Simpson

Living the landscape: The lyric of the country
Simpson’s stories have a sensual complexity that brings the landscapes of her his-
tory and imagination vividly into focus for her readers, particularly through the
personification of trees. However, she also uses discrete occurrences in the lives of
her characters to stimulate thinking in the intellectual terrains of occupation and
dispossession, strains on the natural environment, the economic sustainability of
rural communities and the challenges the landscape presents to us about responsi-
bility and respect. Thus these are not only geographic landscapes, but often moral
and spiritual ones. In the words of Mark Tredinnick (2003: 10), her novels are part
of a burgeoning list of works of nature writing ‘in which the lyrics of the country
sing’. Introducing his edited collection of nature writing, A Place on Earth (2003),
Tredinnick writes of pattern and music embodied in geographies that ‘teach me
how best to live the life that has been given to me’ and explains that for him,
nature writing is the transcription of landscape experience into both language and
acts of love (Tredinnick 2003: 27). In a similar way, the novels that have been
discussed in this essay are written out of the heart of the places Simpson knows,
and they embrace their respective ecologies. As well as capturing the intricacy and
wildness of Australian landscapes, the novels share straightforward, humble, ordi-
nary pleasures about existing and participating in these natural environments. As
she explains in her essay ‘Triangulation’ (Simpson 2016b: 303–4), she believes that
this is made possible because she writes surrounded by bushland:

I am made of ironbark and stone. Formed on the hills scraped back to their
bones. It is to the hills I have returned: the Sunshine Coast’s sub-tropical hinter-
land thick with trees and loud with birdsong. At first, blinded by chaotic green, I
didn’t notice the ironbark. After heavy rain, I recognised their black trunks stand-
ing among the brush box, tallow-woods, bloodwoods, grey gums and flooded
gums . . . Sometimes I see them with my father’s eye, calculating their diameter,
the quantity of timber within, or the dimensions of a bowl turned from a cross-
section . . . It is no surprise, I suppose, that I gravitated towards the handmade
cottage of timber, stone and recycled brick . . . It is by the big ironbarks that I
orient myself, get my bearings.

Inga Simpson’s writing has come not only from herself but from her relationship
with the land. This work advances the role of Australian fiction in honestly engaging
in dialogues about place, time and belonging.

Endnotes
1 For thousands of years, the Wiradjuri and Gamilaroi peoples of Central Western, North-

Western and North Coast New South Wales ceremoniously carved trees as a form of artistic
and cultural expression. The trees usually were located near riverbanks and flats, where the
excavation of soil was easier. Celebrated Aboriginal men were buried with the burial tree
design facing the grave to serve as a warning to passers-by of the spiritual significance of the
area. Each tree was uniquely carved, featuring geometric shapes, chevrons, curvilinear lines,
scrolls and concentric circles, distinct from the ‘dot’ patterns used in Central and Western
Australia (Briggs and Jackson 2011).

2 A spider rig is a form of adjustable double-ended lanyard that allows tree climbers to reach
extreme heights from the ground, giving them the sensation of ‘sky walking’. The concepts

Queensland Review 239



Jane Frank

of the spider rig and Jen’s ‘tree bed’ were sourced by Simpson from Richard Preston’s The
Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring (2008) (Simpson 2014b: 297; Simpson 2016b).

References
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Briggs Ronald and Jackson Melissa 2011. Carved trees: Aboriginal cultures of Western
New South Wales. Sydney: State Library of New South Wales.

Brown Phil 2015. ‘Author Inga Simpson draws on impact of Daniel Mor-
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McGahan Andrew 2004. The white earth. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

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where-the-trees-where-by-inga-simpson.

Metcalf Fran 2013. ‘Inga Simpson opens a window on the past in evocative
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Mears Gillian 1991. The mint lawn. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

Mears Gillian 1995. The grass sister. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Middleton Carol 2014. ‘Inga Simpson’s new novel: Nest’. Australian Book Review 365,
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Offord Baden and Haebich Anna 2008. ‘Introduction: Landscapes of exile — “once
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Pierce Peter 1999. The country of lost children: An Australian anxiety. Melbourne:
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—— 2016. ‘Where the trees were review: Inga Simpson’s talents as a writer come to
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240 Queensland Review

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Ironbark and Stone: Inga Simpson

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Queensland Review 241

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	Landscape as witness, literature as place
	Nature writing and ‘unsettled settledness’
	Simpson’s ‘anti-Gothic’ stance
	A hinterland identity
	The Tree of Life
	Living the landscape: The lyric of the country
	Endnotes
	References