I was able to look at Australia s history within a different and larger framework from that I was used to, at precisely the time when intellectual energies were being expended in Australia to reconceive our future in relation to Asia, a process that involved reassessing our past in order to find the traces of alternative trajectories and lineages. In other words, I hoped to be responsive to history, and responsible to it, but to do so in my novelist s way, through informed speculation that challenged habitual ways of seeing the past. That, in turn, was a contribution to shaking up the present. What I could not change was botany. The basis of my speculation was that a botanical specimen can provide the key to a hidden history.
Plants have means of travelling and changing that are denied to humans.
Not only is the devil in the detail, the Good Lord resides there too, as Flaubert and then Aby Warburg have said. Certainly it is only possible to conjecture about the meanings of history if the little things are right. I am obsessed with getting the detail right. The obsession grows more powerful as the final form of the book approaches, as if the more I have a belief in my creation the more I want it to be unflawed by factual inaccuracy. Sometimes that involves being clear about what is allowed by virtue of poetic licence.