From “Dream Geographies,” an essay about the writing of her novel Praiseworthy that was published in September in the literary journal HEAT.

The notebooks show their age through their use and how they became dog-eared and worn. The pages are filled with notes written in pencil, which, perhaps fortuitously, fades more quickly. Some of the notes are long, others just lines, or words, indicators. Sections were later colored with highlighters, or have flight-line-ringed sentences—guiding later drafts of the book. Various pages were turned inward, or tagged, or have flattened corners.

The inside covers of the notebooks were used to save a substantial collection of news clippings, an offbeat record of the world through those years of writing the book. There are pressed leaves, wildflowers, feathers of owls and colorful parrots and lorikeets, swans, finches, cockatoos, picked up on walks—hundreds of walks—taken alone while deep in thought, that in the end amounted to much of what went into creating the book. The feathers alone form a catalogue of walking through many seasons in different parts of the country.

You will find in these notebooks: broken wings of butterflies, such as the brown forest butterflies found in the summer months when the woods were abundant with their dance; traveling beetles crawling in their hundreds in the leaf litter. These were studied and, if not intentionally, were thought about as works of scale, as were the patterns on a butterfly wing, which are composed of millions of scales, grandiose designs developed over eons.

All these collected objects were a reminder of being grounded while facing reality—as we have done in the past, and will do so in the future—and while dealing with other major concerns that hold no beauty, nor added comfort to our combined humanity. These were story worlds to add to the significance of being grounded, to know the tiny but integral scale of your belonging in a timeless culture of country, while staring into the abyss of the world.