In the grammar of the river people,

It is said, every verb runs upstream

Or down.

    —Mark Tredinnick, “River Syntax”

Rivers, if you follow them, let you into the logic of the land. They carry its secrets. They are the country’s syntax and much of its sentiment. Writing, if you let it, will find a way to and through places you never dreamed you knew.  

Like most rivers, the Murrumbidgee (“big water” for the Wiradjuri), is a small thing at its source; and its source–wet heath high in the Fiery Range of the Snowies on the southeastern corner of the Australian continent. It’s an old river in an old land, and it gets pretty big pretty fast. They’ve dammed it near its headwaters (Eucumbene), but after that assault on it, it swells and flows south till it meets the perpendicular insistence of the Great Divide near Cooma and bends north. For a hundred ks or so it makes about it one of the lovelier valleys on the planet, heading under the Namadgi Range and watering Bredbo and Michelago, for Ngunnawal lands, now Canberra.

Then it bends west, bears the travesty of another dam (Burrinjuck), and carries on, tapering a little south now, through Gundagai and on to Wagga and broadens and brown on the plains beyond—Yanco, Leeton, Hay, Balranald—and finally, having received the tribute of ninety rivers and streams, it delivers itself into the Murray (a river that rises not all that far from where the ’bidgee begins, but takes a more direct route west by south).

Everywhere in the Divide, all high places, plains, towns and hills and streams, interest me; in all of them the eastern and western, the coastal and the inland selves of this land cohabit and congeal. All have their traumas and multiplicities, their tragedy and triumph, glamour and funk. One place, just north of the Murrumbidgee on its run from Gundagai to Wagga, arrested my attention in mid-April, when we broke a journey to Melbourne: Nangus. Jodie found a property there, now called Kimo, a corporate pastoral run of 7500 acres, on which sit a gaggle of repurposed cottages and shearers’ huts. We arrived in the dark under a thicket of stars and a waxing moon and found our way on good gravel roads through six or seven gates to a timber cottage, and we woke early next morning in a lean pastoral paradise, a bowl of dreaming hills. If you like your grasslands tawny and your lines lean, your curves austere, your distances far, as I do, you might feel you’ve been reborn into a pastoral idyll. Certainly, into a tough and hallowed place, Wiradjuri hills and plains, long loved and well kept, taken, made over into pastoral leases, the usual colonial story, innately unjust and yet enacted with vision and hard labour, not just violence. It feels a deep and beautiful and sorrowful place and somehow for me the heartsease of the whole long Divide. If you’re me, you might not want to leave too soon. Wrens and galahs, eagles and apostlebirds, long morning shadows make a compelling case for staying.

We had to press on, that day, but we made a plan. Just down from the cottage where we stayed, I could see a long barn with a lot of doors; it turns out to be the shearers’ quarters from back in the day. And a good sort of a place now for a gathering.

So we’re putting on a writing retreat here for four days in late July [Thu 31 to Sunday 3 August]. A mix of mentorship, teaching, free time and group work. It’s not going to be possible to write badly or fail to chill under the influence of this handsome place, these Wiradjuri hills, this valley of the big water. More details soon, but there’ll be side trips to the river and to Jugiong and nearby Gundagai. A walk or two and perhaps a horse ride for the brave. But mostly conversation and writing guidance and the inspiration of the place.