AVERIL ROBERTSON

I grew up in Ōtautahi (Christchurch), the biggest city of Te Waipounamu (the South Island) of Aotearoa (New Zealand). From the loom of the Southern Alps and the dry and windy Canterbury Plains, to inner-tubing on the Manuherikia and waterskiing in Kenepuru Sound, to hiking up to the Brooklyn Wind Turbine and glow-worm hunting in Punakaiki … it’s fair to say that the landscape I was surrounded with filled my mind and my soul. This is why I love it when an author ensures that the land, and the characters’ connection to it, is a critical part of their novel.

When I think of the fiction that has stuck with me, it is nearly always the case that the landscape features prominently. Where the land gives and takes in equal measure. Where the protagonist goes on a journey of trust with their environment. Where its unpredictability becomes the source of a potential twist as much as any antagonist.

The challenge for a writer, then, is to take the reader to the landscape. Aussie crime writers are doing this phenomenally well. The outback, the rainforest, the beach, the mountains – we feel the dry heat and dust, the humidity and the torrential rain, the sand between our toes and the sparkle of the water, the biting wind and the snow. Sometimes the landscape changes its character too. Here a threat, there a protector. Can the characters trust it not to hurt them? Can it trust the characters not to hurt it? 

I’m lucky that I have some of the world’s most stunning scenery mapped to my memories. We went camping every summer, letting Aotearoa’s questionable “summer” weather wreak havoc with our plans to sit in the sun reading one day, then burn our backs so badly the next we couldn’t lie down for a week.

Writing imbued with a landscape that takes the reader there, that lets the landscape be significant to the story, acknowledges that the place where we belong, our tūrangawaewae, is part of what makes us who we are.