Half an hour ago, I saw a blue bowerbird crackling the leaves as he hopped away from what is definitely not a nest. It was strange, almost voyeuristic, to peek into this site of compulsive seek, search and seduction, all littered with blue plastic. David Lynch could make a terrific movie about bowerbirds and the one-nightstand blue-neoned motels the male birds make in the bush. Especially ripe for dramatic treatment are the immature males that never turn true blue and never make their bowers quite right. The females ignore their bowers while the mature males obliterate them. A mess of twigs, divested of all its blue loot, can be cautionary testimony to futile creativity and unsuccessful courtship.

The natural world can creep up on you in the silence, like the march fly that has just landed noiselessly on my bare leg. The silence can be a haunted and itchy space, thick with known and unknown histories and presences, all indifferent to my spooked frailties. Sometimes I watch the big familiar black cows for comfort, even though I know most of them are earmarked for the abattoir.

Meanwhile, there are other people. In the adjacent studio is my old school friend, the painter Julie Harris. I envy the paint smell of creative industry seeping from Julie’s studio where her work festoons the floors, easel and walls with an overflow of browns and blues and smudges and stars. They reek of mystery and power. ‘The river,’ Julie says.

Yes. It, they, are the river, whereas I have books, pens and notebooks that announce themselves drearily, like conservative cousins at a wedding. Dry, neat and abstract, they don’t evoke the river. But the river does seem to be leaking into my libretto or any stray poem that presents itself. Is it a musical motif? Or just overwhelmingly itself, as when Julie and I went for a swim against its current and literally got nowhere, swimming on the spot in its strong cool grip.

At night, unlike the other artists, I can’t work. I’ve tried. But my writing congeals into a lumpy mess of dark metaphor. Is it because the silence takes on a visual form? On a moonless night, the pitch black can gather thickly around you, as if the air itself is sodden with tar. I go out with a torch to look for wombats – anything to break the surface of the black water climbing over my head.

But, at night, Jonathan composes with intensity on the piano in the cottage a little distance from the community of artists’ studios. Sometimes, across the black field, where, in the daytime, two bulls ram or lick each other, I can hear an occasional, clear, disembodied note. And I wonder which character, which scene, which song in our collaborative opera is being musically born.