The story tells us of the life of Davis Blood from year dot to age eighteen or so. Davis grows up in a large and bustling household: three older brothers and a sister, two Aunts, his Grandmother, father Jackson and mother Lillian. The two Aunts, the one, Mira, psychologic­ally, the other, Ursula, emotionally crippled, feed the boy language and ideas. Mira lost her husband in a car crash twenty years back and was brought to the house by friendly Uncle Hector since she had nowhere else to live. She sits in a comer of the kitchen mouthing the occasional derisory witty monologue or listening to Mozart:

‘Don’t go brandying my name about' Mira yelled. ‘It's the twilight of the dogs! We’ll all be up shortly before the great Computer-Dog in the sky. Worse than being grilled by a roomful of defectives. What will we say then to our cursors? That we were parallaxed by errors? That a little college is a dangerous thing? That too many of our enemies took a Samuel Pepys at our dairy notes?…’

Aunt Ursula has spent all her life in a wheelchair but listens to the boy’s questions and speaks to him of God, Freud. Marx, her own disillusionment:

‘God is alive, isn’t he, Auntie?’
‘Nothing’s actually alive. This – she swept her jerking hand round to indicate the world – even the universe. ‘This is an illusion. Life is merely organisations, and electrochemical interaction. Apparently – living things are mechanisms by which life itself can be mobile, compressed, accessible to more connections, more possibilities of survival’.

He is a bright child, this youngest Blood, gregarious and private, easygoing and violent. When he decides to do something: learn to bowl. dig a fall-out shelter, teach himself to box, he goes at it with single-minded determination. He is serious and curious but not often puzzled. Loved and loving he explores the world without fear, encountering pain, school bullies, vapid teachers and dangerous adventures, with an equanimity anchored in the security which only a close-knit family can provide.

His parents arc, of course, the foundation stones of this Blood edifice. Jackson is a man of faith, a member of the small sect of Dissenting Brethren. A returned soldier whose lungs are decaying from chemical warfare, he knew that ‘Governments and armies don't care for their own people’. Strong in mind and faith ‘he had not pretence in him, treated all people the same and lost jobs because of it’. Lillian, strong too in her belief in God. is constantly working, constantly singing. It is she who provides young Davis with his pity and scorn for men, his faith in the female:

We keep the world family washed, clothed, fed. We provide continuance, new life and replenish the old. All things pass away; mothers and females continue. Men worried him. It would be awful to be like them when he grew up. 

We watch voting Davis as he explores his ever changing environments – his home, family, siblings, school, sport and. most particularly, the bush. The Blood's live on the edge of suburbia, their back-yard with no fence, leading unimpeded to creek, bush and hills. This portrait of a young Australian artist could not be, without the bush.

He was silent looking out over the loved, familiar, shining, half-seen slopes and trees, knowing how well he knew them and the rocks, shrubs, bush flowers. It was his country, his land. He loved its face, its soil, its flavour; its voice, its mood; its unique life and big shies. I am a white Aboriginal he thought.

It seems a romantic, wrong-headed claim, offensive perhaps to the original people of this land. Readers of Ireland’s works, however, will not recognise it as silly, or unfounded. We have in this novelist and Australian who is quite unusual in his affinity with and love for the physical country he and his characters inhabit. Ireland’s urban novels are novels of hell – The Unknown Industrial Prisoner, The Glass Canoe. His visionary novels, A Woman of the Future, City of Women, demand the bush as a symbiotic alter ego to his characters, a place not of hostility or refuge, or even of nourishment, but of necessity. Young Davis cannot function without the bush, whether he runs through it, lies down in it, chops at it or smells it. As he tries his hand constantly at expressing himself through drawing his visions become aberrant and nightmarish, screams of a natural soul forced to become urban. Perhaps Ireland’s un-Australian sense of the bush as essential companion helps to explain why he is still not one of our popular novelists.

It is also, of course, un-Australian to be too specific about God. Patrick White may be allowed to get away with it but his visionary eccentrics are mostly from another age. Their singularity forces us to make allowances. Apart from the dedication Ireland constantly throws God at us, through Lillian’s hymns and simple faith. Jackson's unrelenting adherence to Christian belief and Davis's childish, then youthful attempts to discover what is illusion and what is reality.

Jackson Blood insists early on with his son that:

… nothing’s smooth, nothing’s round, nothing’s flat, nothing’s straight. They’re all words for the way people wanted to think the world was, but the world was never life that.

Davis comes to realise that all supposed reality is a social construct (especially geometry axioms) and even science and photography; he comes to see there is no certainty unless we choose to believe in human constructs: ‘The law had (certainty); religion had it; Marxism had it: the natural world didn’t have it.’

His final epiphany comes with the realisation that he will never be a painter but that if he follows his inner voice, the God within him, he can construct his own world in words. Since God permeates all things all he has to do is converse with his inner voice and God will be released in him: 

For God disciplines the self and becomes the centre: That is the key to wholeness.

The tone and movement of the final epiphany chapter is humbly triumphant and is dearly Ireland’s comment on the impulse and direction of his creative work. His hatred of injustice, his compassion for the poor and downtrodden; his love of the bush, optimistic faith in the fe­male spirit and sense of nightmare when confronting urban progress, are all facets of his God within. They are his inner voices and his work, the liberation of the Deity, now internalised.

Some no doubt will shy away from such a forthright claim by a creative artist. In doing so they will miss the unique experience of this book. It is, in my view, a trifle too long, somewhat repetitive and occasionally a bit long-winded. Nevertheless what we have is a singular voice speaking in tranquil and authentic terms about growth and love – difficult topics both – and weaving a pattern that is undisguisedly and guilelessly Australian. As Jackson Blood says to Davis ‘Australia is the self in which you live.’ This book discloses that self as Davis has to discover it. His discovery is not dramatic but it grows from our soil, our rocks and our trees. It is a paean worth experiencing and it is certainly for us.