The sagas were tales not only of heroes but of families. There are two families in The Glade Within the Grove, as well as ‘sundry loners’. One is the family of fifteen or so wildly assorted young people who in 1968 establish a commune in an Australian Eden, the beautiful valley of Erinungarah, somewhere in the mountainous country of south-east New South Wales or far-eastern Gippsland. The other family is that of the MacAnaspie clan of gutsy mountain men who range from Charlie, an eccentric in his nineties, who owns the Valley, to his five grandsons; Iris, his daughter-in-law, is the formidable matriarch of the clan.

In the Family in the Valley a vivid variety of young women are really stronger than the men. As a commune, of course they are not supposed to have a leader, but when they are spurred on or shamed it is usually by Diane, one of the two beautiful Zoshka sisters, a fiery anarchist still in her teens.

Happy Valleys have attracted writers from Dr Johnson to Patrick White. The very name evokes possibilities of irony and, since every valley must have hills or cliffs or mountains around it, there are hints both of danger and secrecy. The first in the Family to discover the Valley is the famous blues guitarist, Michael Ginnsy, tall, skinny, ‘always off his face’, he of the waist-length hair and the top hat painted in stars and stripes. It’s important that the Valley is discovered by a musician. Music animates all sacred dance, and The Glade Within the Grove goes back to the Corybantes of Cybele, the Earth Mother. (D’Arcy is right into ancient Anatolia, the Hittites and the Phrygians, and the sacred black rock of Cybele that was brought to Rome in a quinquereme and is still there, buried somewhere under St Peter’s. A variant of it is the black meteorite rock which is found in the Valley and, like Cybele, speaks to those who can listen.)

The Saga and the Ballad, however, are indelibly Australian. They are, in D’Arcy’s words, a kind of ‘White Dreaming, cognate with the Aboriginal landscape, but defiantly pastoral the way the hippies were’. It is a landscape of hidden messages, of ‘The scribbly gums that stutter out/The words that no man reads.’ Orion has to become ‘The scribe that reads the scribbly gum’. D’Arcy explains that the Saga is the view from the Mind, the Ballad the view from the poet’s Heart. D’Arcy and Timothy celebrate a marvellous acceptance of Australia and those who are close to it. The whine of alienation is notably absent from this whole book.

D’Arcy especially relishes not only the natural beauties of the mountains and the Valley, but also the tools, the pumps and machinery without which human life could not go on. Anybody who has lived on a farm will relish D’Arcy’s catalogue of the contents of the MacAnaspie sheds, where nothing is thrown away that might come in handy-like the running board of a 1927 Chevy.

The clans and the loners of the commune are a rich mob - in character, if not in cash. As well as the Australians, there are three Americans, one of them on the run from the US Army in Vietnam. The communards include scientists, a woman Federal Minister-to-be, an ex-Playboy centrefold, a nun who has jumped the wall but is still looking for Jesus. Lots more.

It is Attis, a MacAnaspie brother but actually a foundling, honey hunter and bushman extraordinary, who is the most important of the MacAnaspie brothers. In mythology Attis was a Phrygian deity who was driven mad and castrated himself and died; he was metamorphosed into a pinetree and Zeus caused violets to grow from his blood. Strangely enough, although the pitiful subject of a poem by Catullus, he is not mentioned by Ovid in the Metamorphoses, nor celebrated by later poets. Here, Attis is the monogamous lover of Diane and the father of her children.

The Valley is full of sex. Diane lashes the women of the commune about their willingness to provide sex without love. As for the men, they pay the most savage price for not living up to the spirit, for not being able to renounce the flesh.

Violence in the Valley comes from the surrounding mountains, in the shape of Mehmed Contramundum, a Chechen mercenary, the strangest character in the novel. He is a ‘deep ecologist’, the self-appointed guardian of the forest and of the sacred grove of cedars in the Valley. He appears in the Ballad as the Greenbrown Man. Murderer, rapist and emasculator of a forest worker who foolishly tries to apprehend him, Mehmed is hardly the typical Greenie. But Green is different in folklore, as witness Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight. He is the evil and violence in all of us. Attis and Diane are not afraid of him.

There are mysteries in the Valley, as there are in religion. Mystery, in Greek, means that which is not discussed, as D’Arcy reminds us. The goddess Brigid remains a mystery in the Saga, but in the Ballad she speaks and is spoken to. (There are relations here between Phrygian and Celtic mythology.) She appears to the communards between 1979 and 1986, when the Valley was cut off from the outside world by a landslide. Maybe the goddess presence was also helped by the fact that the Family had been getting stuck into the blue meanie mushrooms. In their frenzy she persuades most of the men to emasculate themselves. It is Attis, the passive but adoring lover of Diane, who is the Exemplar, the first to cut himself; he is later metamorphosed into a mallee. Diane, with her children, is metamorphosed into a waratah, peculiar to the Valley: Telopeia doliveresiana, the crying wife.

The commune of course fails, as they mostly do, for various reasons, such as lack of money, too much contact with the outside world, and the hunger of the children to watch TV. On a deeper level, it fails because it is of the flesh and not the spirit. This must be the first novel ever about eunuchs, the third sex which played so many roles in religious and secular life for thousands of years. D’Arcy also says boldly that Christ was a eunuch.

The Glade Within the Grove asks the deepest questions, of love and life and where the gods have gone. It is a novel of great importance, by any standards. It might seem limiting to tack the word ‘Australian’ onto that, but ‘You can’t trans locate this Saga. What a good thing that is for us.

A book which was not available to D’Arcy before he died in 1995 provides wonderful background reading for The Glade Within the Grove. It is Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory, which also takes the visible world back into geological and botanical time and, beyond human history, into myth and religion. But this is all background to what is, above all, a most readable, if also complex and thought-provoking, work of fiction. The Glade Within the Grove is the work of a master craftsman with a prodigious imagination.