Writers of declared fictions – novelists and short-story writers – are less able to disguise the autobiographical and confessional nature of their work because they are accountable to what someone has called the ‘tyranny of the subjective’. I think it was a critic who called it this. It’s an evocative phrase and I believe it has a meaning at a certain level. But I don’t experience the subjective as a tyranny in my work. And I seriously doubt if many other fiction writers do either.

We can, in fact, probably think of Fiction being distinguished from History and Biography through its exploration of something which I might call the subjective reality. Nothing is wholly subjective or wholly objective, of course, but historians and biographers cannot as unreservedly subscribe to the exploration of the subjective as novelists can without making a nonsense of their material. Fiction is not at liberty to do just as it likes either, however.

Fiction is also accountable. It is accountable to unrelocatable outcrops too – outcrops of feelings and intuitions. And these have to be satisfied. They have to be dealt with. They can’t be moved out of the way. The facts can be moved out of the way. They are not irrelevant to fiction, but they are secondary to its principal aim – which is to deal with these unrelocatable outcrops of feelings and intuitions. And unrelocatable because they are too deeply grounded in the human experience to be shifted about arbitrarily.

We also declare ourselves in our readings. We reveal what is hidden within us in our readings no less than we do in our writing. Though we often do it in a less considered way as if we thought we weren’t revealing ourselves. Our reading of a text, however, is as much an expression of our own values and attitudes as it is a reflection of the attitudes and values of the writer whose work we are dealing with – I often wonder if reviewers and critics fully appreciate this. Read as self-confession the review can be a startling genre.

The self-revelation isn’t obvious in either case.

The Tivington Nott isn’t the book I set out to write. It was intended to be one voice in a larger and much more complex structure, in which there was also to be reflection on and interpretation of the material. When I got to the end of the hunt, however, I was dismayed to find the book was finished. The book declared itself to me to be finished. I am finished, it said. Go no further. And it refused to be pushed any further along the path that I’d spent two years preparing for it. It was like waiting for someone for a long time at an airport and receiving a message that they’d landed ages ago, at another airport and been met by someone else.

I cleared my desk and started work on my next book. So, I thought, as I began writing about Queensland, this is how it’s going to be then. There’s no great epic myth thing, there are just these separate books. Unconnected with each other. I made sure I worked out the plot properly this time. I didn’t want to be caught a second time. But as I worked, I kept stopping and chewing the end of my pen and gazing out the window and thinking sadly about my old dream – as if it were an old friend whose company I missed. I kept thinking of this great organic sort of myth thing that had been supposed to gradually arise out of my work and reveal itself. Without the expectation of that, I felt my world – in this regard – had turned out to be a disappointing place.

And when I’d finished my second novel, I saw that things still weren’t right. The plot had determined it. It was like having made a model plane this time. It flew all right and landed at the model airport I’d prepared for it. There had been no surprises. I didn’t let on to anyone, but I felt a bit cheated.

I finished that second novel four years ago and immediately began work on my third. I couldn’t wait. I’m just coming to the end of that book now. Along the way I’ve reinterpreted the signs again. I’ve seen that The Nott was my first excavation. I’m still excavating that area. The Nott had only seemed at the time to be an isolated feature because it was the first feature to be uncovered. It is, I have now come to believe, part of a buried city of great complexity. I was right in my intuition, that is, in the first place.

One day I hope to have excavated the connecting ways between each of these books – and between these and the books I plan to write in the future. Archaeology was a metaphor after all and not, as I thought for many years, an alternative occupation to writing. It was a parallel view of writing. The subjective city is what I now believe I am disclosing and uncovering with my work. That’s the confessional nature of it. I don’t believe one can ever really know in advance what such excavations might reveal.