As an adult, Flanagan returned to his hometown of Rosebery with a documentary crew. He felt embarrassed because the documentary was about him and his role in literature, but Tasmania was a world that “had never really existed in novels” and whose ancient wilderness and working-class culture defied literary “allusions” (168).

Driving into Rosebery with the documentary’s host, Flanagan remembered being at a friend’s birthday party when he was seven where the boy’s miner father, despite being drunk and tired, played the trumpet for them. The next day, Flanagan attends the funeral procession for a miner who was killed in a mining accident with his mother.

As a child, Flanagan’s mother drove them northwest near her hometown to gather bags of red soil that she would spread in their back garden in Hobart, in the south of the island.