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  • The nature of loss
  • Maeve Kirk
Inga Simpson. Where the Trees Were. Sydney: Hatchet Australia, 2016. 300 pp. A$19.99 ISBN 9780733637858

When describing loss, it is tempting to characterize it as an unexpected and often brutal visitor. In one moment, we are defined by what we own. In the next, loss arrives and our hands are empty. Our focus is often on that climactic moment when absence is fresh and irreversible. In Where the Trees Were, Inga Simpson constructs a very different reflection on absence and its definitive power. In this novel, loss is more akin to a heartbeat or breath—neither sporadic nor contained but rather a continuous presence embedded in life. Layering exploration of cultural theft with the fears and discoveries of adolescence, Where the Trees Were is a beautifully rendered reflection on loss and its definitive influence on both our individual and collective identity. [End Page 328]

Simpson's third novel follows the attempts of a young woman named Jayne to reconcile the past and present at various points in her life. The story begins with a promise that cannot be kept when Jayne (known as Jay in her youth) and four of her closest friends discover arborglyphs in a secluded corner of her family's rural farmland. These intricately carved trees mark the graves of Wiradjuri elders and map their path to Dreamland. Sacred in the Wiradjuri culture, the trees carry a threat of possible displacement for Jayne and her family if discovered. Although the full weight of the arborglyphs' presence on the land is not immediately understood by the preteens, they appoint themselves guardians of the space, swearing on the trees to "always to be friends. To protect each other—and this place" (13). The narrative then leaps forward seventeen years to find Jayne, now an arts conservator, stealing an arborglyph from the gallery she works for in an act of repentance. This act not only places Jayne's career in jeopardy but also threatens the stability of her relationship with her girlfriend, Sarah. From here, the novel traces the events linking these two points in time while taking a close look at cultural appropriation, environmental degradation, and the impermanence of ownership.

Alternating between Jayne's youth in New South Wales in the late 1980s and her adult life in Canberra in the early 2000s, Where the Trees Were gains much of its momentum and power through structural absence and its resulting implications. Not only do we see a wide range of dispossession play out in the lives of Jayne and her friends—ranging from death and cultural displacement to relationship erosion—the novel's structure creates absence through juxtaposition. Where the Trees Were simultaneously unfolds from two points in time, each focused on Jayne but told through separate narrative perspectives—the past from Jayne's first-person point of view and the present from a more remote third-person perspective.

There is much to admire about Simpson's work in Where the Trees Are, but one of her most notable strengths is her ability to capture thematic and emotional movement within descriptions of the physical world. Landscape, in particular, serves as a conduit for the tensions running through the novel, often to great effect. Simpson has a gift for distilling meaning from an image, a skill that she employs in many of the scenes featuring Jayne interacting with her landscape:

The water was cold down there, brown and quiet. Things brushed against my skin. I felt a pull, not just of the river, the current wanting to carry me. When I looked up to the surface, the world was strange and far away, as if perhaps I was no longer part of it. But I always needed breath and had to return to the surface, and then it seemed that I belonged after all.

(3)

In this moment, the tension between Jayne's desire to connect with something larger than herself and her inability to fully do so is beautifully established on the page. This is a recurring drive in the novel, one exhibited through Jayne's struggles to maintain the [End Page 329] tight-knit bonds of her childhood friendships, atone...

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