The Creek (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781922912763)

You want to do what? Live in solitude next to the rainforest while you find your real self? Do not do this.

His rational brain had no idea.

The Creek is based on a true story and is about a young man who leaves the Darling River in western New South Wales to live next to the rainforest in South-East Queensland at a place called The Creek.

At The Creek, he searches for his real self, the one he thinks will find if he lives in solitude. His self-reflection, his searching, and his day-to-day within this solitude are occasionally beautiful, often mind-bending, and usually way too political. There are big swear words, sexual adventures that may or may not startle you, and possibly too many judgements laid upon those whom he deems not so much as inferiors, just total dickheads. You have all met a few.

The building of his house, and the subsequent vegie gardens, are done with limited skills. The genuine guesswork and multiple mistakes are below basic levels of arbitrary. The rainforest descriptions, the bird observations, and the character analyses of the locals are somewhat random and do not follow known patterns, norms or legal requirements needed to partake in civilised society. Thank God. The metaphors are accompanied by solace, the optimism joined by lilting bullshit, and the analogies quaint.

After many years at the Creek, and a devastating trauma, he misses the Darling River, but he still wants to hang on to The Creek. What to do? If he returns to the Darling River, will it be enough to soothe the pain? Anyway, how is that search for the real self-going?

This story is about an individual on the edge of society, who rarely listens to his rational brain and only occasionally to his emotional brain, and it is about landscape, lust and life itself.