"Is it history that tells us who we are? Or is it the story we tell ourselves - humanity's great sagas, myths and legends, songs and poems and tales of battles over blood and soil - that defines who we are? As Miller [shows], it is a conundrum with profound consequences - he leaves the answer to us."

A fascinating book, about which anything I say won't do justice to it, or else I'll leave things that I meant to say unsaid. I do think it's a fairly improbable story, but contrived so well that I'm prepared to overlook the unlikeliness of it. ( )

It pains me to say it, but the best thing about this book as far as I am concerned is that it’s short. I read it in a day.

In the first couple of pages, it seemed to hit wrong note after wrong note. Just two examples, tiny in themselves, but part of a cumulative effect that left me simply not believing in the characters: an elderly German professor, meditating on the notion of honour, remembers that somewhere in the bible, probably in the New Testament, we are told to honour our father and our mother; a young Australian History professor asks that same man what his father did in the war, and when he reacts with shock says it was just a piece of Australian humour. Just what planet do you have to be an academic on not to know the Ten Commandments, or that Germans of a certain age might not like to be asked by complete strangers about their family’s relationship to Nazism.

In spite of encountering some fine prose and being invited to confront difficult realities, I never recovered from the blow my trust received in those first pages. The book’s centrepiece is a powerful account of a meticulously planned massacre of white settlers in North Queensland by Aboriginal men in reprisal for the unwitting violation of a sacred site. Everything else seems to be there to justify this piece of writing. It didn’t work for this little white duck. I was left with an uneasy feeling that some kind of equivalence was being proposed between the Aboriginal action and unnamed actions taken by German operatives during the Second World War. I’m sorry, but my response, in a word, is ‘Ewww!’ ( )

"Landscape of Farewell" is a metaphor for images in memory, of the irretrievable past. I found it an easy read because the prose is relaxed and contemplative.

A German academic is retired, defeated by grief and the loss of his wife. He meets a vibrant, angry young Aboriginal academic, Vita who is the means by which he arrives in Australia to visit with her uncle Dougald Gnapun. Together they revisit memories and family stories to reconcile and record the past.

I liked the way Dugald's story that is the culmination of the book was written with a spiritual, dreamlike quality. ( )

Beautifully written novel about friendship and searching through the past to enhance the present. The trip takes Max, a retired German professor to Australia's outback and a young Australian friend's uncle. Lovely! ( )