A fig tree holds a foreshore for two hundred years and remembers who walked beneath it. A man sails out alone after his wife leaves. A migrant steps off a boat into light that tells on every edge. A car comes over a desert horizon and a people's world ends without a shot. In an abandoned pub, one Thursday night keeps returning.

Country Dreaming is a collection about Australian land as the main actor — country that shapes, withholds, remembers, and outlasts the names nailed to it. The people in these poems are not observers of the landscape. They are what it is doing.