William Buckley, transported to Australia in the 1790s, escapes, intending to walk north to China, then turn left for England and home, and end up spending thirty years amongst Aboriginals, taken in as a resurrected warrior and becoming a beloved and respected holy man. He eventually returns home.

And that's the story, and a strange, powerful and beautiful story it is, but with Garner it's the language. The words and folk dances of Buckley's home, the babble of dialects and cant on the ship, the precise and evocative language of the Aboriginals that reflect a whole different way of being. The language represents community, gang, tribe, and Buckley is initiated into each and is subjected to injustice, privation brutality and the ravenous incursion of colonialism, but the language lives on in Bukley, as does the Dreaming, fused into a transcendental final Dance at the climax of the book.

It's an incredible, beautiful, funny, mind-expanding, heartbreaking book. Garner working at the height of his not inconsiderable powers. There really is nobody else like him.