The famed painting by Jackson Pollock - pride of the National Gallery of Australia, prime example of abstract expressionism - may have taken up residence in only a handful of locations, but it has seen some things.

And, if we knew how to listen, it would have stories to tell.

While it began life in a paint-splattered barn-cum-studio on Long Island in New York, and spent its early years on the walls of a Manhattan apartment surrounded by art lovers, art dealers and growing children, many of Blue Poles' stories find their place in Australian politics.

In fact, when Sydney writer Angela O'Keeffe thinks of her first impressions of Blue Poles, it's of heated conversations around the kitchen table in south-east Queensland.

"There's definitely a moment that I remember as a child, I guess I was 11 when [Gough] Whitlam was involved in the purchase of Blue Poles and the whole country was talking about it," she says.

"My parents were talking about it. They were Whitlam supporters, they were farmers, probably the only Whitlam supporters in that area, but they just were so against the painting. And so I remember that feeling, and then I remember when Whitlam was sacked and how upset my parents were. And those two events kind of always belonged together for me."

Her debut novel, Night Blue, is a narrative about a painting, but hinges on the ultimate conceit: it's a story told through the voice of the painting itself.

It may be one of the world's most famous paintings by a towering figure in the American art scene, with his own tragic narrative, but Blue Poles has the distinction of playing a significant role in Australian history.

O'Keeffe never planned to write a book about it, but she had been playing for some time with a story set in rural Australia, with people sitting around a kitchen table, arguing about Whitlam.

It was Whitlam who, famously, approved the purchase of Blue Poles in 1973 for $1.3 million, at the time a world record for a contemporary American painting. Even more famously, he insisted the price be made public, thus sparking fierce debate about the value and merit of contemporary art.

Strangely, or perhaps understandably, O'Keeffe, at one stage, wasn't even 100 per cent certain she'd even seen the work in person.

"I thought I'd seen it in Brisbane with my father in the late 80s [but] it was a different Jackson Pollock painting, and I was so embarrassed when I realised," she says.

"I've since met people who have said, 'I don't know if I've seen it or not, I think I have, I feel like I have', so there's this sense that it's part of us."

She says she got goosebumps the moment she realised that, in writing fiction, she could just "let the painting speak". That there was a way of imagining that perhaps pieces of us live in the painting's consciousness, by virtue of having stood before it and taken part in its own journey.

In the case of Blue Poles, this journey began in Long Island: "Jackson unrolled a piece of Belgian linen, five metres by three, onto the floor ... He left the canvas, and went to the window, looked out to the darkness, breathed. It was raining."

These are just some of the first lines of what turned out to be quite a slim novel - the perfect length, O'Keeffe was assured.

"Every day I wrote was kind of exhilarating," she says.

"I mean, sometimes it was scary, and there was this sense that it was a risk, and that I wasn't part of the art world, you know, that's not my background, but I just sort of had this faith that if I did enough research, but didn't get bogged down in the research, it was never going to be the story about Blue Poles."

In other words, this is not a narrative about abstract impressionism, or about Jackson Pollock. The painting doesn't speak, and, somehow, there is nothing far-fetched or absurd about the notion that it might still be observing quietly, building up relationships with other paintings, settling into its surroundings.

"We're protective of it, but it's not quite in the sense that it's got feelings - I mean, we love it," O'Keeffe says of her protagonist.

"But somebody asked me in a Q-and-A how it felt, or what challenges I faced writing from the point of view of an object, and I was actually shocked. I thought, why do I feel shocked by that question? It's because I always felt I could only write the book if the painting was alive.

"The painting was never an object to me, the painting had its life, and this was its life."

The painting - a quiet, androgynous presence - will lie first on the floor, watching Pollock's face, observing the feeling leach away as the painting is finally complete. It will hang in an art gallery, then again in the studio, leaning forgotten against the wall. Later, art collector Ben Heller (who is never named in the book) will buy the painting after Pollock's death in a car crash. Blue Poles then hangs on the wall of his Upper West Side apartment, where it watches the seasons change, Heller's two children grow up and also change, art lovers and museum directors flock to observe Heller's collection. It also observes Heller's wife, Judith, leave the apartment one day and never return. It watches the family learn she has died in a car accident.

Eventually, Blue Poles is lowered in a crate out of the window to the street below, and shipped to Australia. It is revealed to the Australian public and, most importantly, to Whitlam himself, who leans forward and murmurs, "Magnificent" in his "deep, mellifluous" voice.

Then to a warehouse in Fyshwick, where it sits for seven years while the National Gallery building emerges on the lakeside. There, it is visited by a pair of conservators; one of them, Alyssa, will return in years to come and write her PhD on the painting, having travelled to Long Island and seen the barn where it was first conceived. The narrative shifts, from the painting's perspective to hers; it becomes the story of a story, and how it came to be told.

Like Alyssa, O'Keeffe found herself swept up in Pollock's narrative, and, when she herself journeyed to Long Island to see where Pollock, and later his wife Lee Krasner, had worked for so many years, she was strangely transfixed by the sight of his footprint on the floorboards in blue paint, the same blue as the poles. But it was realising that she could imagine herself into the perspective of the painting itself that would make the story sing.

The painting can see and hear and think - it has agency, but it does not judge. It hears what is said about it, gets into the thoughts of gallery-goers, wonders at the woman, the young conservator who later spends hours sitting before it and writing in a notebook. And around it, the world goes on - transformed and informed by its relationship to a painting. Jackson and Lee, Alyssa and her contemporary partner, solid people with ephemeral dreams.

It's a book that, despite its brevity, is difficult to sum up without resorting to wrong-footed euphemisms. The painting thinks and remembers - it doesn't speak, but it bears witness, and enfolds itself into the lives of others.