But Nick MacLean, the protagonist of Sandy Gordon's first novel Leaving Owl Creek, comes of age as the times, they are a changin'.

The strong headwinds of the 1960s recast the order Nick grows up in. They unlock new opportunities for Richard Connolly, the son of Labor-voting Irish-Catholic workers on the MacLean property who grows up alongside Nick. Nick's sister, Lilly, is partially unshackled from the expectation she will marry another grazier's son.

Change also brings uncertainty and instability. On a path through pitfalls of self-destruction, Nick comes to face all the old questions: How do you fulfill your duty? Does duty count for anything anyway? What does it mean to be a good person?

Gordon never thought he would write a novel. His previous books had titles such as India's Rise as an Asian Power and Business and Politics. But the former police intelligence chief and senior public servant - who also had an academic career, an expert on India and terrorism - says he is done with footnotes.

"There is nothing like a good novel to take you into other worlds and out of your self. So I do continue to read them," Gordon says. "I think novels do provide an important rite of passage for young people, particularly in terms of growing up, you know."

It's almost a cliche, Gordon says, of the relationship at his own novel's heart. But the friendship between Nick, the grazier's son with every advantage and no inclination, and Richard, the talented young man who had the misfortune to be born on the wrong side of the fence, says a lot about growing up and finding the limitations on your place in the world. These characters, Gordon says, are to an extent alter-egos of himself and his working life.

"I think like many people I sit there and work in a quite restricted environment, about which one's writing or working. And you have sort of Prufrockian flights of fancy about other types of life one might lead. Perhaps, in my case, a more creative type of life," he says.

Gordon says he knew he wanted to write about a set of characters who come from rural Australia, with the relationship between Nick and Richard enabling him to say a lot of the things he wanted to say about latter twentieth century Australian life. He wanted, too, to write about the dilemmas faced by a female character, caught in the masculine world of post-war rural Australia with its potential for destruction.

"It was a world in which, in the big properties at least, and this is not true for them all, thank God, only the males inherited the land. Women were expected to go off and marry and not even have a career, just to marry another grazier," he says. Nick's sister, Lilly, is more competent than him on the land but overlooked in their father's eyes.

Gordon points out the book is not autobiographical, even though he grew up the scion of the family on a property near Braidwood. The characters are not like his own family but the problems are there.

In the first part of Gordon's novel, the class divide runs deep. Catholic and Protestant, landowner and worker, Irish and Anglo are locked together but pitted against each other. "It was true to my own experience and I grew up with a sense of guilt around the whole problem," Gordon says.

"When I was a young kid, people on the place were paid 12 pounds, you know. It's true that some of them had never seen the sea even though we lived near Braidwood. It's true they certainly didn't own things like cars and they didn't have that sense of mobility. It was a very different world."

Even then, Gordon could see the opportunities were different. "As a young person living on the land, I had this perception at the time, and had all sorts of guilt around the perception at the time, that the children of the workers on the property didn't have my opportunities and in many cases they were more competent than me, just as Richard is more competent than Nick," Gordon says.

"I think those feelings go right back to the roots of childhood and the way we lived."

Over all this hangs the shadow of the Second World War. "And it was an enormous shadow," Gordon says. In the 1960s, two global conflicts had been fought within living memory. That experience drove the doctrines of courage and bravery, loyalty and honour. Nick finds this atmosphere stifling, at odds with the creative life he wants for himself. Richard finds a path through it all, onto university and public office. These paths open up through that tumultuous decade.

"When the '60s came along, it was both an enormous relief but it was a very cold water in which to dip the toe," Gordon says. Nick moves to Sydney and gets caught up in the Push, which in Gordon's novel is a hard-drinking, righteous group whose cold intellectualism lacks human warmth. Everything at the time was absolute, Gordon says.

In one of the most moving passages of Leaving Owl Creek, Nick must confront his father about his intentions with Vietnam: would he fight in a conflict unlike the world wars or let society mark him down as a coward? "It would have been a wrenching decision for someone like me, because of my parent's background and all that code of honour and so on," Gordon says. "Yes, the war had an enormous influence on that generation and the '60s, therefore, were a great wrench."

The period also led to a big changeover. Richard, who is raised Catholic, comes to find his background is less and less a setback for his ambitions, social and political. Richard is able to rise above his station. "Look at the situation we have now, where we have a very strong element within, let me call it for want of a better term, the right-wing cabinets we've largely had since the advent of John Howard, where there's been a deep-seated Catholic branch," Gordon says.

"There's been a really important political flip over here which I think hasn't been discussed sufficiently in Australian political analysis."

The reader, though, first encounters Nick MacLean a long way from home. He is being held captive by religious fundamentalists in a high valley, south-east of Srinagar, the capital of Jammu and Kashmir in India. Nick plays chess with a man known only as the Mujahid. It is an image like the knight taking on the devil by playing the game with no chance in Ingmar Bergman's 1957 film, The Seventh Seal. Nick must reflect on his own life.

Gordon says the distinctions between India and Australia in the novel are important, but some things come full circle, thousands of miles from the Monaro. There are strange similarities between the religious fundamentalism that captures Nick and the intellectually puritanical world of the Sydney Push and the rural honour code. They are reductionist, leaving no room for humanism.

"If one reads on terrorism," says Gordon, who has extensively, "one finds a view that many of the terrorist leaders, and the Mujahid was a leader, are scientifically trained. They're trained in what we call STEM-type subjects. ... And the reason for this, I came to conclude, was that they're not trained in nuance."

The Mujahid blames his grievances - borne from being forced from his village - on the West. "I think there's always another explanation for everyone other than the ideological explanation, particularly if their ideology is unnuanced and extreme," Gordon says.

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For the Mujahid, his actions are about fulfilling his duty. It forces Nick, again, to think about what duty and honour, and morality, mean for him as someone who is not religious. Gordon says: "One of the great arguments levied against people who try and seek a moral life without religion is that there's no basis for that morality, because it's not laid down by some higher authority, so from where would it come? And Nick struggles with that."

The local rural setting of Leaving Owl Creek is a familiar one in Australian literature. Gordon acknowledges the influence of novelist Patrick White, who wrote and re-wrote about his time working near Adaminaby and the lingering effects of a life caught between the city, the bush and expectation. Gordon acknowledges, too, the help he received from writer John Clanchy and his publisher, Julian Davies, the co-founder of the small not-for-profit press which has released Gordon's book.

"I also decided really from the beginning that I wasn't going to bother about who might read it, whether it might be any good. I was just going to write it, fundamentally for myself to see if I could do it. And then perhaps work on it, like a sculptor works on a slab of marble," Gordon says of the ultimately rewarding editing process.

Towards the end of the novel, Richard, who ventures far from the stunted life Owl Creek ever seemed to offer him, returns, recognising darkly it was his childhood too. "The shape of hills. They stayed with you, hills. They marked places just like New Year's Day marks time," he thinks. It's an old, old landscape. Individuals are insignificant here. The MacLeans and Connolloys are only recent arrivals, even if one has worked for the other ever since anyone can remember.

But the truth of it is everyone has more of a chance than they might realise to shape the life they want to lead. Those hills are not a prison after all. It just might take the courage to walk away from home.