How author Fiona McFarlane captured a landscape in her latest book The Sun Walks Down

How many ways are there to describe a landscape? When it comes to Fiona McFarlane's new book, The Sun Walks Down, it depends on how many points of view there are.

Are you describing it from the perspective of a six-year-old boy who sees it as a collection of colours - "red and brown - desert country - but with a haze of green above it because it was spring"?

Or from his father's point of view - a farmer who judges the landscape, his wheat crop, by how well it is (or isn't) growing? It's something that is so intrinsically linked with his livelihood that of course it's going to impact his point of view. And in 1883, this was a time when trying to grow wheat on South Australia's Flinders Range did not fuel a positive outlook. The crops failed and while settlers believed that it would be a fruitful place for wheat, it ultimately led to the settlement failing.

But it was this landscape - and the history that it held - that inspired McFarlane to write the book in the first place.

The author was in South Australia for Adelaide Writers' Week with her debut novel - the Miles Franklin shortlisted The Night Guest - when she decided to take a trip out to the Flinders Ranges. The moment she saw it, she knew she wanted to write about the area.

"I was struck by its beauty, and also by the number of colonial ruins that I saw scattered throughout the whole region, from just a chimney or a ruined house to whole ghost towns," McFarlane says.

"I became interested in the history of settlement in that particular part of the world because in some ways it failed. I learned, when I got interested in it, that people moved there in the late 19th century because they were convinced that they would be able to grow wheat. And that didn't work out and they all had to leave again.

"I found all of the ruins unsettling and I was interested in the unsettlement of the Flinders. I was interested in thinking about settler colonialism and settler-Aboriginal relations against this particular backdrop."

In a lot of ways, the main character of The Sun Walks Down is the landscape. Primarily set in the fictional town of Fairly, located on the Flinders Range, the entire novel plays out over Nakunu and Adnyamathanha nations - something that McFarlane makes a point of mentioning in her author's note.

As for the plot, it plays out as this entire town responds to what the landscape throws at them. Starting with a dust storm - a defining moment that sees people bring horses into a church during a wedding, mothers rush to bring in washing, and the disappearance of six-year-old Denny Wallace.

"One of the things that drew me in when I first visited [Flinders Range] was this story about a little boy going missing and I thought that since it seems as if I'm going to write a colonial outback novel, what if I also tackle this other huge narrative, which is the lost child, the white child who goes missing in the 'inscrutable or devilish wilderness'? And I'm using those words, ironically," McFarlane says.

"What if I tackle this huge narrative that we have built into our culture in art, fiction and film, and I try and pull it apart a little bit and think about what that might look like from various different points of view?

"It was really important to me that the book never felt like it was saying, I know exactly how things were and they were one monolithic thing and everyone agreed on that. It felt important to me that the book was noisy and messy, and sometimes contradictory. Because all of the people who are experiencing this have had such different perceptions of what was going on."

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The disappearance is a cause that is so easily unites this town, and we read as everyone - newlyweds, landowners, farmers, mothers, artists, Indigenous trackers, cameleers, children, teachers, widows, maids and policemen - explore this landscape and discover their own relationship to it. And from a story point of view, all of these characters - at one point or another - are the driving voice of what is going on.

It gives the story more dimension. It's not just showing the black and white, definitive version of what life was like (or, rather, a fictional representation of that time), but showing all of the shades of grey through the many different points of view - no one voice more correct than the previous.

However, this approach also required McFarlane to step into the First Nations' experience at that time. And as a white woman, who grew up in Sydney far from the experiences of the colonial outback, this was not something that the author took lightly.

Still, to leave it out altogether - to not have the point of view of characters such as Billy, the farmhand who works for Denny's father, included - would be completely ignoring a section of the community and of history.

"I deliberately set the novel post-Frontier Wars, about 30 years after the initial invasion," she says.

"I wanted to be as attentive as I could, as respectful as I could, while also acknowledging the ways in which I don't have a right to aspects of it.

"So I hope that some of those anxieties are built into the book itself. Even though I do have Indigenous characters, the book is, I hope, interested in those questions around who gets to make art and about what and at what price?"

But the entire process of writing The Sun Walks Down was a research project that involved multiple trips to the area, and a lot of time spent in the State Library of South Australia.

And when she wasn't there - which was more often than she would have liked - she was under lockdown in her home in California, where she is a lecturer at the University of Berkley. Weirdly enough, however, this time spent locked at home (and researching) in sunny California acted almost like a transportation device to 1880s South Australia. It was the fuel that encouraged her to finish the book.

But the more that McFarlane looked into it, the more that she realised that her understanding of colonial history was Sydney-centric - that was where she grew up, after all.

"You tend to think about it, as convicts. Whereas South Australia is a different thing entirely and that was part of what really interested me as well," she says.

"It's just amazing how multicultural it actually was. I didn't have a full understanding of say the role of Afghan cameleers and the opening up of the interior, for example. And so you'd go and see these graveyards, and there are Islamic graves in the middle of the outback. It's really interesting. It's a part of our history that on a large scale we tend to ignore."

Fiona McFarlane will be in conversation with Amy Martin at The Book Cow in Kingston, on October 5 at 5.30pm. The event is free but to book go to bookcow.com.au or Eventbrite.

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