The novel opens with Sarah recovering from emotional damage wrought by her parents and by boarding school in England. Isolated in the bush, with the enigmatic Maisie as both companion and sage, she opens herself to the natural world and undergoes a metamorphosis from mental anguish and despair to a self that is open to connection, perception and creativity. At Ngangahook in the second part of the novel, this promise comes alive: Sarah and her uncle Ferny are sympatico with each other and the bush - but at odds from the colonising culture around them.

Initially, Sarah and Ferny casually sign a petition for a town bell, but later, as its refusal creates greater commitment on behalf of some in the town, they come to see the bell as representing a desire to control, colonise and interpret. A bell would mark time, in contrast to "the world's ephemeral rhythms. Light on the stream. Then shadow. Afternoon. Chill. Silence." Sarah is instead becoming aware of the "bell of the world" of the title. "Perhaps," she writes, "the entire glen and its surrounds, the inlet and the cliffs... constitutes one whole instrument of sound and sense?"

As a subtle battle erupts over the bell, Sarah tunes in to the music all around her, from the percussion of the timber bridge and the rattling of pipes, to the sound of the ocean, animals and birdsong. In doing so, she wrestles with how to bring the "outside" in: a newly federated nation is fixated on shutting out nature in favour of culture, refusing to listen to the natural world.

For Sarah, Ferny and others they connect with, like the naturalist Joe, this dichotomy is the source of disharmony in their souls. Ensconced within a homestead, the land viewed through glass has a "storybook air", the view "inflected with the fabrications of our culture". Sarah and Ferny are forever bringing objects from the outside in, modifying her piano and its sound with objects like kangaroo ribs, a piece of ironbark, fern fronds, a bridle hasp. Sarah begins to see that uniting these "two ways of being" might be the reason for her life. This is the case particularly through music, and just as often, through making no sound to allow the "bell of the world" to be heard.

Time, according to Sarah, "is only our moniker for the wheeling of the stars and the moon". Just as engaging with nature so often requires us to let go of clock time, to be patient and to pay attention, so too The Bell of the World requires patience and acceptance of new rhythms.

I read the novel while in the Australian Alps, a wild place that has, like Ngangahook, been immensely changed by the influence of humans throughout the 20^th century. Warm inside four walls as the moods of rain, fog and sunshine passed in the valley outside, I felt keenly the separation of inside and out. In the days after, walking in the mountains, I noticed the way my own inner narratives threatened to drown out the world around me. So I took time to stop often, to listen and to watch.

I saw the world differently, my senses and perception heightened by the novel's rhythms and musicality, and by its challenge to the barriers most of us perceive between the self and the world, between humanity and nature.

The musicality of the novel was particularly powerful: once, as I sat on a hillside above a mountain stream and watched tall white flowers and alpine grasses respond to the cold wind, it was like the swelling of sound in an orchestra, in harmony with unseen rhythms. It is a book with the power to make the reader see the world anew.

The Bell of the World is beautiful and evocative, rich with allusion and allegory, lyrical and elusive. It is transcendent, without any self-consciousness; through opening themselves to the world, the characters learn to listen, fully, to the world around them.

A century on from Sarah's youth at Ngangahook, humanity continues to act as if we are separate from the world that sustains us, and the cry to listen and pay attention is now urgent.