Tim Winton's island home seethes and rings, whispers and beckons with sheer life. It tantalises through shreds of memories and phantom histories turned to stone or engraved in ocean-scored rocks and remote caves. Like William Blake's 'green and pleasant land', it is compromised but offers 'a World in a grain of sand / And a Heaven in a wild flower'. His isle, like Prospero's, is 'full of noises / Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight ...' Before his youthful gaze, as he sat on a surfboard 'waiting for the next set', the natural world revealed itself, '... a sea-shore, now I saw it clearly, was a live system. And so was a creek, a coastal heath, a forest. Even a blunt dolerite cliff was somehow in motion, under power, subject to endless force. This experience of nature as 'somehow in motion' irresistibly recalls Wordsworth rowing the stolen boat on the lake when

a huge peak, black and huge
As if with voluntary power instinct
Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,
And growing still in stature the grim shape
Towered up between me and the stars, and still,
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own
And measured motion like a living thing,
Strode after me.