4 ideas
Stan Parker clears a selection at Durilgai outside Sydney, brings his wife Amy there, and stays on it all his life. They get through a flood, a bushfire in which Stan rescues a woman from a burning mansion, and his service in the First World War. Their son Ray drifts into crime and is shot dead, their daughter Thelma marries up into genteel respectability, and by Stan's old age the surrounding bush has been cut into suburban lots.
In old age Stan is badgered in his garden by a young evangelist demanding he declare his faith. Stan spits on the ground, points at the spittle and says that is God.
The novel treats an inarticulate farmer and his wife as worthy of epic treatment. It suggests that the depths it describes are ones its characters feel but cannot put into words. Significance, on this view, does not depend on achievement, eloquence, or public event. It builds up through repeated chores, weather, and endurance, so the dignity of a life is measured by how fully it is lived rather than by anything it produces.
Stan and Amy share bed, land and decades yet remain largely closed to each other. Stan's inner search stays wordless. Amy's longing to possess him fully turns into jealousy and then a brief affair with a travelling salesman. The novel's claim is that proximity and shared history do not produce knowledge of another person: each partner's interior life stays out of reach, and their love is sustained partly by what goes unsaid.