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I should like to guide you through three distinct episodes in recent history: one from 18th century Europe, dominated by grand, unstable empires, one from the Australian colonial frontier of almost a century ago, and one from the central deserts, from our own time horizon.

Question: The Red Highway begins with a detailed account of Czech artist Karel Kupka’s explorations in Australia’s Far North. How did you come to use Kupka’s story as a starting point for the book?

Darwin-based author and arts writer Nicolas Rothwell is particularly known for his interest in Australian Indigenous art and culture. His fourth book, The Red Highway, follows Rothwell’s mystical and sometimes fictional journey through northern Australia, a beautiful place strangely unfamiliar to most Australians. He travels from Darwin’s beaches to deep into the Kimberley, encountering along the way a variety of local people – from an aging priest and a cattle station “queen” to artists and art centre managers. While exploring deserted coastlines, hidden towns and the vast landscapes, Rothwell discovers how both ancient and modern Australia connect to the landscape – and to himself.

Early in the morning of January 12, 1836, the young naturalist Charles Darwin, on board the Royal Navy’s HMS Beagle, caught his first glimpse of Sydney Harbour and the fledgling colony of New South Wales. He expected wonders: but what he saw, as he wrote that day in his diary, was a level landscape, “bare and horizontal strata of sandstone, covered by woods of thin, scrubby trees that bespoke useless sterility”.

AS he demonstrated in his novel Heaven & Earth, Nicolas Rothwell is a conceptualist. In order to construct a novel he needs an architecture that will also serve as a weight-bearing metaphor to support his massively collected material. In Heaven & Earth that metaphor was the brain of communist Europe cracking into fragments. Because he writes both with the skills of an on-the-spot journalist and the curious, dazed distance of the metaphysician, he failed to convince some critics of his literary power. And yet it was there, as surely as it is in Robinson Crusoe, the allegory overseeing the observation.

Rothwell’s work exemplifies an alternative tradition he sees coming more into its own in Australian writing – that of “mazy, reduplicative” works that, far from being bound by the conventional strictures of the novel, fan out like desert creeks along multiple paths of drama, enquiry and observation, imbued with a consciousness of place, not afraid to repeat, to double back, to leap across barriers of logic.

I would like to spread before you a world of rhythm and light; a world of beauty and fear; of rushing water and slow-burning dry-season fires: it is a realm where lightning strikes for nights on end, where clouds form ranks and phalanxes that stretch for hundreds of kilometres across flat plains, where rivers rush down bare savannah watercourses and enliven the dead earth.

The Red Highway begins with a spare, haunting account of the Czech artist Karel Kupka clambering out of a plane and (as the book’s first sentence has it) stepping “for the first time into the elusive world of Arnhem Land.

The Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky, a deliberate and painstaking artist, went to great lengths to include in his late work Stalker, almost as its centrepiece, an elaborately composed tracking shot – a camera movement that captured many of the enigmas we face today in reflecting on the place of nature in our subjugated world.

Only recently one of my friends, an avid reader of newspapers and voluminous history books, again assured me that he would not touch historical novels; one could not trust them to get the facts right. He is intelligent enough to know that history books too tell stories and recreate characters, which means that the facts they present will invariably be modified by interpretation.