Sydney is the main setting and, though the plot points toward her departure for America, the unnamed narrator meditates at length on Australia’s fraught history and its modern-day crises. For one, she has written a novel very much about Australia. Watts departs from Hazzard, however, in at least three key ways. Not quite pessimists, they share a simple conviction that calamity happens, and happens often - that “the improbable probable,” and will only get more so. And Watts looks to the future much as Hazzard did, with a sense of opportunity undercut by ill fate. Watts’s protagonist, the great-great-great-great-granddaughter of real-life explorer John Oxley, is fairly Hazzard-esque: introspective, stubborn, transgressive, and precise about language and history. In her debut, The Inland Sea, Watts, too, casts the long shadow of British Australia’s early explorations - an aura of masculine vainglory and disaster - over the daily lives of contemporary characters, central among them a young, erudite white woman. It’s easier in the case of Madeleine Watts, who is, as Hazzard was, an Australian-born novelist based in New York City. It’s hard to say what she really thought of the place, as a nation, a colonial project, a physical environment. Is the narrator critiquing Western imperialism, if she thinks the land still serves to “solace” the explorers? And if the explorers died, when did the solacing happen, and what good did it do? Hazzard was an Australian expatriate who mostly didn’t write about Australia. The passage makes for a puzzling ending to a novel set in Italy. The “we” here is ambiguous, the tone ambivalent. Not to direct, but to solace us not to fix our positions, but to show us how we came. One can only say, it will be a whole - a region from which a few features, not necessarily those that seemed prominent at the start, will stand out in clear colors.

When the territory is charted, its eventual aspect may be quite other than what was hoped for. We take our bearings from the wrong landmarks.

We are like those early explorers of Australia who died of thirst. In the final paragraph of her 1970 novel The Bay of Noon,

Madeleine watts the inland sea