The wind was picking up, but she decided to continue towards the train station.

Leaving the air conditioning of the modern block behind, she was met with sauna-like air, thick, syrupy. The air seemed clear that morning, the forecast calm, despite the summer fires. With little to do, she decided to venture into the centre of town, maybe catch an exhibition or have lunch. The apartment she was staying in had emptied of family, and she was alone for a few hours. My mother recounts a story from a recent holiday in Sydney, Australia. Watts explores feminine fear, apathy and danger, building to a tightly controlled bushfire of ecological and personal crisis.The End of Stationarity: a review of Madeleine Watts’s The Inland Sea by Miki Lentin Written with down-to-earth lucidity and ethereal breeziness, this is an unforgettable debut about coming of age in a world that seems increasingly hostile. Reckless and adrift, she prepares to leave. She's working part-time as an emergency dispatch operator, drinking heavily, sleeping with strangers, wandering Sydney's streets late at night, and navigating an affair with an ex-lover.

Two centuries later, his great-great-great-great granddaughter (and our narrator) spends a final year in Sydney reeling from her own self-destructive obsessions. The myth of the inland sea was taken up by other men, and over the years search parties walked out into the desert, dying as they tried to find it. Oxley never found it, but he never ceased to believe it was out there. In the early 19th century, British explorer John Oxley traversed the then-unknown wilderness of central Australia in search of water.

Madeleine watts the inland sea