Salt-lakes and Swamps: Michael Meehan's Australian Environments

The representation of landscape has been an important part of Australian literature, and the imagined Australian character has partly been constructed relative to interactions with the natural world. Often, the land has been framed against an idealised European landscape, and depicted in anthropomorphised terms, as being harsh and unforgiving. In keeping with the idea of landscape as important, Michael Meehan's first two novels, The Salt of Broken Tears and Stormy Weather, have rural Victoria as a setting and character.