Summary

“The Weeping Fig” by Judith Wright tells the story of John Condon, who is visiting a rural area near Hambleton where his great-grandparents established themselves when they came to Australia.

He has a dull conversation with the current resident of the place, Mrs Hastings, who hates the countryside and hopes to move to the city with her husband. The housemaid, Bertha, tells John that the only original building still standing is a homestead near a big tree. John, who has read about the place in his great-grandfather’s dairy, goes to look at it.

Based on what he read in the diary, he imagines how it was for his great-grandparents to live there, in an unfriendly and intensely hot landscape. He recalls how he found the diary upon his father’s death ...