Hope you enjoy it Caleb. The book repays rereading, as I was able to appreciate it all the more because I was not reading the story this time, but thinking more about the themes. Alongside the theme of language - the Aboriginal languages, the language of bees - there is also a theme about learning to see.
Australia must have been such an alien place for those first Europeans who settled here, and interestingly, it even took painters quite a long time to see what was really there in the landscape: early paintings look very European, in both the colours and the shapes of the trees for example.
I loved this passage where Jock noticed the tips of the grass he was walking through were beaded with green:
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When he looked closer it was hundreds of wee bright insects, each the size of his little fingernail, metallic, iridescent, and the discovery of them, the new light they brought to the scene, was a lightness in him - that was what surprised him - like a form of knowledge he had broken through to. (Page 107)
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The person whose understanding is deepest is the minister, Mr Frazer, who learned from Gemmy the names and uses of various plants. He wrote in a report he gave to the Governor:
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We have been wrong to see this continent as hostile and infelicitous ... We must rub our eyes and look again, clear our minds of what we are looking for to see what is there. (Page 129-30)
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Later in the same document (which of course was ignored) he wrote of the need for the settlers to change themselves rather than trying to change the land. This is a lesson we still need to learn. For example, we farm cattle and sheep rather than the animals that live here and have adapted over thousands of years to cope with the climate and to find food.
A wonderful book I think.