A man arrives on horseback on the edge of town. He has been riding for some time, through rough country. Against the backdrop of the colonial apparatus unfurling itself in outback Australia, the sinister process of civilising the land is under way. The man befriends a boy in the town, who has fallen in love with the mayor’s daughter, a girl herself, strangely suited to the country.The boy sees their relationship solely through the prism of letters between them, letters the man cannot read. In the dry and dusty heart of the country, what are they to each other? Is it true that, as JG Ballard says, caring for someone else is the same as being cared for?

October Editions is proud to publish a new edition of Lands End, Otto Weisz’s long out of print verse novella exploring the mythological heart of Australia, and the stories it chooses not to tell about itself. Reminiscent of Patrick White’s Voss, and Randolph Stow at his most visionary, Weisz’s elusive and mercurial work is an oblique meditation on the country's failed seekers, their trajectories parallel with the mulga and the red earth, ending in spare, broken lines crowding out of negative space.