Julienne van Loon won the Vogel Literary Award for 2004 with Road Story. Now, with Beneath the Bloodwood Tree, van Loon has passed the hurdle or hoodoo of getting a second novel written and published, although not with ease, and apparently with no resolved sense of the kind of novel she was intending to write.

The novel’s setting is one of Australia’s new frontiers, the boom mining town of Port Hedland in the remote Pilbara region of Western Australia. This is also ‘one of the oldest pieces of continental crust on earth’. Our fiction writers have paid few visits to this part of the world, so van Loon is pioneering. It is 1996. Four years earlier, Dr Pia Ricci, the feckless protagonist of the book, purchased a share of the town’s only dental practice, abandoning scornful and disbelieving friends in the inner suburb of Melbourne to return to the place where key years of her childhood had been spent.