Readers familiar with Journey to the Stone Country will feel a comforting sense of deja vu right from the start of Alex Miller’s superb new novella. In the first paragraph of both titles the main character stands contemplating their reflection in a hallstand mirror. Both are historians, and both are alone. But while Annabelle Beck had come home to find her husband had walked out, Professor Max Otto, the main character in Landscape of Farewell, is about to leave a home made empty by his wife’s death. Max, an elderly German academic, has come to the end of a disappointing career, and is now resigned to delivering a second-rate valedictory paper about massacres in history, which he knows is ‘concocted from yesterday’s leftovers.’ Duty done, he will then return home and take his own life. But the end of his speech is interrupted by Vita McLelland, a visiting Australian academic who angrily accuses him of ignoring the massacres of her own Aboriginal people. Max is fascinated by the no-nonsense Vita, who bullies him into visiting Australia for an international conference.

Like Annabelle and Bo in Journey to the Stone Country, the two men undertake not just an exhausting physical trip, but a spiritual journey, when the time comes for Dougald to revisit his grandfather’s resting place in the mountains.