Departing Naarm Melbourne and I stand on hotel balcony and notice the surrounding sandstone buildings with blocks all formed and hard, darker and firmer than our light, crumbling western limestones of Walyalup Fremantle.

Later, on the train down to Warun Ponds past Geelong, we start to bend and wind our way out of the city, but before we leave completely I look back and see it all lined up, one highrise after another, nestled into a foreground of land—Wurundjeri land—with mountainous hills in the background, looking down.

My dad is from Wurundjeri country around Melbourne. My mum is from Whadjuk country around Perth.

Melbourne: earth and water—few wildflowers—more sandstone and mudstone.

Perth: light/air, earth, some water, with more warmth—many wildflowers—some clay but more limestone and sand.

Karrgatup Kings Park and it’s wildflower time. I walk around with my nephew and see the flowering of Western Australia—from silky eremophila to spider orchids. But the one that really stops me is the dwarf kangaroo paw from Yonga Mir the Stirling Range region. The ranges are higher up, quartz sandstones and shales—a long way from the sandy dunes of Whadjuk Country on the Swan Coastal Plane. And for some reason I’m struck—the kangaroo paw in this place grows tall and slender, but down there on those higher ridges and harder rocks he’s lower, closer to the ground. And in that moment I get a glimpse of something akin to Goethe’s archetypal plant which he first spied on his trip to Italy, crossing mountains and visiting other gardens with the same plants from his German Weimar, but in those other places appearing differently, given different conditions. And so he articulated what he saw as an archetypal plant—the plant in all plants which could, given the right conditions, take on an infinite number of forms. Here something of that same plant, expressed also in the archetypal kangaroo paw—in front of me, the dwarf.

There is a valley north of Mingenew on the road to Mullewa with mesas on either side, a lone hill, cattle—a kind of Arizona or New Mexco but lower, flatter, greener and (at this time of year) more yellow. It feels to me like a kind of rift valley, like the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. Looking on a map now I see it is also where a lot of the water of the Coal Seem area runs out, taking that flowered soil with it.

We drive the Northern Loop from Tenindewa to the edge of Noongar Country—the Greenough River, which we cross—then back in again, through yellow sandy land, and darker soil stretches. There are wildflowers everywhere of all colours—it is like driving through a post-impressionist’s landscape painting, Cézanne maybe. Eventually we arrive at a waterfall with strange moon-like rocks north of Mullewa. We continue east to Pindar then north again to find the wreath flowers by the roadside, growing here on this one piece of graded road-shoulder. I remember the overall form of the wreaths, but didn’t really recall the flowers themselves. This time I look a bit more closely, and find they turn from yellow to red—from inside to out, from lower to higher—in a kind of flowing spring of colour—a flowing flowering of form.

Coal Seam National Park colour explosions after a wet winter: already many flowers seen on the way from Sandy Cape—wildflowers yellow and purple and white (smokebush) and red and orange and blue—through farmland to Mingenew. At Coal Seam there are white and yellow pompoms, blue flowers, red flame candles, black-eyed daisies, red rocks, noisy birds, a small stream, coal shafts. At the top of the walk there are views, like a colourful, low-down Arizona canyonland. The flowers are knee-deep in places.

We’re driving north to see some wildflowers, so we stop in at Yanchep National Park, and I can’t drive past a sign that says ‘Koalas’. I have never seen one. And one is all there is, sleeping, docile, stirring slightly in a eucalypt, not too far above eye level on a little walkway they have made. He is a light grey; all alone, it seems. And bigger than I thought.