Most nations tell stories about themselves.

Often those stories are flattering.

They celebrate pioneers, heroes, victories and myths. They smooth over contradictions and turn hardship into legend. Literature, however, has often done something different. At its best, literature looks beneath the national story and asks what life actually feels like for the people living inside it.

That impulse sits at the heart of realism.

I didn’t come north to write The Bike.

I came to the rainforest to disappear into another book, Melted. I left Sydney to start a new life. Far North Queensland was meant to be a forward motion, not a return. I thought I was moving on, not looking back. But The Bike was always there. Like most people I was dragging my ghosts, an exile but I thought it was a new beginning, but I couldn’t stop running from myself. Those ghosts, shame, fear, doubt, regret, were still there, and I couldn’t integrate them or have individuation until I confronted the past. I didn’t understand that I was still running.

The road to Kuranda was a climb through fog and memory. Each bend rose steeper, the air thickening with green. Below me, Cairns lay ringed by mountains shaped like sleeping dragons, their spines lost in cloud. Driving upward felt like entering the belly of one.