Petrified Wood by Mary Scott (2018)

 This is part of a series called Lost Rocks, which is apparently a group of forty books produced in tranches over the last few years by a small Tasmanian publisher, and celebrating "mineralogical, metaphysical and metallurgical telling". The tenor of that kind of language tells the reader a bit about the 'artsy' nature of the project. As does the fact that, for some reason, they've decided to call the whole oeuvre a group of 'fictionellas' - there's seemingly no fiction in this one, so that for me at the moment is opaque. Horrible word, too. But that's all context, and if it is stripped away, and we look at what Scott has written, pure and simple, then there's something quietly interesting here. She has an ancestor who was a famous microscopist, who did a lot of groundbreaking work in understanding Tasmania's botanic history through the study of fossils, mainly the petrified wood of the title. This is a short record of her discoveries about him, and the thoughts they bring up. She's an artist, so these thoughts exhibit some of that bent. She takes a musing journey through his history, language and reputation. The best way to typify it is through colour. Imagine a pale colour that looks very slightly green in some lights, and very slightly bluer in others, but predominantly white. One of those colours that ostensibly doesn't yell for attention. But it has a peculiar atmosphere of its own, and radiance within a small field of observation. That is this book, for me. It has the same delicacy and subcurrent, and minor specialness. The only thing I will say agin it is that a colour of that kind has for me a vibrance and glowing tang that is overt and lasting, whereas this book doesn't leave a huge mark in the memory beyond the moment of reading.