In Australian writing, a combination of Catholicism and patriarchy offer a lodestone for many authors (Birch, Winton, Tsiolkas, Flanagan). A detailed itinerary of The Season’s focus on masculinity and the spiritual, its arcades of religious reference, would require more words than I can offer. A cursory itemisation: rubbish collectors working the football field, the hailing of deities, acts of attention and faith despite ignorance, an umpire’s “hieratic gestures”.

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Throughout the book, Garner chastises those who appear not to be mindful (businessmen on scooters, callous dog-walkers, over-enthusiastic eaters). The observation from another parent, “Don’t turn your back on the play”, serves as both epigraph and analogy – for attention, and perhaps a sense of community, too, the link connecting observers and participants. Observation’s disappearing act is easy; who cares to notice an “old duck” patiently keeping vigil, especially when it’s your grandmother? Of course, The Season’s arrival speaks to the possibility that every observer must accept they are also a participant: to help ensure her grandson and his friends would not become too distracted by the book’s arrival during the exam period, Garner delayed publication.

The Season offers a signal idea: there is purity in observance and danger in participation. Writing combines aspects of both. “[O]ffering my presence and my attention and my service,” Garner says, devoting not just quasi-religious observance but a writer’s devotion to self-obliteration and asceticism. Writing requires patience, the slow attempt to reach toward something like understanding, even the understanding of not knowing. It is, in a way, what all creation is: an act of faith – and an absorption, too, in communities, in gestures of physical and mental attention.

At the end of the game, as Amby shouts, “Again! Again! Again!” Garner realises there are only so many rounds you can play. “I don’t want it to end”, she writes. “I want it to go on forever, to be near it forever.”