The bleached Monaro landscape south of Cooma, New South Wales.

When I was a kid, my parents wouldn’t let me have anything to do with chain letters.

I’ve never asked my mother what the problem was with them, but I do seem to remember they were regarded as being slightly menacing in some way.

Before I started writing this book, there were a few houses I would, without question, include if the owners let me – houses I had been to many years ago, or read about a long time ago. The question, then, was how to find the rest. I don’t know many people in the country, I don’t go out to the country as often as I should.

For some reason, the idea of the chain letter came to mind – in my work as a journalist, I’m often looking for people for one story or another but it would never occur to me to find them by chain letter. But, somehow, the idea of a chain email seemed right for trying to find rural properties – it must have been something to do with a city dweller’s view of country people as open and welcoming, doors always unlocked.

As it turned out, it worked brilliantly. I sent the email out, urging people to forward it on as many times as they liked. For months, my inbox was filled with replies from people often two or three times removed from anyone I knew, with photos of their properties, and enthusiastic notes about how much they loved their place. A few of them are in the book.

For a country as urbanised as Australia, we have a contradictory relationship with our rural areas, some of which are as hostile as the Antarctic. Not only do most of us live in cities, but we also cling to the coast, looking outwards towards the ocean – and often beyond, as far as we possibly can.

And yet, at the same time, we’re defined by the land that most of us have never lived in, that some of us have never visited, and that many of us don’t feel at home in. Our art, our music, our literature is steeped in the country, not in the city; even our national characteristics of mateship and larrikinism tend to go with dun-coloured dust and the squint from unshadowed sunlight. You couldn’t find a more Australian painting than Tom Roberts’ The Golden Fleece – a scene of back-breaking work, Aussie blokes, a woolshed – it’s enough to bring on a severe case of nationalism. And in poetic terms, even those of us who have forgotten virtually everything we were ever taught can still remember fragments of a poem with the line, ‘I love a sunburnt country’, or The Man from Snowy River. Did we ever learn Australian poems about the city? Not that I can remember.

If they’re not drawn overseas – elsewhere – for inspiration, Australian composers tend to head straight to the bush. You hear insects, birds, the heat in their music. It shouldn’t be a shock to find out that Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe wrote Kakadu without ever having visited the place – he’d seen pictures of it in the wet, with its stormy skies and waterfalls, and was surprised when he finally got up there, in the dry season and well after he’d composed the work, to find it green and calm and sunny. Artists are allowed to use their imagination – we know Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice without necessarily having been to Italy – but we feel that Australian artists have an innate connection to the country. In fact, we think we all do, and that link only seems to be getting stronger.

The whole concept of tree changers is a new one – a decade or two at the most. City dwellers dream of moving to the country for a simpler, quieter and more meaningful life. Oddly, technology has allowed this move – before the internet, and cheaper airfares, the country was far too remote for those of us used to the conveniences of urban life. The fact that you can now get a decent coffee, and food worth driving miles for, in the most unexpected out-of-the-way places makes the prospect of rural life much more compelling.

I looked at dozens of country houses, by email, at least – the beauty of technology – before I narrowed my selection down to the ones shown on these pages. It was difficult for me to articulate exactly what I was looking for; I knew I was after ‘real’ places, not ones that had been tidied up and propped to make them, supposedly, more appealing. I didn’t mind a bit of authentic chaos. I wanted to show houses that I would like to be in right now – and because my tastes are eclectic, that covered a wide range of places. I wanted some typically Australian country houses, ones that Patrick White wrote about as having ‘verandas, porches, lights, snatches of piano music, whinging dogs, skittering cats, archways armed with rose-thorns, a drift of kitchen smells, but never any real indication of how to enter’. The kinds of well-worn ho uses that families have passed down from one generation to the next, and that most of us don’t have access to in any sense. The verandah, such an Australian concept that it seems unfathomable the derivation of the word is Indian. It’s an appropriately Australian space – neither in nor out, not one thing nor the other, an in-between, indecisive place that adapts according to the company, the weather and the time of day. A highly sociable and, equally, solitary space, that turns into something else altogether when meshed in against the blowfly.

I wanted houses that showed ingenuity and imagination, that, while still being real, managed to have a sense of fantasy about them. I wanted modest places, and slightly grand places; ones that were lived in full time, and others that were holiday houses; old and new; houses built by amateurs and those designed by architects. I wanted to find houses that belonged in their surroundings, and weren’t a cliché of what an Australian house could be.

With the help of the chain letter, the bush telegraph, I found what I was looking for, and discovered far more than I possibly could have expected.

A hallway at Beaconsfield, near Ilfracombe in Queensland, a property that has been in the same family for 100 years.