The central character of the novel is Jim Saddler, a self-contained young man with a profound understanding of the bird life of an estuary near his home.

When the First World War breaks out, Jim feels obliged to join up, and travels to the Western Front, where his unique and sensitive perception gives the reader a window to the horrific experience of trench warfare.

He also sees the local farming communities trying to keep making their livelihood amid the mayhem, including an old man planting in the dirt of a blasted wood.

Fly Away Peter is considered to be an important work in Australian literature, and is on the Senior English curriculum in some states.

The boundaries of class and experience are palpable - Jim has grown up with a hardworking but violent and resentful widower father, and Ashley has had a privileged schooling in Europe - but they have a quiet rapport which transcends their differences.

Like a migratory bird, Jim holds a 'map' of the swampland in his mind, whilst also seeing the detail of grass, undergrowth and water.

The skeleton of a woolly mammoth, which rotted where it was killed with flints by early humans, lies where it fell and is unearthed as the trenches are dug.

As Imogen watches a surfer who repeatedly falls from his board, which rises behind him like a tombstone, at the end of the novel she cannot help, in spite of grief, to see that life goes on in all its power, exhilaration and tragedy.

The novel consists of dualities: war and peace, life and death, innocence and experience, wealth and poverty, natural and man-made.

While the 'sanctuary' is idyllic, it is in this time and place of 'innocence' that Jim saw his brother killed on the farm, and had to live with the venomous and destructive despair of his father.