Debut novelist Lyn Dickens’ Salt Upon the Water reveals the fascinating and cosmopolitan past of Adelaide’s famed surveyor and designer Colonel William Light.

When Lyn Dickens first set eyes on a self-portrait of Colonel William Light, she was startled by what she saw. “I just stopped and looked at it,” she tells InReview . “Something about his face… I thought, he looks like someone like me.”

That moment of recognition became the spark for Salt Upon the Water , Dickens’ lyrical debut novel and winner of the 2024 Adelaide Festival Unpublished Manuscript Award. Published by Wakefield Press this November, it reimagines Light – long celebrated as the surveyor who designed Adelaide’s grid layout and surrounding Parklands – as a man increasingly constrained by social conventions as the c

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