Don Watson is in the middle of moving house, a debilitating exercise at the best of times but perhaps worse when trading the country for the city.

We meet on a Monday and he has just closed on the sale of his house in Woodend, where he lived for the better part of a decade on "the wrong side" of Mount Macedon – with its straggly stringybark scrub – instead of "the other side" with its thick blackwood forest and rich soil.

He talks the old place down, with the same fatalism he employs in his new and ambitious book, The Bush: Travels in the heart of Australia.

But even as he tries to skewer the romanticism of the subject, the loquacious former speechwriter and historian cannot help but be poetic. Even though he is moving back to Fitzroy, where he has spent the majority of his adult life, you sense he will miss the country deeply.

"Four acres of highly flammable bush – it was a bit like living in a chimney in summer, waiting for someone to strike a match. At times it's like little Appalachia," he says. "But people like the bush because it's cheaper, and quiet. There's not a lot of evidence that they move there to listen to the birds and interact with nature."

We meet for lunch at Il Bacaro on Little Collins, a restaurant he has been coming to for years, most often for his adult daughter's birthday dinner. He likes the simplicity, and finds the cult of high cuisine tiresome.

"An Italian family restaurant is what you need nearby, so you can always duck out for a quick bowl of pasta and a glass of red," he says. "That's all you want – or need."

Today we choose want – starting with half a dozen St Hellen oysters each, a shared rocket and fennel salad, and a glass each of pinot grigio. I opt for spaghettini with Moreton Bay bugs, garlic and chilli – Watson the polenta and porcini pasta with rabbit ragu and broad beans.

This is the start of his book tour, between conversations with Landline and Phillip Adams. He will soon visit everywhere from Bathurst to Bendigo and western Queensland to East Gippsland, where he is from.

The Bush begins there, in Thorpdale and Poowong, where he still has family – and where he suspects readers will not look favourably on the work, particularly when it veers into environmentalism, social critique and the history of the land.

Watson clearly remembers the reaction when he first wrote about the frontier settlers of the region, publicly ending up on the "black armband" side of the culture wars while privately fielding questions from family about why he would want to awaken old ghosts.

"We're talking about the obliteration of a civilisation, the massacre of human beings – seems worth doing," he says. "A little self knowledge is not a bad thing."

And yet Australians, he laments, remain silent on many uncomfortable aspects of our origin story, as if digging for the truth would be the ruination of our sovereign spirit. "I think our silence is a sort of weakness in the national character," he says. "The trouble with the bruising rural ideology is that it's fundamentally gutless."

Ultimately the book is a mixture of memoir, deep reportage, academic rigour and travelogue, but the form was not a conscious decision. Watson simply decided to warm up one day by writing about where he grew up (even though he loathes autobiography).

He wrote about great qualities to admire in country life, including a matter of fact practicality and hardihood. Much fondness shines through in the early pages, particularly about his father and life on 140 acres of steep land, much of it infested with bracken.

Remembering was not difficult, it was good for the soul, and it became the "first stump in the edifice" of a reflection that masterfully brings to life the daily rhythms of a farm, like a "series of paintings or photographs I found them flickering through my head."

"The bush is work, and that's how I remember it," he says. "Work was what you did, it was life and it was also the ideology."

He spent months sailing across the landscape in a diesel 4WD. He spoke with CSIRO scientists, the curator of the National Herbarium, the painter John Wolseley, with graziers in Darling Downs and wheat growers in the Mallee. He wrote about bull sales and Monsanto and Roundup, peeking at issues sure to peeve certain farmers, including some he interviewed.

He understands the reality of non-fiction writing. He has rarely read anything written about himself that didn't make him flinch a little. Before I segue into the obvious topic, Watson does it for me – bringing up Paul Keating as an example of "how sensitive people can be" to words on a page.

The former duo – speechwriter and prime minister – famously fell out upon publication of Watson's book Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, in particular over the issue of authorship of the Redfern address.

I wonder if things have thawed between them given the passage of time.

"Might have been five per cent thawing," he says, dryly. "Less than Antarctica, I guess."

Watson says the seeds of the current book were sewn when he was working for Keating. I assume – wrongly – that he drew inspiration from travelling the country on political campaigns.

"He wasn't a great traveller to the interior, Paul. They don't vote for us there," he says, grinning. "But we did get him out a few times. There was a terrible drought at the time, and we saw scenes of incredible destitution."

The Murray-Darling Basin was a big issue, along with rural adjustment schemes and salt pumps and irrigation drips. Watson thought "the regions" were worth taking an interest in politically, as did Bill Kelty. Many Labor politicians do not. Watson still feels vindicated by the 1999 state election, which John Bracks won in part due to rural voters. (One only need look at Tony Windsor, Rob Oakeshott and Cathy McGowan, he notes, for examples of political pragmatism in the bush.)

"In the end," he says, "it's not in the interests of farmers to be tribal."

Indeed he suspects that John Howard ruled for so many years ("devious politicking and weak opposition aside") based in part on playing to a perception among Australians that we are all somehow part of the bush.

"He managed to effect this rural look, with his stupid hat on, and his appeal to values and mateship and all that crap. Whereas Keating, who was much more urban and up to date with how the majority of people in this country live, was anathema in the outer suburbs and beyond."

Watson isn't sure what his next project will be, but he is considering a book about a friend from university – a Vietnam veteran and anthropologist working with the Aboriginal community. He would also like to write about a jockey, owing to a fetish for race horses established in his youth – and consolidated over the past 25 years with a stake in several race horses.

"I don't know why I like horse racing so much, but I do. I think it was part of oedipal rebellion. There was something illicit about it," he says. "We beat a Lloyd Williams horse last year, in the last race at Kyneton, midweek. The club brings out the mandatory bottle of cheap champagne and you feel like you've won the Cox Plate."

He has considered switching to writing fiction – "I'm sick of being strapped to the facts" – but suspects it is too late for him to make the transition. He wishes he had a more disciplined daily work regimen, but also knows that he writes better in chaos and under duress.

Speechwriting once forced the best out of him, "but it also consolidated my natural bad habit, of needing the guillotine to be poised above my head, or even falling," he says. "I'm still like that and getting worse."

At a time when many are considering retirement, Watson is not only launching his book but also raising two young children with his partner, the writer Chloe Hooper. Together they have two sons, Tobias, 3, and Gabriel, 6 weeks old.

They have a student living in with them to help. Watson tries to avoid the depressing calculus – that he will be in his 80s when his youngest is 21. "It's good being a father in your sixties, in many ways. But it's got its problems," he says, dryly, "like you're going to be dead soon."

He is just happy to watch now as the elder son bravely accepts the young interloper, "even though you know he'd like to kill him from time to time."

Watson's own big brother, a farmer in Gippsland, still wants to kill him after 65 years - and perhaps more so after he reads the book.

"Just in little bursts, I think he'd like to hit me with a shovel," Watson says, smiling. "I tend to stand a shovel distance away from him still."