23 September

Crocodile Dundee is like the Frank Sinatra or Elvis of the Australian landscape. The whitefella substitute for the culture we didn’t understand and mostly destroyed. Elvis and Frank mined black music heavily, and became our way into it that felt less threatening. There’s a whole macho subculture of the Australian ’outback’ now, where taming it with 4WDs and pretending we’re getting ‘back to nature’ there tries to fill the void we’ve felt since we arrived on the continent, and realised we didn’t really know how it all worked. The outback is a whitefella myth. Aboriginal Australians lived everywhere, including anywhere you are right now. It’s the bits of Australia most of us don’t live in, that we forced Aboriginal Australians to retreat to, that’s all. As the Aboriginal writer Alexis Wright puts it so well (and note the concept of ‘home’, which I post about a lot - we have no understanding of that concept now, we see it as an address, where we launch our travels from in search of what we can’t find at home any more): “For Aboriginal people, the term outback is an alien concept that implies that someone is a long way from home, and home is somewhere else,” she writes. “We see our country as our home whether it is in the desert, the forest or by the sea. The whole continent is our homeland and the foundation of our wellbeing, and our belonging.”