30 March

The English countryside is one of the great attractions in the world today. The interesting thing about it is that most people know that it’s almost entirely man-made. But when they look at the Australian landscape, they only see wild ‘bush’. The Australian landscape was created over tens of thousands of years, by human design. The ‘bush’ we see today is that astonishing creation, falling apart. There’s a mystery about Australia, the greatest mystery in all human history. How that landscape was made, and how humans lived in it for tens of thousands of years, when other civilisations all collapsed inside a thousand. You can feel that mystery, when you live in Australia. But you have to be attuned to it. The place feels genuinely ancient, way beyond the historical time of other places, like Europe. Something astonishing happened here, and we don’t quite know what, and we may now never know. Continuous civilisation for tens of thousands of years, it’s almost impossible to imagine it. What we laughably call ancient history, with things like the pyramids, is all modern compared to Australia. Australia is the greatest thing, by far, that humanity has ever created. Australia was CREATED, it was made. It’s not ‘nature’. We look for machines as evidence of civilisation, and buildings. But a landscape is a far, far greater engineering achievement. Nobody knows how they did it. The earliest European accounts of Australia were of a place of wonder, of almost impossible beauty. The blatant racism and God-given superiority complex of European colonialism couldn’t fathom that the local black ‘savages’ could have done it. They assumed it was all nature, and the ‘blacks’ just hunted as primitives, and ate berries and witchetty grubs, inside this nature. You know when people are asked where they would go, if time machines existed? For me Australia pre-1788 would be the only thing on the list. To see firsthand the wonders we’ve now mostly destroyed, with farms and fences. To see how the then locals had cracked the code of permanent civilisation, something no other people have ever done.