9 July

Cockburn a good example of our relationship with the outback, and with the bush more generally. It only exists because of mining, it was a place where trains and drivers exchanged when transferring mining ore out of town. The mining only existed because the big cities wanted the resources. Now that operation has long stopped, the town is collapsing, with only a tiny handful of people who like the experience of the big open landscape. The thing is, that experience is still a tourist experience. Still a tourist in our own land. No real connection to the landscape, living on it rather than in it. The towns are utterly dependent on goods and services from the big cities, because they’re just an extension of the big cities, now no longer needed. Remnants of earlier extractive industries, which has always been our main focus everywhere in the landscape - to extract things, whether from mining or agriculture. You name any regional or ‘remote’ (such a telling word) town, and I will bet you its entire existence will be because of some extractive industry. Extracting things from the landscape. The one exception today is tourism, which is what most of these towns fall back on as a last resort, with mixed success. People come to ‘see’ the towns, like living museums. It doesn’t bring the town or anybody else closer to living IN the landscape. We’re still just on it, looking around, extracting things, whether mining ore, sheep, cattle or tourist dollars. The Blue Mountains is like this, a fantasy of some sort of ‘pristine’ nature. Rubbish. It’s a total mess of untended scrub, with creeks and rivers full of resident sewage outflows, and swarming with tourists. There’s no cohesive community there, no actual connection to the landscape. It’s people living city lives, just with a bit more space and more plants and animals. The divide between city and bush is a fiction, people in ‘the bush’ are living the same culture, with just more space and fewer amenities.