25 December

National parks, part 2. The Australian landscape at the time of European settlement was overwhelmingly described as a ‘park’. But not in our modern meaning of ‘wilderness’, but in the meaning of the sorts of estates aristocrats had in England, or the parks in our towns and cities, with wide sweeping grass plains and pockets of forest here and there, with very little scrub and undergrowth (unlike today). It must have been stunningly beautiful, captured by early artists like Joseph Lycette here in 1820. It puzzled the early Europeans, who thought it must be the ‘natural’ state of the landscape. In fact it was entirely engineered, by aborigines. Within onIy a few decades these glorious parks had been reduced to either desert, or ‘wilderness’ (‘national’) parks of vast scrubby overgrowth, which burns like an atomic bomb.