16 August

I post a lot about Australia and the land, because I think there are some truths about this country that aren't well understood. Take the classic distinction between the city and the country. If you work your way through the history of all of the country towns, nearly always you'll find they exist at all because of mining (often the gold rush), or farming. And the farms were there to feed the cities. So really there is no such thing as 'the country', it's all outposts of the city. Most of these towns struggle to survive, and this is why. They only exist as outposts of the city, which can now often access the things these towns provided from somewhere else. The people who live in 'the country' have pretty much the same ways of life as people in the cities, just with more space and less traffic. It's not really a qualitatively different way of life, they're not more connected to the land, unless they're farming it, which means they're treating it like a mine anyway. Extracting meat and crops from the soil, much of which blows away in the dry. No meaningful interaction with the landscape itself, except as sight-seeing, recreational camping at best. The 'country' is really just the supply chain for the cities.