13 April

The Australian 'bush'. What does that even mean? Somewhere we don't have a town or city, usually. Sometimes we create a national park out of it. A piece of 'bush' like in this picture, is usually a landscape falling apart. As all of our national parks are. We do nothing with it except maybe bushwalk or camp in it, the eucalypts dominate, we destroy the water courses and kill most of the species that live there, etc. We're not plugged into the landscape, we don't tend it, shape it, act in it. It's scrub, land we haven't turned into housing developments yet. Zoned 'green space' or 'rural' on our maps. One genius of Gammage's book on pre-European Australia is that it includes depictions of what 'bush' looked like when we arrived. An intricately constructed landscape, like a botanic garden, constantly shaped by humans and animals and plants, for mutual benefit. People and the 'land' mutually defined each other. They didn't just live 'in' it or on it. Hardly any of that breathtaking complexity survives, taken over by scrub, or bulldozed to feed cows and sheep.