30 March

As an Australian, when I see pics like this, I don’t ooh and ahh about what a beautiful place it is, or about what a great place that would be to take a holiday, or to churn up with a 4WD. The last thing I want to feel is a tourist in my own land - Australia, the Theme Park - but we don’t have many other options. I feel an ancient presence in Australia, that I’ve not felt anywhere else in the world. Just pitching a tent in the outback won’t give you that feeling, that’s one of the delusions of travel, that ‘being there’ somehow brings you closer to the reality of a place. It’s why I think Australians travel so obsessively, to try to connect with the place via accumulation. “I’ve been everywhere, man”. But that’s just movement and accumulation, not connection. There’s something deeply, darkly mysterious about here. Humans here confronted the deepest parts of reality, and understood something that has probably now been lost forever. But some of that understanding survives in the landscape. It’s an eerie presence, which we try to capture in the hopeless idea of ‘the outback’. Nothing is more complex than a landscape, we pride ourselves on building jumbo jets and computers. They’re toddler toys next to building a functioning landscape. This isn’t ‘nature’ you see. It’s a constructed feat of engineering.