12 December

In many ways China is uniquely similar to Australia. Both are ancient cultures who found way to live IN the landscape, for thousands of years. Not on it. To make the landscape part of their society. Those farmlands are thousands of years old, and are re-worked every year to keep the richness and diversity. Compare with post-European settlement landscape in Australia, which is almost universally a catastrophe, topsoil either blown out to sea or washed down rivers and creeks turned into erosion gullies. Nothing much alive in those farming landscapes today, either above or below ground. And no people live in it, so we’re not even living on the landscape, it’s mostly empty of people, just mechanised agriculture. Your relationship to your landscape determines the longevity of your culture. No society can survive without a productive relationship to landscape. We’re living creatures. We have no idea how to do it. Aboriginal people could show us, but we’re too ignorant and racist to even ask. We think they’re primitives.