30 July

I remember driving through what we call ‘the bush’ one day, and thinking about how empty our landscapes are. Empty of people, and increasingly of plants and animals too. You’ll find handfuls of people living there, and tourists. But mostly empty. It wasn’t empty when we arrived here. This emptiness some sentimentalise as ‘the great outdoors’ was made. Brutally. The people were driven out of the landscape, and often killed. They occupied the land, tended it, turned it into a wonder of the world. The tragedy is we didn’t even replace them with ourselves. We replaced them mostly with extractive industries - mines and farms. To feed and enrich the cities. The bush and outback we worship today, full of dust-bowls, feral animals and plants, dead rivers, and tourists, look nothing like what was here before us.