24 July

Fish dont know water exists until they’re beached. In the same way, our own culture is the thing most invisible to us. Like travel, again. This passion Australians have to do the ‘Big Lap’, or equivalent. To accumulate lots of sights, like doing an inventory of the whole continent. Lucky Starr’s “I’ve Been Everywhere, Man.” Macca’s “Australia All Over” weekend radio show, with the same theme. It’s all actually quite strange. I think at the deepest level what’s going on here is that we know, as a nation huddled mostly on the coast, that we have no real connection to the land. Notice that’s the route of The Big Lap, because that’s where most of us live, as far away from the actual land as we can get. And we think ‘collecting’ lots of sights will somehow repair that connection. Diverting through the centre of the continent, trending now in travel, doesn’t change this. We’re tourists in our own land, and we don’t see it. No amount of travel, no amount of ‘sights’, brings us any closer to any meaningful relationship to the continent. We’re just tourists. We’re window shopping our own home. Some set up home in the more remote parts of the country, thinking this is a more authentic connection. But they’re living lives not dissimilar to the coasties, just with more room and quiet. Remote towns are permanent campsites. The whole continent is gripped by a Madonna-Whore complex, we plunder the land for ‘resources’ and real estate, and camp in the ‘outback’. 200+ years of trashing the world’s greatest mystery. You might think this is exaggeration. But this continent is falling apart. Mass extinctions, topsoil all washed and blown out to sea, ongoing record land-clearing. All the stuff that actually keeps us alive. That’s the ‘whore’ side of our culture, while we travel to the inland to do our best Crocodile Dundee impersonation, wallowing in the numinosity of an ‘outback’ we can’t even define. That’s the Madonna. We’re like the US and UK. Mostly a vulgar and brutal settler culture, a culture of get-rich-quick, only sometimes interrupted by mass migration from much more nuanced cultures that take the rough edges off it.