16 September

Australians travel obsessively for the same reason they drink and gamble obsessively, and always have. We’re a settler culture with no connection to place. Settler cultures accumulate places as ‘land’, and drink and gamble to hide the essential emptiness otherwise of their lives. We voted no on a referendum for Indigenous recognition because Indigenous culture has a profound connection to place. That can’t be tolerated in settler culture. Place in a settler culture is just real estate. Capital gains. We travel the world accumulating more and more ‘sights’, terrified of sitting still for too long, as it would reveal again the emptiness of the culture. We have to be permanently distracted with new sights, to avoid that confrontation with ourselves. We’re even tourists in our own country. Every week somebody at work says ‘what are you doing on the weekend?’, and looks surprised when I usually say ‘nothing’. Always gotta be doing, moving around, to avoid the obvious fact that if we didn’t do that as a culture, we’d be left with nothing.