8 July

Driving through the Australian countryside again yesterday, I think we’re blinded by too many landscape paintings. The thing that should jump out screaming at us (I think), is that there’s nothing in it. Trees here and there, the odd flock of sheep or cows, or ploughed fields. Not a single person or other animal or plant. It looks pretty enough, but it’s in dire trouble. What we call the ‘bush’ is really a landscape emptied of nearly everything alive. These are our soil mines, fenced off to keep a tiny, tiny handful of animals in (fences that prevent the flow of animals across the landscape). The landscape is dead, not much more than a painting.