Had some fun talking about the positives of constitutional monarchies when Charles was crowned. But never…

Had some fun talking about the positives of constitutional monarchies when Charles was crowned. But never said who my preferred Head of State would be. My vote is - Australia. The land under our feet. It might seem absurd to suggest a non-human Head of State. Bear with me. /1 https://t.co/LltfKyAIfz

Nearly all of the existential problems we face at this point in history revolve around landscape in some way. Whether food production, water, biodiversity, every dimension of climate change, sovereignty, reconciliation etc. That's telling us something. /2

The 'economy' as people call it, when you zoom out is really a massive stripping away of every geographical basis of our lives. Where you live is not important, just an address on a map, in a 'globalised' market. Transport is the economy's passion. Moving things around. /3

A road for example is a no-place, inserted into actual places with significance and meaning. It's worth feeling that disconnect, by just standing on a road for a moment in a quiet time, in your community. That entire black space has no meaning anywhere where it actually is. /4 https://t.co/UDJ4azl9zU

Its meaning is entirely where it can *take* you. All roads in a modern society are connected to all other roads. The significance of that space is that it's always about *somewhere else*, not where you are right now. And it's right there, outside every door. Space has meaning. /5 https://t.co/Ykm2yij1dh

Add our obsession with travel and modern Western societies are obsessed with never grounding themselves. Never being anywhere, always somewhere else. Contrast that with the Indigenous peoples they displaced, for whom the land under their feet is the most sacred of all things. /6

For Indigenous Australians, the land already was the Head of State. I think a lot of the reconciliation we talk about but can never seem to achieve is the misunderstanding of that fact. Land is sacred to them, and it should be to us. But for us it's 'sights', to be 'seen'. /7

Something to take a selfie with, as a backdrop. And now with climate emergencies even the most tedious consideration of that land as a 'resource' says we're in the shit. It's definitively non-partisan, and existential in the deepest way. /8 https://t.co/7Wuuohcblh

It doesn't belong to any human group, this isn't about asking geographers to run the country. Or geologists, or farmers, or property developers (help us), or environmentalists. The land contains all of those things, it exists across generations. /9

Every living organism and everything those organisms create comes from the land, and returns to it. Indigenous peoples never speak of the land in that ownership way, but in a stewardship sort of way. They tend the land to sustain themselves and it, in perpetuity. /10

One of my favourite sections of Bill Gammage's book is on 'farming without fences'. How Indigenous Australians didn't fence land in an ownership sort of way, but instead engineered it to be appealing to wildlife, which roamed freely over it. /11 https://t.co/lNYPuXuE2I

Animals and plants then flourished in abundance, to be used by people as sustenance, but also the fauna and flora benefited enormously. It was a genuine win-win. A symbiosis of people, plants, animals and landscape. Incredibly sophisticated. /12

It's figuring out how they did that for tens of thousands of years, humankind's greatest ever achievement and still a mystery to European minds, that I think is an untapped key to reconciliation. Because we're going to need to know how they did it, fast. To survive. /13

It reverses our assumptions, that they have to adapt to us. Our lifestyles are a mere few centuries old, and crumbling into dysfunction. A mutual recognition that the land itself is the converging key to all of our survival seems not even a choice. It seems our only hope. /14

I don't even pretend, nor do people like Gammage, to understand a fraction of what Indigenous Australians know and what the land itself knows and could tell us. But to me it's the way to join all of the dots, to find that out. Australia, the land, should be our Head of State. /15

As it has been for tens of thousands of years. /end