Australia is the world's sixth largest country and its largest island. It is the only island that is also a continent, and the only continent that is also a country. It was the first continent conquered from the sea, and the last. It is the only nation that began as a prison.

It is the home of the largest living thing on earth, the Great Barrier Reef, and of the largest monolith, Ayers Rock (or Uluru to use its now-official, more respectful Aboriginal name). It has more things that will kill you than anywhere else. Of the world's ten most poisonous snakes, all are Australian. Five of its creatures--the funnel web spider, box jellyfish, blue-ringed octopus, paralysis tick, and stonefish--are the most lethal of their type in the world. This is a country where even the fluffiest of caterpillars can lay you out with a toxic nip, where seashells will not just sting you but actually sometimes go for you. Pick up an innocuous cone shell from a Queensland beach, as innocent tourists are all too wont to do, and you will discover that the little fellow inside is not just astoundingly swift and testy but exceedingly venomous. If you are not stung or pronged to death in some unexpected manner, you may be fatally chomped by sharks or crocodiles, or carried helplessly out to sea by irresistible currents, or left to stagger to an unhappy death in the baking outback. It's a tough place.

And it is old. For 60 million years since the formation of the Great Dividing Range, the low but deeply fetching mountains that run down its eastern flank, Australia has been all but silent geologically. In consequence, things, once created, have tended just to lie there. So many of the oldest objects ever found on earth--the most ancient rocks and fossils, the earliest animal tracks and riverbeds, the first faint signs of life itself--have come from Australia.

At some undetermined point in the great immensity of its past--perhaps 45,000 years ago, perhaps 60,000, but certainly before there were modern humans in the Americas or Europe--it was quietly invaded by a deeply inscrutable people, the Aborigines, who have no clearly evident racial or linguistic kinship to their neighbors in the region, and whose presence in Australia can only be explained by positing that they invented and mastered ocean-going craft at least 30,000 years in advance of anyone else, in order to undertake an exodus, then forgot or abandoned nearly all that they had learned and scarcely ever bothered with the open sea again.

It is an accomplishment so singular and extraordinary, so uncomfortable with scrutiny, that most histories breeze over it in a paragraph or two, then move on to the second, more explicable invasion--the one that begins with the arrival of Captain James Cook and his doughty little ship HMS Endeavour in Botany Bay in 1770. Never mind that Captain Cook didn't discover Australia and that he wasn't even yet a captain at the time of his visit. For most people, including most Australians, this is where the story begins.

The world those first Englishmen found was famously inverted--its seasons back to front, its constellations upside down--and unlike anything any of them had seen before even in the near latitudes of the Pacific. Its creatures seemed to have evolved as if they had misread the manual. The most characteristic of them didn't run or lope or canter, but bounced across the landscape, like dropped balls. The continent teemed with unlikely life. It contained a fish that could climb trees; a fox that flew (it was actually a very large bat); crustaceans so large that a grown man could climb inside their shells.

In short, there was no place in the world like it. There still isn't. Eighty percent of all that lives in Australia, plant and animal, exists nowhere else. More than this, it exists in an abundance that seems incompatible with the harshness of the environment. Australia is the driest, flattest, hottest, most desiccated infertile, and climatically aggressive of all the inhabited continents. (Only Antarctica is more hostile to life.) This is a place so inert that even the soil is, technically speaking, a fossil. And yet it teems with life in numbers uncounted. For insects alone, scientists haven't the faintest idea whether the total number of species is 100,000 or more than twice that. As many as a third of those species remain entirely unknown to science. For spiders, the proportion rises to 80 percent. [Bill Bryson: In a Sunburned Country, pp. 6-7]

We walk together on sacred ground. Black feet, white feet, footprints, footprints, soft upon the land.
The Tjukurpa* moves beneath our feet.
The landscape is alive
Anon.

*Pitjantjatjara word for Dreaming

Importance of Landscape

As Janet Frame observed, "Nature is never out of fashion." The importance of landscape in New Zealand literature reflects its importance in the wider culture--in painting, photography, film, advertising, tourism and more recently the campaigns of the conservation movement. ...

Not surprisingly the concern with landscape begins in New Zealand's colonial experience--a determined engagement with the original ecology and landforms, an impossible conflict between eighteenth-century aesthetic conventions and the muddy realities of the new land. Contemporary colonists' accounts...share an overwhelming sense of alienation from the indigenous landscape. Despite the glowing publicity encouraging emigration, despite occasional vague resemblances to the landscapes of "Home," nature in New Zealand was wild, primeval and unnervingly evergreen, "dreary and desolate," "gloomy forest and repulsive rugged waste." ...

From 1872, New Zealand writers relied on the Sublime as a way of accommodating and managing the magnitude the sheer drama of the scenery--especially the Southern mountains and the dense bush. Human frailty and insignificance are invariably emphasised.... New Zealand's wild country became the essential setting for the epic journeys of numerous "Man Alone" heroes, rugged figures proving their own sublimity in relation to hostile landscapes. The pattern form Women Alone in such alien scenery tends to be less heroic...[women are shown to be] victims of the landscape and its alienness, destroyed by isolation and hardship and the "savage spirit of the country [that] sneers at what it sees." ...

The principle colonial enterprise of taming the recalcitrant landscape soon became a powerful literary theme. The metamorphosis of landscape into countryside allows writers both to celebrate the settlers' noble enterprise and to employ the more optimistic literary conventions of the Pastoral and the Picturesque. ... Tough farmer-heroes soon establish themselves in the literature as a quintessential Kiwi archetype, laconic, stoical, struggling for a living and for a sense of identity on the land. ...

Wild landscapes have always...been a means for New Zealand writers to connect with the eternal and the elemental, with fundamental universal forces....For many writers landscape can be a means of access to larger personal and spiritual dimensions, the forces of history and ancestry. In Maori traditional oral literature, and in the work of contemporary maori writers, the natural landscape is inextricable from questions of spirituality and identity. ...The bonds between maori and the land are visceral, inescapable, centrally to the whakapapa (genealogy) of each individual and the iwi (tribe), essential for maintaining mauri (the spiritual energies) of each person and thing. ["Landscape," The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, pp. 296-298]