Australia, you little beauty

I think the sense of unrelentingly blue, of an Australian blue, encapsulating an aspect of summer life that I might recognise if I could indeed transport myself back in time to 30,000 years ago. Tourism NT/Salty Aura

From a young age I’ve had a fascination with the Australian continent – via all manner of disciplines, from history and demography to geology and poetry. This interest has even shaped my career in a field that I didn’t know existed: localised commentary on the cultural evolution and prospects of the Australian people.

Here is just some of what I love about this ripper spot, this Australia.

Five hundred million years ago, this land formed part of a supercontinent known as Gondwanaland. It included Antarctica, which fitted jigsaw-like into the Great Australian Bight. It also included the Indian subcontinent, which abutted Australia near the Perth coast. In my fanciful musings I like to contemplate that, without the effects of continental drift, it might have been possible to drive from Australia to India via Antarctica.

The first peopling of the Australian continent occurred no less than 60,000 years ago when the forebears of indigenous Australians walked across a land bridge from Asia. These arrivals then extended to all parts of the continent before rising sea levels, perhaps 12,000 years ago, cut off the mainland from Tasmania and New Guinea. Again, in my wild erratic fancies, I sometimes wonder what I might recognise if I could magically transport myself to merely the halfway point, 30,000 years ago, in this remarkable lineage of continuous human settlement. What might I recognise, let alone find familiar, in the landscape, the humanity, the flora and fauna of Australia back then?

My family’s relationship with this land began barely 200 years ago; they were drawn from the slums and farmlands of England, Scotland, Ireland and Bavaria. They were gifted assisted immigrant passage although one arrived in Hobart in chains and, against the odds, eventually thrived as a Victorian Vandemonian. Australia offered my forebears the opportunity to escape poverty and destitution. Today about 30 per cent of the Australian population was born overseas; immigration still underpins our culture.

And then we come to the romantics, whose language inspires an abiding love of country. In 1889, Banjo Paterson (at the age of 25) published Clancy of the Overflow, which tells the story of a city clerk’s lament for a drover’s carefree life on the land. Clancy’s “vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended” reverberates down the decades, the pedestrian “splendid vision” made glorious by reversing the words and setting up the rhyme to the sunlit plains extended. Not a syllable out of place, and all designed to create a sense of wonder, of majesty.

Dorothea Mackellar’s 1908 poem My Country refers to Australia’s “pitiless blue sky”. Pitiless I think in the sense of unrelentingly blue, of an Australian blue, encapsulating an aspect of summer life that I might recognise if I could indeed transport myself back in time to 30,000 years ago.

While there are many areas where our lifestyle, values and support programs could be improved, there is much to recognise as being distinctively generous and supportive about modern Australia. And it often stems from community – the way we come together, provide support to each other and recover from calamity like bushfire, flood and drought. The way we have set up support networks such as the Country Women’s Association, the Royal Flying Doctor Service, various volunteer fire brigades and surf lifesaving organisations.

We all connect in different ways with what we love about being Australian.