16. A place too big: Australia as a collection of regions

The Australia I grew up in had seven million people, a third of what we have today (2009).  Our land mass is not quite as big as America and somewhat smaller than China but it’s the emptiness, the vast areas not filled with anything, that give us a feeling of our country’s size.  We come now to the greatest paradox about this land – its unity.  We can go to the bottom of Tasmania and find our way back, up the coast or inland, to Cape York, and, though the country will be changing all the way, and the vegetation and the birds, the transitions will be gradual; we won’t have a feeling of separation, of losing one thing and entering another, or if we do, it will always be within a feeling of connection, one part to another.  The same holds true when we travel east to west, or west to east.  Despite the Nullarbor and other desolate stretches from the Kimberleys to the Bight, we’ll never be in doubt that our move is being made across one great land.  There are state boundaries of course, but as we cross them, they feel artificial; the land, we tell ourselves, has no idea that it’s changed from being Queensland to being New South Wales!

Against this unity, however, there’s diversity. [read more]