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It's always most difficult to talk about your home, but I'll take up the challenge and try and describe my birthplace, Australia, to you.

Australia May 2001

Nickjenkins
2003-11-20 15:37:40

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wide and open and the blue skies go on forever. Nowhere does emptiness like we do. It's no wonder the aborigines evolved the concept of a dream-time, with that much space to think it would be hard not to dream.

To experience that emptiness just get in a car and drive right-to-left, or if you prefer, left-to-righ, across the map. The trip across the bottom of Australia, across the Nullarbor, is a special kind of road trip. Three days from Adelaide to Perth (two if you've a death wish and a fast car) on a road as straight as a die. Roadhouses every two to three hundred kilometres and no population to speak of. The landscape is unremarkable without being desolate and the people friendly if a little strange. It is one of the defining trips for an Australian to make.

Sitting, writing this in an office in London it seems vaguely amusing that I could be in a place so remote that the nearest human being would be more than an hours drive away. From my desk I can see the better part of central London and within one hundred kilometres of this spot more than ten million people make their home. My chance of getting any kind of privacy let alone solitude is very, very small indeed.

Not that we Aussie's seek solitude. It might be a wide, brown land but the locals know exactly where they want to live and it 'aint in the middle. Nearly 95% of Australia's twenty million people cluster in a thin strip running around the extreme coast. All of the major cities are within 10km of the open ocean (except Canberra - but hey, who lives there). Beach culture is hardwired into the Australian brain.

Nearly everyone grows up with the beach in their lives. I've even known families that live hundreds of miles inland making regularly pilgrimages to the coast just so the kids can "go for a paddle".

Australia's love affair with the beach is not the decadent, ...