It took Robert Dessaix many decades to appreciate Australia’s landscape, but when it finally happened on a Tasmanian bush block, he felt forever changed
If you’ve been brought up on Enid Blyton and, a little later, Shakespeare, as I was, with Sartre and Tolstoy thrown into the mix in late adolescence, then the Australian landscape will be as alien to you as the moon. Now and again, I caught glimpses of gum-trees and dry paddocks from train windows, but I belonged somewhere else.
I wasn’t against gum-trees or “the wide brown land” as such, but longed for something else entirely. Forests, for example, not bush, fields, not paddocks. What I yearned for were precisely the things Dorothea MacKellar dreamily disdains in her poem My Country: England’s “ordered woods and gardens”, her “coppices”, her “green and shaded lanes”, or anybody else’s.