Driving out from Sydney on a weekend lately I looked at the bush again for the first time in a long while, and it frightened me. So intimidating it is, so apparently monotonous, so uncompromising in colour and texture. It does not beckon or invite, as green woods do, and coppices, and noble forests of beech and oak and larch and fir. Its mysteries are not of the romantic order, but freakish, spiny, spare and unearthly strange. And so utterly indifferent. I thought then about the reluctant founding fathers and how it must have seemed to them, rejected if their own familiar country, rejected of their own familiar society, but never so utterly rejected as by this utterly rejecting landscape that they had never even asked to see, let alone to engage in combat for sheer survival. From a real adversary courage flows into you. This adversary is too awesome: it simply does not care.
Our beginnings are, at the best, ignominious. Little to celebrate in the founding of a colony that was founded only because it was so far away that it could be conveniently forgotten. Founded parsimoniously, grudgingly, without aspiration, enthusiasm, or the high wild audacity of reckless vision. Founded to clear the hulks and prisons, to forestall the French, and perhaps to grow flax.
Australia Day (Newspaper column, c 1970)
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