Seas of green

One of the things that rarely ceases to amaze me about this country is the sheer richness and abundance of astonishing, untouched natural landscapes.

The cottage where we stayed in Berry was perched on the hump of a hillside dipping down to a rolling brook shaded among the trees. From every window on one side of the house, all you could see was the forest tumbling down the steep slope opposite; step outside and you'd glimpse the craggy escarpment of the Great Dividing Range looming above. The lawn and trees flickered with rosella and galah parrots, a wombat lumbered around as our friends arrived on Friday night, and, early on a crisp Sunday morning, an invasive fox stalked past through the high grass.

I used to look on the 28 hectares of Highgate Woods--a small forest in North London which was never built on or extensively logged--as a sort of miracle. And there is something remarkable about its ability to persist almost untouched while the industrial revolution rolled around it and one of the world's great cities grew to swallow it up.

But the almost profligate profusion of near-untouched landscapes in Australia makes such scraps of nature seem few and mean. A typical farmer may have a Highgate Woods'-worth of forest sitting on their land and regard it as little more than an irritant.

I suppose this is what Europe was like in the days when the great boreal forests stretched from the Urals to the Atlantic. Whereas nowadays even stretches of "wilderness" like the Scottish Highlands are the result of intensive sheep-farming, logging and hunting. The same is true of Australia in a way--Aboriginal people had a huge role in shaping the environment through fire agriculture, for instance--but the absence of pastoral and arable farming means the human impact is almost invisible to my eyes. The landscape seems pristine.

So despite myself, I can't help a certain incredulity sometimes when I hear of threats to Australia's woodlands. I agree with those who want to preserve this unique environment from development and degradation, but what I find most amazing about this country is not the scarcity of the natural environment but its vast, untouched abundance. All the more reason to preserve it, of course; but we should stop for a moment to wonder and be thankful for the scale of what we have.