The great Australian
holiday everybody knows is set against the sea but bushwalkers
understand that the beach is not the only Australia worth knowing.
Not to love the ocean is almost unpatriotic and the first breaking
wave we ride is one of the rites of passage of most childhoods. But
Australia does not have a monopoly on sand and surf.
For a uniquely Australian experience you need to turn away from the
beach and walk into the bush, where the environment is like nothing
else on earth. Walkers know that while the bush is hard work,
especially in the heat of summer, their experience is as close as
we can get to the way indigenous Australians crossed the landscape
for millenniums.
Sit quietly under a
giant gum in a forest valley, look up at the sandstone walls of the
surrounding cliffs, as harshly red as the sky above is starkly blue
and you can look at a vista that has not changed for thousands of
years.
It does not take an
especially spiritual nature to find a sense of the sacred in the
bush. Paul Hasluck, writer and governor-general, would play tapes
of Palestrina in the bush, letting the music blend with the bird
calls and the wind in the trees. "The sound belongs to the setting.
The setting enhances the sound," he wrote.
Hasluck knew how to
connect his Western spirit to our unforgiving land, which reminds
us with every summer's heat and each decade's drought that we are
only here on sufferance - and find majesty in a landscape that will
only be loved on its own terms.
Few of us will ever
connect with Australia, not the landscape we have made in our own
image, but the real Australia the Aborigines reached their peace
with millenniums ago. Some explorers and stockmen understood the
bush was not for taming from the start. But generations of European
Australians saw the bush as a crippled version of European forest
and saw gums as less beautiful than oaks and elms.
But bushwalkers are
the heirs to the men and women who saw the bush for what it is -
less hostile than indifferent to us. Bushwalkers know how easily it
can swallow them up in a vastness, wearing them down with heat and
exertion on walks in country just hours by car from city high-rise.
Bushwalkers can imagine what Australia was like before settler
society started to remake the landscape.
Bushwalking has
probably generated a far greater love of the land among Australians
than all the Greens' reflexive raging against
development.
Walking in the bush,
not down a fire trail or country road, but a path cut through the
forest, shows how the bush is resilient and can withstand
everything thrown at it - except us. Even the tread of hiking boots
down the decades changes the landscape.
Bush tracks wind back to spiritual core
By Stephen Matchett
December 30, 2003
