When the Picador Nature Reader was published several years ago, it included only one contribution by an Australian: an excerpt from David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life. It’s a beautiful piece of writing, but it is not set in Australia. It struck me at the time that for a culture so deeply embedded in, and concerned with, the land we have little in the way of nature writing.

Writing this review in the post-Christmas swelter of my mother’s sitting room in central Queensland, I am propelled to the stacked bookshelves in search of one of the first coffee table books my parents purchased, shortly after it was published in 1966. It is called The Australians, and the text is by George Johnston. It opens with the sentence: ‘It was never really intended as a place for people.’ The excerpt on the dust jacket continues:

behind these is always the brooding presence of the brown land. It is at the heart of all other things – on the palette of the aborigine, terracotta and umbers and ochre, touches of black and clay-white, of khaki and olive drab; and in the red west wind that blows on Sydney, hot and drying, bearing a dust that mocks the complacency of middle-class housewives.