This is an important Australian book. It will find companions on the shelf with: [b:A Million Wild Acres: 200 Years of Man and an Australian Forest|281037|A Million Wild Acres 200 Years of Man and an Australian Forest|Eric Rolls|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1607425350l/281037._SY75_.jpg|1964254] by Eric Rolls, [b:Call of the Reed Warbler: A New Agriculture – A New Earth|34951739|Call of the Reed Warbler A New Agriculture – A New Earth|Charles Massy|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1494503291l/34951739._SX50_.jpg|56224975] by Charles Massy, [b:Back From the Brink : How Australia's Landscape Can Be Saved|3747340|Back From the Brink How Australia's Landscape Can Be Saved|Peter Andrews|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1335571856l/3747340._SY75_.jpg|3791186] by Peter Andrews, and [b:Collected Poems|1341646|Collected poems|Les Murray|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1182869189l/1341646._SY75_.jpg|1331230] by Les Murray.

Don Watson eloquently surveys the extent to which Australia has been, and continues to be, laid waste by the people who struggle against it; people who want the bush to be something it isn't. Even today, the destruction is due to ignorance and the afflicted application of unsuitable practices and aesthetics. Across regional Australia the arrogance of broadacre terra-farming finds its corollary in the domestic garden where ugly bush is pushed back in favour of exotic fancies. Urban Australians have also lost contact with natural systems. The consequent public blindness through loss of knowledge, memory, and continuity, now tolerates an almost wilful disregard for Australian natural values.

For all its historical anchoring, The Bush is really only half-a-book because it fails to lift its gaze from historical descriptions of mainly nineteenth century utilitarian imperatives -interesting as they are. Don Watson's reluctance to look further, even into the present, like the man who sees grasses only as potential stock feed, seems remiss. This is despite a brief encounter with bush artist, John Wolseley and a passing reference to Peter Andrews.

Sensitivities towards the bush have changed dramatically over the last hundred years particularly through bush walking, bush regeneration, and bush living. As I closed the book, I was left with the sense that he has yet to surrender to the enchantment that can come with not turning bush land to use.

This is a pity because someone as widely respected as Don Watson could have moved beyond agriculture and mining and not only acknowledged such new sensitivities but investigated how a deeper understanding of the bush might be worming its way into our national psyche or even creating a new frontier - or not.

Over the years I've encountered many people in Australia who are as enchanted as I am with the perfection and resilience of the bush in whatever form and shape they feel affinity with - even severely damaged or degraded bush; people who know how to nurture it, restore it, and know when to leave it alone; people who are enthralled by what they see and hear; people who find themselves in the bush, are open to what it can show them, and are plunged into a state of wonder and veneration; people who commune with it - even worship it, as if in a kind of secular church.

Don Watson is interested in language, yet he doesn't question why the Australian language doesn't have words or phrases for (increasingly uninhabited) areas of the bush, bush where people live benignly, feel they belong, or are finely attuned to the complexity of cycles and moods, other than the dismissive, even derogatory terms he briefly mentions: hobby farm or lifestyle block.

In Don Watson's sweep of bush architecture, it's as though people who know, nurture, exult in the bush, and who find in such terms the continuation of a destructive force, don't really exist, or are not worth mentioning. The almost invisible uninhabited wilds that are finding custodians or sometimes incorporated into National Parks are not known to many but are held in almost religious awe by those that know them well. If, as Watson asserts, our relationship with the bush defines who we as Australians are, then why is this non-utilitarian dimension missing? Is it that the absence of language has denied bush lovers the opportunity to describe what they have discovered?

...and yet, there have always been some, in each generation,
there have always been some who could live in the presence of silence.
And some, I have known them, men with gentle broad hands,
who would die if removed from these unpeopled places, (Les Murray Noonday Axeman)

I write this, not as an armchair urban theorist, but as someone who has lived in, and loved, remote bush land for more than 50 years. I've had the childhood privilege of experiencing what I call the pastoral life on a large property with more than 30 station hands (including a full-time rabbiter), where women wore jodhpurs and the homestead had a groom. I've wasted time as a grazier paring thousands of maggoty feet. I've known the satisfaction of building a well-strained fence. I've had a romance with Australian hardwoods and still run a sawmill. I've been flooded-in, burnt-out by bushfire, and have closely observed the ecologies of wild and feral animals - and humans, over a lifetime of restoring and nurturing degraded bush land and watercourses. I've been the President of a Landcare Network, where what has natural provenance is not just venerated but turned to non-use. I like to think that after nine generations, my family have learnt what it means to be living on the land.

What's missing from this book are the bush's non-utilitarian, spiritual dimensions or as Les Murray once said, something along the lines of, 'the Australian landscape is made for poetry'.

Most of what I'd like to say about a lifetime of bush enchantment, and perhaps its consequences, can be found in a written piece about where I live in the bush that I've called In Place. I suspect, if he read this piece, Don Watson would become Tom Donovan and mutter, "bullshit". ( )

I loved reading this very interesting coverage of Australia’s bush with history, personal observations and literary anecdotes. Extremely good index of a books like this. ( )

Four and a half stars really. A great book by someone who grew up on a Victorian dairy farm at a time when we owned a quite different set of environmental sensibilities. Captures well the dilemma of the European sensibility (re land use, particularly) in what is genuinely a very different land from that where our sensibilities arose. Heartily recommended for all who are pondering how Australia uses its space. ( )

A rambling tome about the relationship between Australians, especially farmers, and the Bush, the Australian outback. The author, himself a Gippsland dairy farmer's son, muses on the weird and mostly destructive effect farming has had on local species, especially trees, and the possible reciprocal effect on the psychology of farmers. He notes that the bush environment as described and appreciated by the early settlers is now mostly gone thanks to various agricultural practices. Many farmers are reluctant to recognise these negative effects. In the early 21st century, evironmental degradation from past human activity is an observed fact. Watson urges us to see the Bush as more than an uncoverted economic input, but to live more sustainably with it.

"If, unlike many farmers, we see no reason to doubt the almost universal opinion of climate scientists that the earth is warming and that greenhouse gases generated by human activity are substantially responsible for it, we are obliged to question the wisdom of subjecting 56 per cent of the continent's landmass to grazing ruminant animals that produce as much greenhouse gas as all the cars and trucks on the nation's roads combined...As the science of climate proceeds according to the same scientific principles that gave farmers more productive animals and crops, advanced machinery, fertilisers, greatly improved weather forecasting, chemicals, and medicine to keep them and their animals healthy and on their feet, there seems no reason for them not to trust it as much as they trust Roundup"

-- 'Farming the flood plain', p.300 ( )

couldnt finish this book too much information ( )