The Australian bush says: ‘Come in’ — and then it breaks your heart

We are driving in inland New South Wales. We could be driving across grassy English lowland. Wide green hills roll towards a dove-grey horizon, and wisps of white curl down from wet clouds to touch the higher ground. Here and there a stand of trees dots a meadow, and small woods fringe pasture; but there is no forest, nothing dense or dark. Green here is not so much a colour in the artist’s palette as the canvas on which he paints.

The whole aspect is damp, mild, open; and though wire fence strings the roadside and sometimes a lonely track is lined in wooden post-and-rail, the impression is of parkland: of a vast ducal estate, loosely maintained, from which His Grace is unaccountably absent. Small, reedy streams curve their way through shallow basins, and there are turf-edged ponds on grassy inclines where cattle drink. The modest farmsteads, tree-sheltered, may be few, and the human population small, but this announces itself a tamed landscape.