Bumping into everything

Thanks for all the fish.

By "literary landscape" I meant the way writers in Australia have described the country, the landscape. That in Lawson and Paterson I think it was little more than a great set, a stage on which human dramas played. It was "the vision splendid" for the Banjo and for Lawson it was an "agony of scrub and wire fences". There wasn't a great sense of regionalism, just outback. And whatever that meant to the writer.

So, I want to talk about the way the words we use to describe 'Country" have changed over the last hundred years and more. I want to see how we have claimed country, imaginatively, so to speak.

I remember reading about an old fella in the Territory who watched the pioneers:

Whitefellas just came up blind
bumping into everything
and put the flag, put the flag