The Bush: Travels in the Heart of Australia

by Don Watson

Most Australians live in cities and cling to the coastal fringe, yet our sense of what an Australian is – or should be – is drawn from the vast and varied inland called the bush. But what do we mean by 'the bush', and how has it shaped us?

Starting with his forebears' battle to drive back nature and eke a living from the land, Don Watson explores the bush as it was and as it now is: the triumphs and the ruination, the commonplace and the bizarre, the stories we like to tell about ourselves and the national character, and those we don't. Via mountain ash and mallee, the birds and the beasts, slaughter, fire, flood and drought, swagmen, sheep and their shepherds, the strange and the familiar, the tragedies and the follies, the crimes and the myths and the hope – here is a journey that only our leading writer of non-fiction could take us on.

At once magisterial in scope and alive with telling, wry detail, The Bush lets us see our landscape and its inhabitants afresh, examining what we have made, what we have destroyed, and what we have become in the process.

No one who reads it will look at this country the same way again.

Genres: Nonfiction, Australia, History, Travel, Nature, Environment, Memoir

448 pages, Hardcover

First published September 24, 2014

About the author

Watson grew up on a farm in Gippsland, took his undergraduate degree at La Trobe University and a Ph.D at Monash University and was for ten years an academic historian. He wrote three books on Australian history before turning his hand to TV and the stage. For several years he combined writing political satire for the actor Max Gillies with political speeches for the former Premier of Victoria, John Cain.

In 1992 he became Prime Minister Paul Keating's speech-writer and adviser and his best-selling account of those years, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart': Paul Keating Prime Minister, won both the The Age Book of the Year and non-fiction Prizes, the Brisbane Courier Mail Book of the Year, the National Biography Award and the Australian Literary Studies Association's Book of the Year.

In addition to regular books, articles and essays, in recent years he has also written feature films, including The Man Who Sued God, starring Billy Connolly and Judy Davis. His 2001 Quarterly Essay Rabbit Syndrome: Australia and America won the inaugural Alfred Deakin Prize in the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. Death Sentence, his book about the decay of public language, was also a best seller and won the Australian Booksellers Association Book of the Year. Watson's Dictionary of Weasel Words was published in 2004 and continued to encourage readers to renounce what he perceives to be meaningless corporate and government jargon that is spreading throughout Australia and embrace meaningful, precise language. More recently Watson contributed the preface to a selection of Mark Twain's writings, The Wayward Tourist.

His latest book, American Journeys is a narrative of modern America from Watson's travels in the United States following Hurricane Katrina. It was published by Knopf in 2008 and won both the The Age Book of the Year non-fiction and Book of the Year awards.[4]. It also won the 2008 Walkley Award for the best non-fiction book.

Reviews

[Lyn Elliott · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best book I’ve read on Australia for a long, long time, maybe the best ever.
Part memoir, part history, part rambling journey through ideas about what The Bush is and what it means in Australian culture, always engaging and often sardonically witty.

It’s a sort of unpacking of Australian bush myths, far too complex to cover in a short review like this.

Through stories from many parts of Australia beyond the cities, he puts before us the impacts of colonization on Indigenous Australians and the destruction of the natural environment as well as the incredible hardships endured by first settlers and their resilience.

It was a book club read which I took nearly two months to read right through, and because I have my own hard back copy I’ll be able to go back and read bits of it whenever I want a refresher.

Kay, a fellow book club member and blogger wrote a great review : https://whatbooktoread.com/2018/11/29...

Highly recommended.

[Judy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly a must read history book for every single Australian.
A history written about that real-mythical-imaginary-beautiful-cruel thing we Australians call "The Bush"
Written by a man who grew up in The Bush but left for half a lifetime and then returned to live and learn and enjoy. So he writes with wisdom and knowledge and experience but not from a position of living an entire lifetime trying to wrest some sort of living from a land that doesn't want to give what you are asking from it, as many agricultural endeavours are.
My impressions -
* I have learned more and more detail about the battle we colonisers fought with this ancient and incredibly balanced and delicate landscape and ecosystem. As always I find myself in awe of the drive, energy, persistence, desperation, shear ability to survive that each wave of settlers possess or develops as they take up land or clearing or tasks that denuded this land.
* I see more clearly how the nation of Australia was forged, we wouldn't be here or have anything if it hadn't been for the action of these generations.
* I see the brutality and cruelty that is the colonisation process and I acknowledge that this is a heritage I and each Australian must own. Not the myths we have created around these characters but the truth of what was done to the land and the people who have lived here for millennia.
* In saying the above. I in no way imply that the colonisation of Australia was more brutal or cruel than the colonisation of any other land taken in the same period of time. But the huge difference is the "great silence" that surrounds the reality or stealing lands from the people whose home it is. In this Australia is unique. Other countries are up front and admit "yes, we did this." They have the courage to call them WARS. And that is what always strikes me about this country I have chosen as home........this is a land of cowards.......there is no nice way of saying it. We try and project this tough, strong image, but we are cowards who will not step up and admit what was done to forge this nation. And until we have that courage, until we destroy the "great silence" then healing can't really begin.
Sorry, end of political rant.

I read this massive book in Audiobook form, narrated by the author. I have had a paper copy here for ages, lent to me by a neighbour and have delved into random sections from time to time -it is a great book for delving - and I will be reading it again and again. I will try and reborrow the audio version from the library for my next visit to my ageing parent, as audiobooks are a wonderful airport departure lounge companion.

Yes. 5 Stars from me. Please read this title fellow Aussies. Prepare to be challenged. Read with an open mind and heart and hear the message Don Watson is writing down.

[Jennifer (JC-S) · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘The Australian bush is both real and imaginary.’

‘The Bush’ offers an expansive narrative in appreciation of Australia’s bush heritage. Don Watson’s book encompasses the roles and impacts of Indigenous peoples, convicts, settlers and migrants as well as native and introduced flora and fauna. There is no single Australian bush: the country is too big and diverse, and people’s uses and experiences of it are too different for there to be any singularity.

‘The bush could gulp you, or your children, much as the dread interior swallowed explorers, drovers and prospectors.’

The first European farmers and settlers experienced the Australian bush as quite alien, and saw it as something to be tamed and brought under control. In the main, they tried to impose European practices, with limited success. But there were those who learned to appreciate its difference and diversity, and who tried to understand it.

‘Farming is like playing a piano: it is measured violence. It teaches a man willing to learn that there is a right way and a wrong way of doing everything.’

The bush is seen as part of Australia’s national identity which is ironic, given that most Australians live in cities on or near the coast. The bush is an iconic ideal, yet few of us have much experience of it in any form and the people from the bush have been migrating into city suburbs for 50 years.

‘So long as people of the country are the real Australians, other people are less real. This might be only to say less distinctively Australian, or it might mean out of touch with reality and real people, and not knowing which side their bread is buttered on.’

This book describes the roles of farmers, timber workers, miners, shepherds, squatters and selectors. It mentions the experiences of returned soldiers (including his grandfather) on their soldier-settlement blocks, and the role of women.

‘The bush never stops adapting, both as an environment and as a mental construct.’

Don Watson’s family history as settlers and farmers provides a framework for the book, augmented by his own observations while travelling across Australia, and interviews with different ‘bushies’ along the way. He describes beautifully a complex relationship with the environment: its biological, historical, political and social aspects. Don Watson’s narrative is part travelogue, history and memoir; his analysis clearly presented.

‘The bush is really two places: the watered and the unwatered, which means two places in time as well as in space.’

These days, my own personal bush lies within the Snowy Mountains, and trees (especially eucalyptus trees) are an important part of that. I enjoyed reading the entire book, but especially the descriptions of trees and scrub and the experiences of people – both Indigenous and others - who know the land on which they live. The tensions between Indigenous and non-Indigenous uses of land are made clear, as are the consequences of the introduction of non-native flora and fauna.

I enjoyed this book immensely: both content and presentation. It’s a book to read, and revisit.

My thanks to Netgalley and Penguin Books Australia for making an advance copy of the book available.

‘There is no one bush, but many bushes.’

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

[Caitlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

"More than their hats and moleskins and lopsided gaits, the interior silence of their days still sets them apart, confirms them in their creed, sets it in stone. They are special and their cause is just, and they are doomed to always deserve more than they receive."

This is a huge book - not just its literal size (400 page hardback does wonders for the biceps) but this is a magnum opus of broad reading, wide travel and hours upon hours of deep thought.

This is a grand book because it would be many different books to many different people - to those who live in the metropolitan area, it would be a manual to better understand the various complaints of those living in rural and regional areas. To those who live in "The Bush" it would be a vindication and articulation of their concerns (although they might still think Watson too high-brow and removed to be speaking on their behalf.) To those from outside Australia, especially in rural America, it is a great illumination of the sheer size and scope of the place, and the tragic story of its agricultural legacies.

Watson offers few prescriptions or solutions, which I feel is good because there is too much in the history of those with little understanding saying what needs doing.

The book isn't perfect, but the astonishing beauty of Watson's writing makes up for this in spades. At times I was a little frustrated at the overall structure of the book - that is to say there wasn't really one. Instead, this is more of a pathway of observations, rather than structured around a chapter to deal with each topic in turn. While this means there was sometimes repetition or a feeling of doubling back, it also meant I couldn't skip a chapter on a topic I might not consider interesting (only to discover Watson made everything seem interesting.)
Watson was the speech writer to Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating, and having heard Watson being given a platform to speak, he certainly works best within time limits - so having free reign on this topic has meant a book with diversions and deltas of description.

It is important to respect that in attempting to deconstruct the myth of the Bush Watson is not denigrating the Bush itself or those who reside there - which is a distinction that could easily be forgotten (as happened to James Brown when he did a similar thing to our concept of Anzac.) Like Brown and his concerns about how our mythic construction of Anzac as a thing of the past prevents us from appreciating and helping our current serving troops, Watson believes the mythic construction of the bush does us all a discredit and restrains the ability for the nation to move on and find better solutions to help our struggling farmers.

I appreciate Watson's wide reading of the women's memoirs, in many ways filling in some interesting (and at times contradictory) gaps between the men's stories of triumph. I also appreciate this book has widened my understanding of Australian literature (even pointing out some key differences between Lawson and Paterson's a big help) I have started reading Ruth Park's "Harp in the South" trilogy, now with a very different appreciation of what I am actually reading and the characters that inhabit her stories.

Some might not like Watson's continuous returning to the Indigenous people and the catalogue of wrongs wreaked against them, but he articulates many of the silences that exist in the narrative of the Bush where they live. It is a constant theme throughout the whole book, as it was a constant theme of the "settlement" of Australia. However, all Watson does is indicate where a silence exists; he respects it isn't his place to fill in those silences.

Having grown up in an area that was the country before being swallowed by suburbia, and going to school in "the city" I was keenly aware of the two very different worlds from a very young age. I had always felt I lived after some kind of Golden Age after the Bush was at its best - but this book demonstrates this never really existed, that there has been continual cycles of boom and bust, and that there are few places in Australia that are as untouched as we believe them to be.

"Except we need to love [the bush] as it is and can be, not the way it was and never will be again."

This is a very important book - and even if people read it purely to disagree with Watson's observations and ruminations, it opens up some vital conversations we as a country need to have.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good book well written for the most part. I found that it tended to ramble somewhat in places. But, the overarching feeling I got from this book was sadness. The subject matter for the most part is how much of Australia's native bushland, forests and natural environment has been lost for ever. And when not discussing the loss of flora & fauna the book recounts just how cruel the white settlers were to the Indigenous population.The worst part is that we have learnt nothing from all this experience - it all continues to this day in the name of greed and bastardry! The people who should read this book probably never will. I would suggest that they are the type of person who don't see any point in reading books.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Way too big a conceptual book for a month's lead in reading to a bookclub gathering, this is one that many of us agreed needed to be on the shelves, for dipping in and out of. I loved so much about this book, but need to think, reread, consider and probably rethink much of it. Definitely one for the to be bought stakes now though.

[Murray · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a magnificent and beautifully-written book about the Australian bush - or bushes as Watson rightly describes it. Covering every imaginable aspect of life and history of the bush from the various life forms, the environment, indigenous people, colonial settlers and squatters and modern life. Well worth a read.

[Roger · Rating 4 out of 5]

What to make of this book. Don Watson, known for his speech writing work for Paul Keating, and more recently his exposes of management speak, has in this book written a series of inter-connected ruminations on the Australian bush: what it was, what it is, how it came to be that way.

This is of course a huge task. Where do you start describing the countryside of a continent that stretches from 10 to 40 degrees of latitude, taking in the tropics, desert, temperate forest and alpine areas? They are all "the bush", but are all so different, is there a way that you can write about all of it? This is the problem at the heart of this eminently readable, enjoyable and enlightening work

Watson tackles this problem by firstly acknowledging it, and dividing the book into sections that discuss various aspects of life in the country, beginning with his own childhood dairying in Gippsland. The opening chapter describes how, in little more than two generations, vast tracts of virgin rainforest were cleared to create the grassy hills we know today as South Gippsland.

If there is any theme to this book it is of the destruction of, and change to, the bush since white settlement, and before - as he points out, the Aboriginal inhabitants of Australia had been "farming" the country for thousands of years before the white man - he notes that Edward Curr doubted if "any section of the human race has exercised a greater influence on the physical condition of any large portion of the globe than the wandering savages of Australia." The changes wrought by the new settlers were quick, and dramatic - the combination of clearing for pastoral use, the impact of pastoral animals and the defoliation of native plants and trees had a dramatic effect on native wildlife, waterflows and soil condition. The introduction of exotic species likewise has had a detrimental effect on the land; ironically, given the reason for their introduction, to the farmer's disadvantage.

Who were (and are) the farmers? Watson shows us that contrary to the widely held idea that the man on the land is a happy independent example of the human race, many people in the bush have been slaves to the banks, or to itinerant work, and constantly short of the comforts city folk take for granted. There have not been a huge number of long-term success stories in the bush, and plenty of failures, many brought about by ill-thought out schemes such as solider-settlement in areas such as the Mallee, where people ill-equipped for a life on the land were sent to land ill-equipped for agriculture.

Unlike some people in the bush, Watson does not shy away from the destruction of the Aborigines. Recent historical work has exposed what has always been in plain sight: that many Aborigines were hunted down and killed, either by using some pretext, or often none at all.

Watson delves deeply into the ambivalent relationship settlers have with native flora and fauna, and how even today we struggle to accept what actually belongs, desiring rather to impose our own ideas on the land. He points out that much of Australia's flora has yet to be classified, which has led to a marvellous imprecision in identifying what might be useful - "The bush personality is fed and watered by imprecision. What is useful - or a bastard of a thing - gets a vernacular name. What is neither useful nor a bastard is not worth knowing about. But while there's generally a consensus on what's a bastard, what is useful is a matter of opinion." The fact that we have not found it important enough to scientifically evaluate what's out there to see what is useful is telling.

Some of Watson's best writing is on the bush personality - to adapt to a harsh landscape, men and women became hard. The cruelties of weather, fire and heat led to cruelties in the populace, and to resigned acceptance of hardship, and in equal measure to mateship and bastardry.

He writes of attempts to reclaim and repair the land, and discusses what that actually means - reclaim it to when? If to before white settlement, then doesn't that imply that Aboriginals should be living a traditional life on such land, cool burning, creating pastures for kangaroos, and all the other things they did in managing "virgin" bush? This is a question that has no answer.

Watson's book is mostly about the changes agriculture have wrought on the land, but he does point out that it was mining rather than farming that has left the biggest scars on the land - most sclerophyll forests in the Central Highlands of Victoria were cut down to shore up mines, process gold, and to house and heat miners. What grew back was not the same as what was there before.

And that is the key - what we have now is not what was there. This is a tragedy, but Watson does not necessarily blame those that were responsible: "A frontier exists in a moment of transformation: one civilisation and the environment in which it exists give way as a new one is brought into being. This is a violent and self-interested act regardless of the particular means by which it is carried out, but also one redeemed by the hardships endured by those who perform it, and contradictory as it may seem, by the purity of their motives, their brave hearts, the grandeur of the colonial enterprise." This is the nub of why the bush is a controversial place - this is still happening there today, and the effects of that transformation are still evident.

The extensive notes at the end of the book are an invaluable source of reading material about the history and the current state of the bush, and are well worth delving into. The index is less useful.

The final word in this review should go to Watson - his final paragraph - "You can't kill myths but that doesn't mean there is no other way of seeing things, or that you can't cultivate something more profound and useful to coexist with them. It can do no harm to settle on the public mind a deeper and more honest knowledge of the land than anything that myth and platitude allow, or to encourage love to overcome indifference. Throughout Australia there are people whose daily lives are led according to a philosophy of just this kind. There are farmers who farm this way. We need a relationship with the land that does not demand submission from either party, that is built more on knowledge than the hunger to posses, and finds the effort to understand and preserve as gratifying as the effort to exploit and command. In the end it is possible to love and admire the bush both as farmers do and in the kind and curious ways that the woman in Western Australia loved the birds and the sight and the scent of the black boronia; they way that the farmer further down our watercourse, who by his neighbours' lights should have been busy cutting his bracken, loved the lyrebirds that surrounded him as he lay gazing in the gully. Except we need to love it as it is and can be, not the way it was and never will be again."

Check out my other reviews at http://aviewoverthebell.blogspot.com.au/

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Watson's such a beautiful writer. So much research would have been invested into this book and yet he (mostly) has a very light touch in revealing the work behind it. It's an unflinching account of the brutality and environmental degradation white Australia has wrought on the land since settlement. It's also a reflective, affectionate and considered book about the impact the bush has on people around the country.

I read this during my summer holidays with the 'bush' around me at Jervis Bay, NSW, in a cabin overlooking a tidal creek, amongst gum trees, kookaburras and cleared land, with the fresh scent of eucalypts in the morning air. Watson's summing up made profound sense to me and the reason why I volunteer for bush regeneration in my local area:

"What Europeans have done to the bush is atrocious by any measure, rational or not. Along with my somewhat guilty sense that I owe much of my fortunate life to a host of destructive acts, the scale of past atrocities dismays me. We are all, to some degree, implicated in them. It seems to follow that we're obliged to refrain from throwing more than a handful of well-aimed stones, but equally to do a share of the necessary repairs."

[Jade · Rating 5 out of 5]

Content warning; colonialism, climate change crisis discussion, animal cruelty and more.

Brutally honest, intensely thorough and refreshingly unbias yet, he does not villianise any particular group (save perhaps the British government and later, the Australian Government).

Don Watson writes magnificently and quotes primary sources from a variety of people (drovers, explorers and even wives of pastoralists- a perspective I have scarcely heard.). He gives voice to ecological injustice, dehumanised indigenous people and even cuts through the mythology of the drover and bushman.

I recommend having a map of Australia beside you whilst reading, as he really does take inspiration from every corner of Australia. I consider this mandatory reading for anyone exposed to the same revisionist history in school as I was. Audiobook is read by the author (superbly). Very dense or confronting in parts so I took many breaks but I am so glad to have pushed through.

[Janelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

This took ages for me to finish. Part memoir, history book, botany text, literary review and myth buster , it’s an interesting and well written book. It just made me so mad! And sad too. The myth of the australian bush is based on lies, violence, racism, sexism and environmental degradation and yet the myth lives on. My rating of the book is based more on my reaction to it than the quality of the book itself.

[Sophie Draganic · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rounded up to 5 stars.

By no means a perfect book, but one that has moved me perhaps more than any other. It’s difficult to comprehend the complete destruction and violence inherit to the colonial project, and at times the loss feels completely overwhelming. This book ruminates on our history and interaction with the land we now call Australia in a way that is sometimes measured and gentle and at other times damning. It also poses the question of the future of this land might look like if we move forward with knowledge and respect, rather than desire to control. Watson is a wonderful writer, but at times the massive scope of this book proved a little more than could be handled. Regardless, I think most of us living on this continent could gain some insight from reading it.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

It might not be a book for everyone, but I feel like I learnt a lot by reading it. There is obviously a lot to learn about the way this country was "settled" and this book contains a lot of that history.

[RM · Rating 5 out of 5]

The late historian John Hirst encouraged his students - and anybody else who would listen - to abandon the modern academy's fixation on definitions and narrowness and to "go big". Well, this is just about as big as it gets. This is at once memoir, essay, journalism, literature, travelogue, national and cultural history, frontier and postcolonial history, social and economic history, environmental and natural history, agricultural and pastoral history, policy history, an act of reconciliation, popular science and Walden. It's also written damn well.

[Smitchy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I know many people who loved this book and part of me can see why: Watson has a good turn of phrase and has attempted to tackle a topic of massive scope; the mythology, history, relationship to, reality of, environment, future and indigenous dwellers of the Australian Bush.

The term "bush" itself has massive scope from tea-tree coastal scrub, to saltbush plains, to towering temperate eucalypt forest, to tropical rainforest, and everything in between. The traditional indigenous farming methods (laid out very well in Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu BTW), the impact of white settlement, the degradations and deforestation that resulted make for depressing reading. The treatment of Aboriginal Australians is harrowing.

I struggled to stay focused while reading this. Watson frequently goes on tangents and meanders from one subject to the next. A methodology that is sometimes interesting, sometimes frustrating - drawing from his own childhood reminiscences, settler journals & diaries, official records, newspapers, art, fiction and poetry Watson attempts to encompass the entirety of white Australia's relationship to the land we inhabit and I feel it is just too much.

Australia is a vast country and this topic is equally vast - narrrowing it down might have made this book a bit more readable. However if this is a topic you are interested by all means read The Bush but I can't help but feel there are many more readable books out there that might be more specific.
This one left me feeling helpless (you get beaten over the head with what we have done to the environment and no real steps forward are suggested), depressed (again the environment and also treatment of Indigenous people), a bit bored (he rattles on a bit), angry (our politicians are still happily fucking the environment - I'm looking at you Adani mine and Murry River Scheme) and not really that enlightened (could be because I have been reading a few on this topic over the last year or so but if you have never read anything this will give you a broad overview).

I also felt Watson took a great joy in pulling apart the cultural myths surrounding "the bush" and our relationship to it - I didn't feel that was a bad thing in itself but he seemed to really revel in it and the attitude kind of got up my nose a bit (this is coming from a skeptic and atheist - I love pulling apart myths and fuzzy thinking) I think maybe because I didn't feel any of the mythologies he was picking apart with such relish are held quite as dear to people of my generation as they were to people of his (50-odd year age gap there), or maybe it is simply the fact I grew up in a rural area (the area where he starts the book incidentally) and so I am more aware of the realities of "bush" living than someone from a suburban background.

[Emmaby Barton Grace · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 maybe? (i definitely enjoyed the first half of the book more, the second half at times dragged a bit)

“the loss of nature as religion, as a human cosmos, is an expense for which there is no apparent compensation”

this book was a pleasant surprise - i thought i would enjoy it enough to pick it up, but didnt expect to love it as much as i did - or to annotate as heavily as i did. firstly, it was written so beautifully!! and made me fall in love with australia, appreciate it more. something i am finding more and more as i get older. i love seeing how australia is described, the familiarity? idk... still working out my thoughts about australia haha

“the smallest thing can excite the image of that veranda and my grandmother treading it, as inexorable as a ghost. the smell of milk, cream, meat, and pastry. cypresses and gums baking in the sun or stewing in the dump. rubber boots and dogs stained red by the soil. flyspray”

“there was the bush reality of shadowless gums and the perpetual glare from ‘dazzled and faded’ skies. as well, when the treetops let in the moon and the starlight and the clear crimson afterglow of sunset, and the trunks of the gums looked like ‘gigantic bleached bones’, there was the ‘perfection of the night’. then lucy liked to go riding in the scented air. there was ‘such delicious yellow light’ on moonlit nights, ‘and deep purple brown shadows’, quite unlike the ‘cold blue and silver of English moonlight’… mrs gray let herself be enchanted by the bush”

but also, learning more about my country and its history. for example, how our identity developed with the bush, pragmatism, squatters v settlers, politics of land, how city and country view each other, the poor/swagman and waltzing matilda, how much australia was built on industries of mining and sheep.

and helping me appreciate it more. romanticising being here. not wanting escape as much.

“in the space of half a century they wrecked it. still, when the sun is low on the green hills and the gleaming road-side gums and the grazing cattle shine and the cypress hedges throw their shadows on the grass, no one could say it is not a beautiful bit of the earth. and if you have closed your mind to what was there before, or do not know, it is no less beautiful for being made by human enterprise and for growing food and wealth”

also raising a lot of questions. making me think about our nature to the bush and our history more. how do we grapple with the beauty of what we have while recognising it is man-made, a result of destruction of our environment and the oldest living culture in the world? founded on genocide? but still valuable? we can’t get back what has been lost but we need to value what we have now. australia - a unique mix of past and present. how do we balance our need for nature - in its current state - with our need for the products/work etc it provides?? ie. how do we balance the intrinsic and extrinsic value of nature? the practical aspects of peoples livelihoods with sustainability and climate change?

i also appreciated his acknowledgement of first nations knowledge and practices, the brutal impacts of colonisation and how australia often remains silent about this past (which isn’t even the past and continues into today)

some other things i want to remember/that stood out
- no real wilderness/the bush is man made - “to speak as if [nature] had been a wilderness when the aborigines were there seems to be restating the europeans’ view that the land they grabbed was as god alone had made it”
- we reduce the bush to one idea - gum trees and sheep - ignore how much variety there is
- we romanticise the bush, treat it as church, the goodness - but often ignore the other side. perhaps in part this distance keeps us from the guilt we should feel if we were confronted with the reality
- australia is a unique mix - american and british, european and indigenous, city and country, young and old - even things like the names of places/things today come from mishearing/misunderstanding aboriginal knowledge/terms etc
- malleefowl mounds are v cool
- the paradox/balancing act of valuing trees/nature for both its intrinsic and utilitarian value
- amount of labour for a wedding ring?!?? “18 tonnes of earth have to be dug up and 12 cubic metres of tailing dumped to make the average gold wedding ring”
- how much australia owes to mining and sheep
- “plants are ranked as weeds if they are contrary to human intentions”
- have only identified around 40% of aussie flora (whereas 90% in uk)
- “socialism is just being mates”
- examples of sustainable farming and landcare were v interesting (e.g., malcolm carnegie and lake cowal conservation centre)! and made me realise that i shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss sustainable/organic farming as middle-class fads (something i am guilty of i admit for certain practices!!): “this kind of farming is often mocked for being impractical and self-indulgent, yet there never was a more padding farming ideal than closer settlement in the name of which the big scrub was destroyed. it is hard to imagine a greater self-indulgence than wiping out an entire ecosystem for the presumed benefit of a few thousand people. the kernel of the pioneering dogma, that it is unconscionable to leave good land in the hands of hunter-gatherers, persists in the modern view that to extract the maximum in food and fibre from the land is an unquestionable moral good” (i definitely want to get more of an understanding of GM crops, organic foods etc - that comes from unbiased sources!)
- the discussion of agriculture/eating meat etc - as with so much of aus stuff “it is difficult to measure the costs versus benefits of pastoral , the way it onlyy continues bc how tied it is with our national identity
- didn’t realise first nations people, and other people of colour, were buried in different areas of the cemeteries where the graves had less protection etc.
- “settlers in australia yearned for the feeling of ancestral connection… it is impossible to calculate the consequences of a lack of ancestors to worship”… where in this new place was the continuity, ritual, and tradition, the predictable patterns of the seasons, the rhythms of deep habit and belief, a civilisation to ease the days of the living?…searching for the familiar english picturesque in the australian landscape was not a casual fad, but an attempt to satisfy a psychological craving, to dull an ache” - just comforting that humans all over the world want the same things at the end of the day
- we view native plants/people etc as more valuable - but how do we define what is native versus alien? who are we to say what/who belongs/belongs more? what is more valuable? as he points out with the plants, this is so subjective, there is no real answer. and, in modern-day australia, does native really even exist?
- really enjoyed the photos in the middle - i always forget we have photos from so long ago and it helped add a human element to it, what the settlers went through - easy to judge their destruction of the environment and treatment of first nations people (and am not saying we shouldn't judge/critique!)but also important to remember how much hard work/difficulties they endured ig? idk

[Elise · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Don Watson’s extensive observations on the nature, mythology, legends, treatment, degradation, salvation, and liveability of the Australian bush was pivotal for me. Now living in the city but having grown up in many different iterations of “bush”, I found myself both nodding furiously in agreement with some notions and exceptionally challenged by others, wondering how much I “know” as compared to what’s just the common tale we’ve told ourselves over generations.

It is first and foremost a book for Australians - you will need some degree of understanding of the, generally speaking, “Australian bush myth” to have some concept of what Watson is talking about. The book wanders around a lot, you could be reading about different tree species to a few battles to particular areas of particular states and their respective ecosystems in the course of a couple of paragraphs.

For me, one of the most fascinating aspects of this book was the history and detail of the northern NSW / southern QLD area, having jut come from there a couple of months ago. A beautiful, lush area and tourism hotspot with macadamia farms selling Devonshire teas every few kilometres, before I visited I only knew it to be an area that had a major cooperative dairy and a major cooperative meatworks. An intriguing background into the formation of both is given in this book, as well as the development of the area into what we know it to be today.

[Susan Wishart · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very large, well researched and interesting history of the Australian bush. It follows the march of European settlement into the hinterland to work the land as pastoralists or miners. In doing so, millions of acres of forests and bushland were cleared and we are reaping the results of this today.
Without tree cover weeds proliferated, fertile topsoil was washed into rivers and streams impeding their flow, water became scarce causing soil salination and native animals were driven into near extinction. It's difficult to condense such a detailed narrative into a few lines but the book is very interesting and topical without being too didactic.
It was a library Book Club choice and I have a feeling I chose it from a long list. I may have to deny this at the next meeting as I don't think it will be popular with the other members, but, who knows I may be pleasantly surprised.

[Simon Pockley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an important Australian book. It will find companions on the shelf with: A Million Wild Acres: 200 Years of Man and an Australian Forest by Eric Rolls, Call of the Reed Warbler: A New Agriculture – A New Earth by Charles Massy, Back From the Brink : How Australia's Landscape Can Be Saved by Peter Andrews, and Collected Poems 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".

[Mirko · Rating 1 out of 5]

The Bush was a painful read.

The narrative feels absent of orderly coherence: A random pile of information in its first draft. The author zig-zags front and back, left and right, up and down through topics, time, and locations.

Too often it feels like sentences and paragraphs are linked by random or hardly related matter to the previous sentence or paragraph.

Author uses significant (for the book) terms without finding space to provide a short explanation of what they are (e.g. selector, surveyor, squater, etc.). Yet, author finds lots of space to throw around (random) names and their (random) thoughts - without a bother to note who these people were and why their thoughts matter.

[Robyn Philip · Rating 2 out of 5]

Still reading...

Just begun Watson's magnum opus of a book about the bush. Only up to chapter 2, and I will read the whole story, but already I feel like the book is stuffed too full of anecdotes. I like Watson's writing but - it's too much. I feel over full. A quick scan through the pictures, and they too seem stuffed into the book with less care than I would have expected. I see less of a collage and more of a slapping down of images. I'll be interested to see how I feel by the end of the book.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I heard Don Watson speak about this book at the Sydney Writers' Festival and immediately bought it, but ended up being a little disappointed. I struggled with the sheer amount of information included, it was overwhelming at times and seemed to belabour some of the points he was trying to make.
But - he makes some important observations about the way settlers have treated the Australian inland since colonisation, and the mistakes that are still being made. It is important reading.

[Annette · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful book. I listened to the audio version. Stopped at one point because it was depressing, but then started again and am so glad I did. Now I want to read the printed version. Such scholarship, wisdom, thoughtfulness, creativity, courage and perseverance went into this book. Outstanding writing. Such important subject matter. So late in coming... Would a smaller version, or a tv documentary, make its content more widely broadcast?

[Jess Xu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Audiobooked.

[hayls 🐴 · Rating 4 out of 5]

A definitive tome on all aspects of rural Australia from a European/colonial Australian perspective.

[Matt Ralph · Rating 5 out of 5]

Important if there is going to be a future, which seems unlikely, that agriculture recognises the role of ecology and history. This work, Charles Massey's The Call of the Reed Warbler, and the works of Bruce Pascoe and Bill Gammage, are leading the change in how we think about human interaction with the Australian landscape.

P. 76
The aborigines, the myth of wilderness
'They lived in harmony with the environment, but only after bending it to suit their purposes. It seems very likely that soon after their arrival on the continent their hunting and burning wiped out the megafauna. The loss of the megafauna changed the ecology, the nature and appearance of the land; the burning, over thousands of years, went on changing it.'

P. 81
'Most Australians of the past century and a half have only known the bush when it was half dead, a shadow of itself.'

P. 106
Bowyang

P. 120
'If a ship is a prison with a chance of drowning, a farm is a prison minus excitement.'

P. 160
The Monaco plain
'On being asked by the whites he was accompanying what the region was called, replied, "Manyer" - "I don't know."
Like Yucatán peninsula

P. 160-161
'the English baron Charles von Hugel said they (European naming of the Australian bush) reflected an "excess of pedantry" and bore "the stamp of... low taste.'
E.g., 'Wellington for a score or more of hills and creeks and valleys'

P. 161
'It seemed to Hugel that "the Aborigine never hears a single sensible or informative word from the settlers."'

P. 183-184
'The South Australian Act seeks "the restoration of land and its ecosystems to their conditions before European colonisation." To restore the Mallee is nothing less than desirable, yet to speak as if it had been a wilderness when the Aborigines were there seems to be restating the Europeans' view that the land they grabbed was as God alone had made it. Can a place that was intimately known and exploited by humans be a wilderness?'

Bill Gammage - talk, work

P. 186
'The Judeo-Christian god, however, did not suffer rivals. There would be no worship of the tree itself, no "Eucalyptus religiosa". The faithful could set upon the most commanding and inscrutable gum with reasonable hope that the ring of their axes was music to his tremendous ear.'

P. 187
Spinoza 'the power of nature is the divine power and virtue itself. Moreover, the divine power is the very essence of god.'

P. 191
'"I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do," the American novelist Willa Cather said a hundred years ago.'

P. 213
'It is hard to imagine a greater self-indulgence than wiping out an entire ecosystem for the presumed benefit of a few thousand people.'

P. 214
'In the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century 16 million tones of karri and Mari trees, 95% of them old-growth, some over a thousand years old, went to Japan for pulp.'

P. 214
'Across the continent since Europeans first arrived, 92 per cent of old-growth forest has been destroyed.
The farmers who are replanting old species on their properties, and indulging owls and snakes, might seem deluded, but they are taking a longer view than the generations that put paid to fields of boronia, forests of eucalypts and Gondwanan wonderlands, and it's one which might yet reveal a less anthropocentric approach to land is, paradoxically, more productive and useful to human beings.'

P. 35
Southern oscillation index

[Fan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Learnt a lot about native animals:

Koala sleep or rest for 19-20 hours a day; the remaining hours they give to eating toxic, indigestible and pitifully unnourishing gum leaves. No other creature bigger than an insect could sustain itself on such diet.

Wombats are at least as bright as the brightest dog and easily the cleverest marsupial.

Possum, the most flexible ankles of any living mammal. It is because they can dislocate them and point them backwards that they are able to scurry down tree trunks head first.

Platypuses are monotremes - egg-laying marsupials. “Monotreme” describes the fact that their urinary, defecatory and reproductive tracts all meet in the one opening, the cloaca. Their ancestors lived with the dinosaurs in Gondwanaland. (Kangaroos, possums and koalas are relatively modern). Nineteenth-century science saw them as a kind of Gothic mole.

Malleefowl don’t need to drink; they survive hot dry summers on nothing more than the moisture they gather from vegetation. In the way common to all desert dwellers since Isaiah and before, they depend on the fruit and seeds of plants, and such insects as cross their path.

Ants have almost as much claim to iconic status in Australia as the kangaroo or kelpie.

Emu stomachs have been found to contain stones and pebbles, shards of glass, nails and car keys: anything small and hard enough to grind their food and help digestion.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mr Watson explores what the Bush means to various people and how the term's meaning has changed over the 200+ years of white colonization. He traveled the country extensively talking to a wide variety of people asking them what the bush means to them and how the bush has changed, including: Farmers, farm hands, historians, scientists, environmentalists, politicians, shop keepers and more. He starts the book with his own families history of farming and clearing the land in Gippsland up through his years of growing up in that regions and then works his way through all the states and territories. HE gives a balanced view of each interested parties views, including how large scale farmers and petrochemical companies feel they are doing the right thing, but coming down on the side of those who feel, including some of these same farmers, that these practises may be degrading the land. He ends the book by stating: "You can't kill myths but that mean there is no other way of seeing things, or that you can't cultivate something ore profound and useful to coexist with them. It can do no harm to settle on the public mind a deeper and more honest knowledge of the land than anything that myth and platitude allow or to encourage love to overrun indifference." I would give this 3 1/2 stars if I could as there is some repetition and redundancy at times.

[Andrew Westle · Rating 5 out of 5]

It really feels like a book that every Australian should read, and while that sounds so nationalistic, ‘The Bush’ captures so much of the methodology that Australians employ around the Bush.

The book is filled with a nuance exploring the complexities around our relationship to the bush, and it’s place in a colonial history.

While the book explores disposition and different perspectives about First Nations experience of the bush, there was something about the writers use of ‘settlers’ that I found troubling, even thou it’s uses was aligned to common usage and established methodology.

The book’s insight in to changing perceptions about land, farming and colonial attitudes to everything from trees to grasslands is revealing.

Brought up in the bush and later relocating to the bush after decades in the city, the book feels personal as well as universal. Well written and capturing the people, places and histories of the unique country.

I would be lying if I said it didn’t make me feel home sick, the sounds of the bush described- the kookaburras, the koalas; the smells of the bush- the soil, the eucalyptus, tea tree and the fresh rain! I have always had such an affinity with the bush and feels so comfortable under the canopy of the gum tree!

[Andrew Young · Rating 4 out of 5]

A rambling, daydreaming, and inspired walk through Australia's colonial history (or parts of it), without having any particular message or thesis but seeming not to need one. The relationship between white Australians and 'the bush' turns out to be a muddled one, since the bush itself is as much a figment of our collective imagination as it is a place, or a lifestyle, or an ecosystem. Watson's language is lyrical and hard to pin down - definitively not academic writing - so it might feel wishy-washy to some readers, but to me it is perfect for the kind of nebulous ideas he is writing about. Similar to an Adam Curtis documentary, he is trying to capture the feelings and perceptions of people in the past, as well as documenting some of the more objective parts of their lives. This is a tricky thing to pull off, and at times it does feel like he is just brushing things under the rug for the sake of simplicity, but overall he strikes a great balance. The bush itself is nebulous, so it wouldn't make sense to dissect it with rigorous, scientifically provable statements.