This is a post I’ve been intending to write for a couple of months. Some time ago I posted a photo similar to this on flickr…
…and Kirsten left a comment saying,”So this is what Australia looks like!”
Well, sort of. As we left to drive to the Sunshine Coast for our holiday, I kept thinking of Kirsten and, as we watched the scenery changing, I took photos through the windscreen.

So the first few hours of our journey, travelling south to join up with a main west-east highway, looked mostly like the photo above with a bit of this…
The areas that the farms cover here can be so vast that frequently there are no fences, so you need to watch out for stock. Having said that, you can also drive for a hundred kilometres without seeing any stock, because the land is so poor that there are relatively few animals (the ratio varies considerably from area to area but often they can only farm a couple animals for every acre).The funny little bird is called a Bustard. Then, after we join that highway and head East toward the coast, the land begins to change. There is more vegetation and even hills (of a sort!). When Australians talk about “the Bush” this is what they mean. The closer you get to the coast, the more trees and hills there are. But now I’m sure you can see why 90% of Australia’s population lives along the eastern coastal strip! Inland there just isn’t much of anything. It’s a landscape that people seem to either love or hate. Those who have been born here can’t imagine being anywhere else and those of us who started life somewhere else seem to find it pretty inhospitable. What you can’t experience in photos is the intense, dry heat; the countless thousands of small, sticky flys that attempt to invade your eyes, ears and nose; the dust that coats everything you own. But also the wonderful silence; the air at night that is so warm it feels like velvet on your skin and the constant presence of life - birds, animals, and, bless their creepy little hearts, bugs.

This is the second time in my life that I’ve lived “Out West” and, while it will never be an environment that I enjoy being in, this time I’ve appreciated it’s good qualities much more. Well, I’ve tried, anyway.

By the way, if you are interested in seeing more stuff about this weird place, I thought these links were pretty representative…
http://www.lakeeyrebasin.org.au/tour/tour_start.html (this is like a slide show tour of an enormous area called the Lake Eyre Basin. We are on the Northern edge of it.)
http://www.outbackholidays.info/places_to_visit/north-west.cfm