I went “walkabout” in far western Queensland for a while. Queensland is vast, 50% bigger than South Africa, to give my old compatriots a sense of scale. I drove towards the vast Simpson Desert and got as far as the desert outskirts, about 1500 km from the Australian East coast. That’s further than from the Zimbabwe border to Cape Town.
The landscape is interesting. Australia is an enormous island continent, but it is remarkably uniform in vegetation and topography, compared to other continents. It is dominated by endless flat plains of Acacia and Eucalyptus species across the broad range of structural vegetation types including forests, woodlands, shrublands and grasslands. From an artistic perspective, this monoculture is not desirable. You can see the sameness in my video below.
The roads are dotted with “grey nomads”, retirees and empty-nesters, piloting caravans pulled by large SUVs and 4WD vehicles across the landscape. They’re everywhere, an army of pensioners with too much time on their hands. Just kidding, I’m one of them, worse luck!
I was a little shocked to see cattle farming right up to the desert’s borders, even on fragile marginal land.
My general impression of the landscape’s aesthetic qualities was positive, although Australia will never rival Africa, or indeed North America, in terms of natural beauty. The reason for this is geological: Australia has the oldest continental crust on Earth, emerging 4.4 billion years ago from a hellscape of magma oceans, and dating to the era of the moon’s formation. It has changed little since then. Over the eons, sediments were deposited, only to be eroded away again, over and over. The soils are low in phosphorus, limiting plant biodiversity, and the lack of glacial disturbance means these are some of the oldest soils on the planet. But there is some beauty here, if one can be bothered to overcome the “tyranny of distance” (to borrow and misuse a phrase coined by author Geoffrey Blainey) by traveling the thousands of kilometres, on deteriorating roads, to get to the places of silent wonder.
