The Bush

The Bush
$15

The Bush: in Australia no word resoundsn like it, and none is harder to define. Far from a convertional history of it, this is an idiosyncratic, highly original and insightful journey through Australian landscape, history and culture. Don Watson sees the bush in a way that neither reomanticises nor decries it, evoking the heroic labour of the white sarmers as well as the cost of that labour - on the Aboriginals inhabitants, on the land, on the farmers themselves. Most powerfully, he probes our legends from the axeman, to the swagman, to the grazier, looking deep into the stories we like to tell and those we've avoided telling in history, literature, art, in the national myth and political debate. The Bush is intelligent, warm, witty; it's full of fascinating anecdotes, beautifully written, addictively readable. Its view is at once vastly informed and intensely personal. Don Watson is of the bush himself, having grown up on a fairy farm in South Gippsland. This book is part memoir, part travel document, his meanderings through Australia acting as a springboard for comment in much the same way as his rail travel did in American Journeys. No one who reads The Bush will afterwards look at this country in quite the same way.