Where the dictionary defines desert as treeless and wilderness as desert, Australians see arid lands flush with plants, and wilderness in their densest forests.Īboriginal Australians would think this still too Eurocentric. Today ‘wilderness’ is seemingly untouched forest, as in south-west Tasmania. ‘Wilderness’, the dictionary says, is ‘Desert, uncultivated & uninhabited tract… part of garden left wild.’ In 1836 an Englishman used that meaning of the site of Adelaide, calling it ‘a desert a wilderness’ 3, but Australians today are not biblical: we no longer think like that. Instead non-Aborigines use another US word with exactly the opposite meaning: ‘wilderness’. Second, few now see parks in Australia ‘s natural landscape. Until ‘National Park’ was later coined in the United States, a park was man-made. First, ‘park’ was not a word Europeans elsewhere then associated with nature. with woodland and pasture… large tract of land kept in natural state for public benefit.’ Early Europeans used ‘park’ more than any other word to describe beautiful and seemingly natural places. In the bush, travellers used another word to describe particular landscapes: ‘park’. The Australian National Dictionary has 13 dense double-column pages, its biggest grouping, of specifically Australian meanings for ‘bush’ and such derivatives as ‘bushman’, ‘bushranger’ and ‘bushcraft’, many of which have entered English world-wide. In Britain a ‘bush’ was singular, usually gardened in South Africa it was generic in Australia it became generic and symbolic. They confused what they meant by ‘forest’ or ‘brush’ or ‘plain’, and they resolved the confusion by broadening the meaning of a word brought from South Africa: ‘bush’. Arriving settlers found none of their landscape words adequate for what they saw. So light seemed the touch of the Aborigines that early voyagers speculated on whether Australia was occupied, and for 200 years the fiction of terra nullius – empty land – lay under Australian law. In Australia Europeans met people who seemed not to use land at all. They reflect the time in European thinking when land-use ranked them and classified others, when lords held domains or estates, peasants worked tenements or plots, and peoples were farmers or herders or hunter-gatherers or gardeners. The dictionary meanings become statements of mind, not ground. Trees, bushes, grasses, in the right season miles of flowers, make our deserts beautiful. ‘A veritable botanic garden’, one expert calls the Great Victoria Desert 2. Dune systems circle 4000 kilometres through it 1, and some move in the way film-makers seek out, but most are stable, with richly diverse flora. Waterless & treeless region.’ These meanings jar those who know the Centre.

Uninhabited, desolate uncultivated, barren. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines it as ‘1. Many Australians equate it with central Australia, each setting the other’s limits even though some of the Centre averages better than 250mm a year. What exactly is a desert? Geographers say it is land averaging less than 200mm of rain a year.

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