Twenty years after its extraordinary superslam the nation’s glory has faded and it is now time for recalibration
You notice many curious things as you fly across Australia. It is not just the size of this barely inhabited continent that the mind struggles to compute. As you stare from a tiny plane window, on to a landscape that could easily double for Mars or Jupiter, it is always a surprise to see just how much is happening across this alien interior. Salt lakes the size of inland seas pockmark the landscape like lunar craters (or particularly hazardous golf bunkers). Giant rock ranges crinkle the brown earth for hundreds of miles at a stretch.
There are other shapes you notice from the air too, when you finally reach the populated areas by the coast. Ovals, everywhere. The symmetrical shapes leap out at you, dotted across the landscape, perfectly formed oases of green amid the roofs of Monopoly bungalows. There are rectangles, too, their boundary lines so crisply marked they are easily readable from 15,000ft, a geometry test sketched out in blue and white. Football pitches, cricket grounds, tennis courts. Recreational facilities as far as the eye can see.
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2WnTp4D
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