num_pages: 363
description: Most Australians live in cities and cling to the coastal fringe yet our sense of what an Australian is  or should be  is drawn from the vast and varied inland called the bush. But what do we mean by 'the bush' and how has it shaped us? Starting with his forebears' battle to drive back nature and eke a living from the land Don Watson explores the bush as it was and as it now is: the triumphs and the ruination the commonplace and the bizarre the stories we like to tell about ourselves and the national character and those we don't. Via mountain ash and mallee the birds and the beasts slaughter fire flood and drought swagmen sheep and their shepherds the strange and the familiar the tragedies and the follies the crimes and the myths and the hope  here is a journey that only our leading writer of non-fiction could take us on. At once magisterial in scope and alive with telling wry detail The Bush lets us see our landscape and its inhabitants afresh examining what we have made what we have destroyed and what we have become in the process. No one who reads it will look at this country the same way again.
language: English
title: The Bush
publisher: Penguin