In a big country.
Everything is big these days. Big meals. Big games. Big news. Big risks. Bigger promises, backed by bigger lies. And today’s big is much bigger than yesterday’s, and will be much smaller than tomorrow’s. Yesterday’s big TV will be tomorrow’s phone screen. Everything is so big, and hence so uniformly forgettable, that when you come face to face with things of genuinely enormous magnitude it takes you by surprise. Four and half hours out of Melbourne airport and I’m still in Australia. For much of that time the view down from the window has shown nothing but red soil and rock pocked hills running off into the distance. The flight path to Darwin takes you over Australia’s red centre, over lands that are some of the most thinly populated in the world. For the most part, over landscapes not riven by the familiar comfort of road or rail. The straight and narrow of human transport is missing – instead t...