Blog 1 (Creative)

CREATIVE – Create your own creative work drawing on any of the work we have been exploring and anchoring it in your own experience.

Me and 7 friends embarked from the busy suburbs of western Sydney at 2am in the morning for a 5 and a half hour drive north to the sleepy village of Mullaley, just outside of Tamworth. We were hunting on an 8,000 acre property that was used to raise cattle. The topography of the land was absolutely amazing, like nothing I have ever seen before in Sydney. I dont want to talk about my time hunting (which I thoroughly enjoyed) as much as I want to mention how I came to appreciate the amazing Australian landscape during my time away. The literature of colonialists and the first settlers came alive when I viewed the wild Australian bush and I understood why the land would have been so distasteful and unappealing to their conditioned eyes. The problem was not with the Australian landscape, rather the problem was with what they wanted from it. The earlier european explorers did not come to view what the land could give to them, rather what they could take from it, and do to it, so in that regard, it was indeed useless. But during my 4 days in the bush, I did not possess those same eyes. There is such a profound beauty and uniqueness in the Australian bush that cannot be found anywhere else. For starters, theres no reception, Praise God! That in itself was a massive burden lifted. But spending time in the bush, I came to concur with the later authors studied in class, who rather than rejecting the land embraced its beauty, its solitude and the solace it provides. The stunning colours of the rainbow lorikeets and eastern rosellas sharply contrasted the dry and arid land which lay beneath them. I seriously marvelled when wondering at how such colourful creatures could inhabit such a dry and drably coloured landscape. The landscape itself was so unpredictable, it was rocky, grassy, mountainous, dry and yet fertile. There were creeks, there were plains, there was an abundance of amazing trees and yet there was a lack of anything that was truly green. Far from the cautious eyes of Charles Sturt or the prideful gaze of Charles Darwin, my experience in the bush was one of appreciation and escape, of reflection and enjoyment, of glorying in the amazing creation set before me.