When I first came to Australia there were periods where I felt an unaccountable sadness. It wasn't depression or the awareness of man's inhumanity to man but a feeling that somehow my immediate world had gone awry. Something was just not right. These moments happened generally after I had been walking outdoors. I realised it was the sere and withered gum leaves which were everywhere under the trees and the look of the trees themselves.

In the United States where I lived there would be an explosion of colour in the autumn as the trees prepared for winter. The oaks blazed scarlet. The leaves of the white birches were a penetrating yellow. The colours were there all the time but were masked by the green chlorophyll. When the chlorophyll disappeared as the leaves died the other colours produced by the now visible keratin and xantophyll were their shroud. The leaves would then drop, and make a colourful carpet under the trees. As time went on the colours would fade, and there were sere and withered leaves under the skeletal trees. One can hear the leaves rustle under foot. Tiny buds can be seen on the branches. We know new leaves will come forth in Spring. Life will renew itself. Leaves die. New leaves come. The dead leaves crumble and disappear into the soil. The rains are over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth. From death comes new life.

In Australia where I live now it is not like that. Leaves droop and drop from the gums all the time. There is no burst of colour to mark their going. At any time of year withered leaves cover the ground. For one used to change and renewal it is perpetual autumn. Waiting for a winter which never comes. Death with no resurrection. Riding down the New England Highway one can see the changing colours of the oaks, beeches. poplars and other trees brought in by European settlers, but the omnipresent gums with their perpetual autumn dominate the landscape where I live.

What in Australia feels most alien to you?

Not sure how long you've been here, David, but given time I'm sure the charm of the Australian landscape will draw you in and win you over.

I can't imagine the stark colours you describe ever lifting my heart the way the muted grey/greens and browns of the Australian bush do. I guess it comes back to where you grew up and what landscape it was that first got under your skin so to speak in those early impressionable years.

I returned to my home state, Victoria, last week for a visit and even though it was incredibly dry, in fact the driest I've ever seen it, that same nostalgic appreciation of its dry grasses and magnificent gums was as strong as ever.

If anything in Australia is to feel alien to me, it's much more likely to be aspects of the built environment rather than any part of the natural landscape, which I love and in which I feel totally at home.

Dear David f,

Thanks for this thread.

What in Australia feels most alien to me?

It would have to be the fact that my father is
no longer alive to share in my life. He died
suddenly at the age of 52 of a massive coronary
while I was living and working overseas with
my husband. I couldn't make it to his funeral
in time, so I never got to say goodbye to him.

He never got to see his two grandchildren.

I miss him dreadfully - especially during Festive
family times like Christmas, Easter, Father's Day...
I get this longing - if I could only sit down with
him one more time. I often feel that there's so
much that I'd like to say to him - Did he really
know how much he was loved?

Then the moments pass - and life intrudes once again.
Greater needs then mine take over.

Another interesting thread from david f. As someone who was born and raised in Australia, and spent much of my childhood in the Australian bush, I feel nothing of the alienation towards it that he describes. Indeed, where I live in rural southern Queensland I'm surrounded by national parks dominated by native vegetation and wildlife, and I'm rarely happier and more at peace than when I'm out and about in it.

In contrast to the drab uniformity that david f sees in the Australian bush, I'm frequently delighted by the splashes of exquisite colour that one finds when the eucalypts or acacias are flowering, in the wildflowers and shrubs, and of course in the birds and insects that are attracted to them. Indeed, david's characterisation of Australian wilderness as being drab and alien is very reminiscent of the sentiments of early European explorers and settlers, who wrote frequently of the harshness and hostility of the Australian natural environment compared to that which they had left behind.

Like Bronwyn, it's aspects of the built environment that I find most alienating in Australia. Shopping malls in particular are soul-destroying places with no aesthetic redemption. Occasionally, I have to go the Gold Coast for family reasons, and I have to say that the entire strip encapsulates for me the meaning of alienation.

That people choose to live and even holiday in such an awful place never ceases to astound me.

What a simply lovely thought for a Sunday morning, thank you david f.

In the past six years my wife and I have spent four months each winter travelling through remote Australia. The remoteness itself is awesome and the flat landscapes that suddenly produce the most spectacular outcrops of prehistoric geology, mountain ranges, gorges, waterfalls, flora and fauna are constant surprises. Yet the endearing image and most alien for us have been the red, red dessert and the blue, blue sky. It’s like a Childs painting where the colors seem to surreal, false and quite alien

Dear Bronwyn, Foxy, CJ and spindoc,

I have been starting these discussions because so many of the discussions on OLO, especially those speculating on religion and evolution, just draw people in who restate their previously held views. The discussions often sound like children arguing and repeating, “It is. It is not.” So I thought I would start some threads expressing feelings and see what other people felt in those areas.

My wife spent part of her childhood in what is now the Gold Coast and feels about it now the way you do, CJ.

We live north of Brisbane and generally sit on the verandah after breakfast having a cup of ovaltine and talking. We enjoy the colourful parrots, the squawk of the kookas, the athletics and wonderful songs of the butchies and all the other antics of the birds as they go about their business. One time I went back to bed with a portable computer and heard a banging on the window. A king parrot apparently demanded that I get out of bed and put seed in the feeder. We look out at the gums where sometimes a koala and her baby sit. Once we saw one on the ground going from one tree to another. Unfortunately our former neighbour had dogs, and two of them tore a koala to pieces.

Bronwyn, I have grown to love the Australian landscape. The gums seemed to look familiar as though I had seen them in a previous existence. Where had I seen them? Then I remembered a painting I liked with trees that looked like the gums. It was by an American artist, Maxfield Parrish (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxfield_Parrish) who incorporated ghost gums in some of his paintings together with Italianate ruins, Greek nymphs and Arizona buttes to make beautiful landscapes that never existed.

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