The power of this book does come from the way Watson positions himself as both an insider and outsider to the Australian bush, rather as he did with life inside the political bunker in his book on Keating. The Bush begins with recollections of his family history and a Gippsland boyhood. Watson’s parents were dairy farmers, his forebears selectors. Here, he is writing of the bush as a kind of insider or, rather, as a member of that large and influential sociological group in Australian history: the boy from the country who went to the city, got an education, and made good. For them, the country has never been just a place that they had left. It was also from another time.

The title of Watson’s book is shared by a long poem published in 1912 by another country boy who left and made good. Bernard O’Dowd’s The Bush was in its day regarded by some admirers as one of the grandest feats of the white Australian literary imagination. Like Watson’s, O’Dowd’s bush was a place of diversity: the ‘miner cradling washdirt by the creek’; the ‘navvy boring tunnels through the peak’; the ‘farmer grubbing box-trees on the flat’ and ‘hawker camping by the roadside spring’. O’Dowd went on to fill his Australian bush with figures from world history and mythology, whom he permitted to frolic under the gum trees with such Australians of his own day as Walter Murdoch, Hugh McCrae, Rose Scott, and Baldwin Spencer. Mercifully perhaps, Watson’s flights of fancy are more modest in comparison; but, as the reference to ‘the heart of Australia’ in the subtitle suggests, his book is a meditation on Australia itself through a reflection on the bush, which has been seen to embody its character and identity.

Watson does not take us on a linear journey. Rather, it is as if we are bound to him on a series of parachute drops; we call in to the Victorian Mallee to admire the mound created by its glorious fowl, to the Northern Rivers to meet its hardy cedar-cutters, and then we might be off to Jerilderie or West Wyalong or Narrandera or Hughenden – depending on which ‘bush’ Watson wants to show us. The Bush combines memoir, Bill Brysonesque travelogue, nature-writing, and historical narrative – the latter often based on the journals, diaries, and memoirs of explorers and settlers. There are philosophical ruminations that would do Furphy’s Tom Collins proud, as well as some rather lengthy scientific disquisitions containing a lot of Latin names for plants that recall the autodidactic tradition that Furphy epitomised. The volume of historical and scientific detail is often rather demanding of the reader. Yet the text reveals both Watson’s characteristic sensitivity to the way others use words, as well as his own mastery of language. In this, he is sometimes brave, to the point of foolhardy – ‘a good Jersey’ cow, we learn, ‘looks a bit like Audrey Hepburn’.

Don Watson (photograph by Susan Gordon-Brown)

The bush has long been represented as ‘the real Australia’ – as Jeanne Little recognised – and the place where you would find ‘the typical Australian’. In this connection, Watson – like the rest of us – remains in the debt of the historian Russel Ward and his deeply influential history, The Australian Legend (1958). Yet Ward’s ‘bush’ was a bush of a particular kind. In many ways, it wasn’t really a physical place at all, but an idea. His daughter, Biff Ward, in her brilliant memoir (reviewed in ABR by Sheila Fitzpatrick, August 2014), described her father’s interest in the bush as ‘romantic and academic, not practical or physical’. To the extent that Ward’s bush had a reality at all, it was the literary bush of Lawson, Paterson, and Furphy; a parched country of wandering shearers, thirsty eucalypts, and eccentric minds. Yet in contemplating this kind of bush, Watson is again the sceptic and pluralist insistent of the multiplicity of Australian ‘bushes’. Here, his boyhood in Gippsland, a place of rain and mud, informs his understanding. Neither Watson’s father, whom Watson pictures forever tapping his thermometer, nor any of the neighbours, ‘were inclined to sing about solidarity or even to call each other mate ... they believed in a fair go for the deserving only’. When Australia was represented as a place of ‘parched landscapes’, he reports, ‘we felt a little left out’. One is reminded of the Jeff Hook cartoon from the late 1970s, in which an Australian naval vessel encounters a family perched precariously on the roof of their home, and takes them for Indo-Chinese refugees: ‘VIETNAM! FAIR GO MATE – WE’RE FROM GIPPSLAND!’

Watson points out that respectable farmers, such as those in his Gippsland family, saw themselves as being ‘in the country’ or ‘on the land’, rather than ‘in the bush’. They understood the transformation of ‘bush’ into ‘country’ as a mark of their pioneering achievements. But in recent years, the land occupied by tree-changers and others fleeing the city – in some cases, the descendants of those earlier farming settlers – is once again being called ‘the bush’. The book ends with Watson living on his own piece of ‘bush’ at Mount Macedon, near Melbourne, and issuing a plea that we stop projecting our own selves and desires on to the bush. Instead, Australians should to try to understand it as it is, and as it can be, while also owning up to the damage they have done to it, as well as to the people their ancestors found there.

Only then, rather than simply seeing the bush as a source of profit, a means of projecting personal and national selfhood, or as something lost forever, might settler Australians be able to know and love it.