Book Excerpt: Introduction

The first thing you notice is the sky. It’s bluer than you’ve seen anywhere else in the world, and stretches right to the horizon whichever way you turn. Except at night, when it becomes a vast galactic carpet scattered with swirls of copper and pink. It feels too brilliant to be real. You might turn to someone you love, or anyone really, and exclaim, can you believe it? As if the stars can’t have shone so vividly for anyone but you, on this night. Even when you live in the bush, you’re still astonished by its beauty.

Most Australians live on the coastal fringe within cooee of a neighbour, and yet, there’s an enduring sense the spirit of our country lies beyond the Great Dividing Range. But what’s ‘out there’, beyond the back fence, and over the hazy mountains?

To borrow a definition from author Don Watson, the bush is a place that’s both real and imaginary. It’s the vivid red dirt of the interior and muted green of a eucalypt forest. It’s the ringer in ripped jeans, and the glamorous Mum at the races. It’s the Brahman cow, and the kangaroo; the weightlessness of open paddocks and cocoon of ancient pines. The bush is a place, a people, and a feeling.

Early white settlers swung between terror and curiosity in Banjo Paterson’s ‘land of sombre, silent hills, where mountain cattle go.’ A land of giant gums, and silence so deep that sound itself was dead. They believed Australia to be unloved, which we know was deeply untrue. More than 3,200 generations of indigenous people were concerned solely with conserving and managing the land, which was far from an untamed wilderness. Nevertheless, the new arrivals saw the forest and scrub as beasts to conquer - and armed with axes and fire, they set about doing just that. Within decades the bush had changed forever.

To the first people of Australia, the bush is an extension of themselves. Their story is largely absent from these pages, as we believe it theirs to tell. There are talented indigenous photographers whose storytelling is unmatched and we encourage you to seek them out.

We are 10 Australian photographers - women, mothers and friends; farmers, graziers and creatives, for whom the bush is a place of light. Once you’re in tune with it, you never stop noticing how it dances across silver acacia leaves or shimmers on dewy, green paddocks when the sun is low. The bush is also a place of income, family and community.

But the lure of rural Australia goes beyond the ownership of a piece of dirt - for us, it’s a way of life. Beauty in the Bush Collective formed to celebrate all the tiny and wonderful strands of it - from Dorothea Mackellar’s ‘saffron sunset clouds, and larkspur mountains’ to the man toiling in dusty yards at shearing time. There’s a poetry to life here, a beauty that’s mostly unspoken, but no less appreciated. We opened our senses and discovered our stories had become greater than the sum of their parts.

For the past two centuries, the bush has been somewhere to escape from - on this highway, the traffic mostly flowed in one direction. But it’s been a curious couple of years, and as world events tie us to home, cities are losing their magnetism. We’re finding ourselves in the midst of an exodus of people moving back to the country.

How much and how little things have changed. There are oat-milk lattes and NBN - but brolgas still dance to win their mates, and men of a certain age remains frugal with words, because who has time for chatter?

Biophilia is defined as the innate human instinct to connect with nature. The evolutionary phenomenon was popularised by Edward O Wilson, but the idea has floated around for centuries. It proposes we’re hardwired to have deep affiliations with other life forms and nature as a whole, which goes some way to explain why people risk their lives to save animals and keep plants and flowers around their homes. In other words, life sustains life.

Few are more more connected to the natural world than rural Australians. Drive a paddock with a farmer and they’ll name every species of grass through which you pass.

The buffel’s darker on this hill.
Seeded at a different time.
That Mitchell Grass there.
It germinates at 38 degrees.

They wrap baby oaks in protective sheaths of green plastic, hand water them through summer, and rotate stock to allow native pastures time to rejuvenate. We can’t say these things help them achieve a zen-like state - but working the land is knowing the land, and that brings deep satisfaction.

In the course of preparing this book, we’ve laboured to find a collective term for the people of the bush. Colloquially, they’re bushies, but that might only refer to those living very remotely. Northerners are pastoralists, or cattlemen and cattlewomen - and those growing crops seem to prefer farmer. Those who farm sheep can also be wool producers, and cattle people are graziers and so on. So to country people: we know mislabelling anyone is to commit an error, and if we offend you, we apologise.

In the following pages, you’ll find a selection of moments, and each has a kind of charge to it. There are so many worlds within the world we live in - and instead of moulding a singular narrative of bush life (surely an impossible task), we’ll reveal how we live, work, play and love - gradually unfolding an unseen field of energy that connects us all.  And that’s what makes this account different to others you may find. Ours is not a scientific expedition into rural life - or a collection of other people’s work. This is us. And we’re so very pleased to meet you.