The Australian bush says: ‘Come in’ — and then it breaks your heart

We are driving in inland New South Wales. We could be driving across grassy English lowland. Wide green hills roll towards a dove-grey horizon, and wisps of white curl down from wet clouds to touch the higher ground. Here and there a stand of trees dots a meadow, and small woods fringe pasture; but there is no forest, nothing dense or dark. Green here is not so much a colour in the artist’s palette as the canvas on which he paints.

The whole aspect is damp, mild, open; and though wire fence strings the roadside and sometimes a lonely track is lined in wooden post-and-rail, the impression is of parkland: of a vast ducal estate, loosely maintained, from which His Grace is unaccountably absent. Small, reedy streams curve their way through shallow basins, and there are turf-edged ponds on grassy inclines where cattle drink. The modest farmsteads, tree-sheltered, may be few, and the human population small, but this announces itself a tamed landscape. Nature’s tooth is herbivorous, her claw clipped: a ruminant and not a predatory world.

And it is raining. For days it has been raining. Not the fierce downpour of the tropics, but the temperate splash of a leaking sky, sweeping in slow curtains across the hills. Small raindrops sting the puddles. Branches dip, leaves drip. Our tyres hiss across wet tarmac. The effect, so soft, so gentle, so English, is not so much of mist as of blur: a perspective that as you lift your eyes to the horizon yields from pale green to the palest grey. Cloud and hilltop kiss damply. The edges of things swim.

Such a landscape, surely, can be nothing but temperate; nothing but benign.