Australia [antikvár]

Introductionday' is our Australian word of greeting straight to the point, not a vowel longer than need be, as lean and tough as the stockmen who drive enormous herds of cattle along the edges of the hard Australian desert.Like the stockmen, under its rough cast it is a word suffused with genuine warmth, friendship and mateship. Being greeted at Sydney airport with a dry 'G'day' from a friend brings tears to the eyes. Not from a rush of patriotism, but by the way that simple word evokes a brother- and sisterhood that bonds all Australians.Our ancestors faced one of the harshest climates on earth, survived and flourished in this land of great terror and great beauty. Wanderers from Asian lands sailed across the dangerous sea gap in cockleshell boats 40,000 years ago. Many were swallowed up by the ocean or consumed by giant crocodiles and sharks, the guardians of the beaches. But on each journey a few survived, planting firm roots in an unpopulated land.What the first-comers found was the oldest land mass on earth, most of it flattened, scarred and burned to a crisp by millions of years of boiling sun. Many clung to the shoreline, a narrow strip of green: the fertile, cool, rainforest that ran around much of its circumference, alive with strange but tasty animals, birds and plants.The more hardy scorned the soft living along the coast and trekked inland, seduced by the shimmering horizon. There, they found desert flowing into desert, flowing into desert, for almost the entire length of the land mass, more than 3,000 kilometres (1,864 miles) southwards, onwards to another strip of fertile coastline and another ocean.True to our origins, we Australians are a people enthralled with wanderlust or 'walkabout'. In a land that seemed larger than life, our Aborigine ancestors fashioned myths populated by giants and monsters. They gave birth to the land, our 'dreamtime'. Our destiny was swayed by their powerful totems kangaroos and emus, koalas and wombats, that fed their bellies and their dreams. Their wise men divided the land into lines of song, chanted to the throb of didgeridoos and the clap of dance sticks that mapped the vast continent, geographically and genealogically, with a thoroughness a cartographer would envy.So they lived through the millennia, painting sacred symbols on cave walls, celebrating their good fortune with corroborees, unaware that in another land, far off to the northwest, ghost-skinned scientists and explorers dreamed of discovering their home, the great south land. This land to the south had to exist, if only as a counterweight for the countries of the northern hemisphere.Soon enough the new wanderers came, in sturdy sailing ships on journeys that lasted years. The most important was a brave English sea captain named James Cook. In 1770, he sailed the Endeavour along the east coast, marvelling at the bounteous harbours, the great forests and the golden-sanded beaches.Cook steered his vessel through one of the wonders of the earth, the Great Barrier Reef, which spans more than 2,000 kilometres (1,243 miles) along the northern coastline, an endless stretch of turquoise waters speckled with the sun's gold. Led by leaping, cavorting dolphins, he traversed its length, amazed by the beauty of its tropical borderline the white sandy beaches, the coconut palms and the distant deep-green hills.Sadly, he and his crew saw hardly anything of the treasures the waters veiled the wonderland of many-hued coral and the hordes of dramatically coloured fish that swim among its spindly subterranean gardens.Cook's purpose in charting the great south land, pure exploration, was nobility itself. But what resulted from it sullied the golden shores. Seventeen years after Cook had chartered the eastern and northern edges, the English First Fleet, under the15