The Bush by Don Watson

Judges' comments

The Bush is loosely structured around two large questions: What is the bush? What does it mean to Australians? Don Watson explores a range of shifting answers, travelling through time and space, through history and myth. The Bush encompasses clear-felling and Aboriginal land management, swagmen and agribusiness, mining in Queensland and memories of a Gippsland farm. Watson is alive to the violence that underpins so many human interactions with the bush while remaining responsive to the idealism and hopefulness that also colour our dealings with the land.

This is a grand work, as multifarious as the bush itself. Watson moves fluently between genres — social history, travelogue, nature writing and memoir — and produces memorable observations on every page. The intelligence of his writing is matched by the generosity of his vision, which finds room for mountain ash, weeds and the roses grown by farmers’ wives. Impeccably written, The Bush illuminates a kaleidoscopic subject central to our idea of ourselves.

Watson peels away manufactured nostalgia to investigate unpalatable historical and environmental truths about the settlement of Australia. He is particularly persuasive on the need to face up to our destructive past if we are to break with our ‘impatience to possess’ this ancient continent. Watson’s stylistic and tonal range is impressive: he can write plainly when detailing frontier violence, elegiacally when recalling vanished landscapes, ironically when analysing the machinery of tourism, rhapsodically when conjuring the majesty of trees. The profundity of Watson’s thinking, the scale of his subject and the virtuosity of his writing make The Bush an outstanding work.