“Australia is the only island that is also a continent, and the only continent that is also a country,” he writes.

“The only nation that began as a prison, Australia was the first continent conquered from the sea, and the last.

“It's the home of the largest living thing on earth, The Great Barrier Reef, and the largest monolith, Uluru.  

“Australia has more things that will kill you than anywhere else.  The world's ten most poisonous snakes are all Australian.  Five of its creatures – the funnel web spider, box jellyfish, blue-ringed octopus, paralysis tick, and stonefish – are the most lethal of their types in the world.

“And Australia is old. Things once created have tended just to lie there.  Many of the earth's oldest objects – ancient rocks and fossils, animal tracks and riverbeds, and the first signs of life itself – come from Australia.

“Australia's creatures seem to have misread the manual.  Its most characteristic animals don’t run, lope or canter, but bounce across the landscape.  The continent teems with unlikely life.

“There's no other place like Australia.  Eighty-per cent of all the plants and animals which live there exist nowhere else.  And they exist there, in abundance, despite the harshest of environments. 

“ Australia is the driest, flattest, hottest, most infertile and climatically aggressive of all the inhabited continents.  Only Antarctica is more hostile to life.

“Australia is, at once, staggeringly empty yet packed with interesting stuff, ancient stuff, stuff not readily explained.  Stuff yet to be found."

That's our home, isn't it?

And we love it!

bstewart@ispdr.net.au