Landscapes, like cities, cut across disciplines and professions. This makes
it especially difficult to provide an overall sense of how landscapes should
be studied and researched. Ecology, aesthetics, economy and sociology
combine with physiognomy and deep physical structure to confuse our understanding
and the way we should react to the problems and potentials of
landscapes.
Nowhere are these dilemmas and paradoxes so clearly highlighted as in
Australia — where landscapes dominate and their relationship to cities is
so fragile, yet so important to the sustainability of an entire nation, if not
planet. This book presents a unique collection and synthesis of many of
these perspectives — perhaps it could only be produced in a land urbanised
in the tiniest of pockets, and yet so daunting with respect to the way
non-populated landscapes dwarf its cities. Many travel to Australia to its
cities and never see the landscapes — but it is these that give the country
its power and imagery. It is the landscapes that so impress on us the need
to consider how our intervention, through activities ranging from resource
exploitation and settled agriculture to climate change, poses one of the
greatest crises facing the modern world. In this sense, Australia and its
landscape provide a mirror through which we can glimpse the extent to
which our intervention in the world threatens its very existence.