'Australia is a wild place. More than that, as Tim Winton states in Island Home: A landscape memoir, it’s a uniquely wild place. “It’s been a haven for humans for millennia”, Winton writes, “and yet it is not humanized as other continents are.” For him, the continent stands in contrast to a “relentless denatured” Europe. Around every massive beautiful mountain in Europe, he points out, there is a tunnel, a funicular, a luxury resort, a hovering helicopter; in the valleys and plains nature can only be seen “through the overlaid embroidery of the people who’d brought it to heel”. Think of Italy, France or Germany – or for that matter India or China – and what springs first to mind? “Human action and artefacts”, Winton says. Australia is different: the “scale and insistence of the land”, together with its geography, “trumps all”.' (Introduction)