Have Australians lost their sense of country?

This rather wonderful photo by Gordon Smith looking down from Halls Peak is part of what I think of as my personal country.

Scenes like this are imprinted on my memory. However, talking around I get the feeling that metro Australians at least have lost their sense of country.

I do not mean by this that they have lost their sense of their own urban area. Rather, that they no longer know the Australian countryside in the way I do and did.

A year or so back I went to a school function in Sydney. Part of the function was the presentation by different groups of their perception of the outback. To one group, Sydney's Blue Mountains was part of the outback. I blinked.

For the benefit of international readers, the traditional definition of the outback is inland areas far from extensive settlement. Back of Bourke in NSW terms.

The country I grew up in was not outback. The country sounds, feels and images were not outback, far from it. Now it is apparently classified by at least some metro dwellers as outback.

We have always been an urban community. Arguably, Australia was the world's first urban community measured by the proportion of the population living in major urban centres. Still, fifty years ago most Australians had some country connection.

This is no longer true. I find it hard to understand, but it's true that there are Australians who have never experienced the country other than views seen from a car while driving from point A to point B.

I am a townie. I grew up in an urban, indeed academic, community within the country. But I was still imprinted by the sights, sounds and smells of the countryside. As a consequence, my oral and visual language is different from that used by many metro Australians.

I find it sad that so many will never experience the things that I knew.