Selected for Best Australian Essays 2010

AS YOU FLY out of Perth, heading east, the wheat and sheep country cushioning the world’s most isolated capital city quickly recedes. The already sparse signs of settlement diminish, and soft yellows and greens give way to the harsh rust-reds of the continent’s interior. But this is not the mostly flat, mostly featureless landscape characteristic of much of central Australia – not nowadays, anyway. This is a landscape pockmarked with man-made hills, and gigantic holes gouged out of the earth. This is gold country.