The place that stayed with me: that afternoon in Orford, I belonged to the bush for the first time

‘After picnicking with my partner, Peter, and the dog on the beach at Orford, Tasmania, we drove up into the hills behind the town, coming across a bushy block for sale at a ludicrously low price.’ Photograph: Robert Dessaix

If you’ve been brought up on Enid Blyton and, a little later, Shakespeare, as I was, with Sartre and Tolstoy thrown into the mix in late adolescence, then the Australian landscape will be as alien to you as the moon. Now and again, I caught glimpses of gum-trees and dry paddocks from train windows, but I belonged somewhere else.

I wasn’t against gum-trees or “the wide brown land” as such, but longed for something else entirely. Forests, for example, not bush, fields, not paddocks. What I yearned for were precisely the things Dorothea MacKellar dreamily disdains in her poem My Country: England’s “ordered woods and gardens”, her “coppices”, her “green and shaded lanes”, or anybody else’s.