International visitors to Australia often ask this question:
Where is the Australian Outback?
If you ask a range of Australians you’ll get a range of answers. It depends where the Australian grew up.
I grew up in the Australian Bush. And then that introduces a whole new question:
Where is the Australian Bush?
Forbes, the town in the bush near where I grew up
I’ll tackle that question first and move onto the Outback later. The Aussie Bush is anywhere that isn’t in the city. People from the Bush refer to the city as “The Big Smoke”, so the bush is away from The Big Smoke. It’s away from the crowds of people, the industry, the hustle and bustle of city living. People from the Bush are renowned for being more laid back, friendlier and certainly more likely to pull up and ask if you need a hand if they see you stopped on the side of the road with your car bonnet up!
The further you get from the population centres, the deeper you get into the Bush, the more strident the Australian accent becomes, and the more welcoming the people are. There are towns and cities in the bush. Canberra the Australian Capital was known as the Capital in the Bush, since it was located away from all the other population centres of the country. But if you want my opinion, it’s a bit big now to be true bush, and it’s full of public servants who don’t fit the real bush character!
This bush is in the Bush
To make things confusing, the word bush can also be used as the Australian equivalent of forest. So a walker may have “become lost in the bush”, he would have been a bushwalker to begin with. But the distinction you may have picked up from the above is that in referring to forest the word bush isn’t capitalised, it’s not a name, it’s a thing.
OK. Do you understand the Bush now? So to get back to the original question, where is the Outback?
If you grew up in The Big Smoke, you’re likely to consider most of the Bush as the Outback. For those of us who grew up in the Bush, the Outback are the very remote regions of the Bush. The Outback is those parts of Australia which are particularly dry and barren so that there is either no agricultural industry or agricultural activity which can support only a meagre living and not many people. As such, these areas of Australia are sparsely populated.
Definitely the Australian Outback, the most remote part of the Aussie Bush
People from the Outback have even more pronounced characteristics than those from the Bush. From necessity they tend to be stayers with ingenuity. They can sometimes be quite eccentric, but generally they are friendly, welcoming people. The Outback spirit is a “can do” attitude and hospitality to your mates.
So have I cleared anything up for you? Not to worry if you’re still in the dark! We Australians like to be an enigmatic lot, and if we put everything in black and white where would the Australia mystique be? 