WHEN WE WERE moving from Sydney to Brisbane this year, people suggested different things I’d need to get used to: hot, sticky summers; the absence of city beaches; and the city’s baseline fauna, which apparently ran to mighty flying cockroaches and massive spiders.

Driving north, I traced the line of the Pacific Highway in our map book, registering the dot points of towns as they passed. The red callistemon in my beachside street gave way to the rough-barked apple, Angophora floribunda, of Les Murray’s country above Buladelah, which gave way to luminous spots of delicate purple-blue lotus in creeks and ponds further north again. And I watched the colours and shapes of the landscape, close up and far off, morph and change as we drove through a thousand kilometres of Australia’s complex mosaic of space.