I was the Englishman overcome with enthusiasm for a barbarous place. I believe that people at Home would have said: this is merely the heathenism which too ripe an alien adventure will raise in the young mind. I was not inhibited by any such reflection. I walked a little way, barefooted, and then lay down in nakedness on loamy earth and began to scoop it up and inhale it. The earth groaned, so I thought, like the beloved, caressed." "So writes John Bettany as he exhilarates in the freedom and wildness of the Australian bush on his journey into the New South Wales of the 1840s.