When I was 14 years of age

I pinned a massive National Geographic Society physical land form map of Australia above my bed in Calgary, tracing obscure Outback tracks and roads with my finger and wondering what the vast salt bed of Lake Eyre looked like. I subsequently read quite a bit about the country and coming from southern Alberta, endowed as it is with big landscapes of prairie and mountains, I focussed on the landforms - the Outback and the coastlines - and I built up both a powerful mental profile of Australia and a desire to visit it more than any other place in the world.

My first attempt to travel there was scuppered in 1992, the early 90s recession kicked a plan to go to Oz on a one year working holiday visa into the long, dry life-choking grass of the doldrums of prolonged unemployment. I didn't have the $1200 bond the Australia government required for a visa to be processed let alone the cash for a flight. What I did have was a massive student loan and no job and no prospect of a job.

So Oz would have to wait 13 years until I was in London and working at Earthscan where I managed a week-long editorial and promotional work trip to attend the huge IUFRO World Forestry Congress being convened in Brisbane with a three day holiday excursion to Noosa and Fraser Island tagged on the end. This trip was more of a sweetener - I was there and gone before jet lag subsided - than the satisfying long drink from the well demanded by two decades of travelling the dusty tracks of this vast sun-scoured desert land in my imagination.

It was thus, you might imagine, a bit of a jab in the solar plexus to finally arrive in Melbourne on 2 April for a trip of real duration and unlimited prospects and to not really like the country all that much.

The problem, as it turned out, wasn't Australia but rather a misalignment of the fantasy of youth and the reality of modern Australia. That is to say the idea of an almost unimaginably vast, thinly populated country of rugged geography and unforgiving landscapes, inhabited by odd, unique characters, much like my own country, crashing headlong into another reality. A reality which is that for the 80-85% of the population of this country that lives in five large coastal cities and a number of smaller cities and towns, much of everyday life in Oz is a circumscribed existence in a sprawling belt of interchangeable suburbs. These are flanked by big-box stores and shopping centres and choked by the freeways of busy, stressed people carting home mountains of stuff they don't need to an overpriced, cookie-cutter house they can hardly afford in a neighbourhood that isn't as good as the one they really want to live in but is better than where their friends live. And then every night they turn on the television and have this same world reified in a shower of mass media.

So, in other words, it seemed that I'd waited 25 years and travelled to the other side of the world to arrive back in the city - or more to the point, what that city represents in Anglo-American Western society - where I pinned up my National Geographic map of Australia in 1985.

Over the past month, much has changed though and this initial disappointing view of Oz has been being eclipsed by a vivid, engaged experience that has matched, and indeed has begun to exceed, the imagination of a 14 year old. And all it took to kick this off were four wheels, two emus and a kangaroo.