Outback survival and the hunter

There’s an old phrase that Australia rides on the sheep’s back. It’s a saying that recalls the colonial era when Europeans began to clear land to generate the pastures on which sheep flourished, wool was shorn, mutton was eaten and money was made.

Indeed, the sheep trade predominated the Australian economy all the way up to the ‘wool boom’ in the early 1950s due to the American demand for wool generated by the Korean War.

Throughout this period, it’s safe to say that the Australian psyche was well attuned to our connection to, and reliance on, the land around us. But this situation has radically changed in more recent years. While in the early 1930s, nearly 37.5 per cent of the Australian population lived in rural areas, by 1976 less than 14 per cent was classified as rural. Today, more than 90 per cent of the population