Australia is dramatic, difficult, magnificent, unpredictable and hard to manage, and when it comes to protecting it or using it, Australia’s people are the same.

Australia has some of the oldest exposed rock on Earth — 1.4 billion years old. A scientist told me that if you stand in the Berkeley Tablelands, you're on a place where absolutely nothing has happened for a billion years. I loved that idea. You can easily see the one thing that did happen — it was eroding constantly. So when you walk through the land, you really get a sense of an ancient time.

I flew over the salt ponds in Esperance to see where salinization is overtaking the farmlands. If you look very closely you’ll see some plowed fields between the ponds. The farmers are working their way around what has largely been ruined.