Where the water decides
The road west from the coast climbs almost imperceptibly at first — a slow gathering of altitude until the air begins to thin and the country changes its song. Behind me, the lush valleys of the Northern Rivers stretch green and glistening, carved by seasons of rain and growth. Ahead, the hills rise toward the range and beyond it, the vast dry heart of the inland. Somewhere along this ridge, invisible yet absolute, lies the line that decides which way the water will run.
They call it the Great Dividing Range — Australia’s ancient backbone. It is a geological divide, yes, but also something more. Standing here, I feel how it mirrors another fracture — one running through our culture, our agriculture, even our own hearts. A divide between living with the land and trying to master it.
On one side, the vast paddocks of industrial agriculture: efficient, mechanised, chemically assured. On the other, pockets of farmers relearning the grammar of relationship — the patient language of soil, grass, rain, and time. Between them, a tension as old as colonisation, as fresh as this morning’s dew.
When I set out on this journey around Australia, I didn’t come as a critic or a convert. I came as a witness. I wanted to see what happens when a people forget that the land beneath their feet is alive — and what begins to stir when they remember.
In every valley and roadside conversation, I sensed echoes of that greater story — the one we’re all part of, whether we drive a tractor or type on a screen. It’s the story of forgetting and return, of disconnection and reconnection, of exile and homecoming.
I stop at a lookout where a trickle of water disappears into a gully heading west. A few steps away, another trickle runs east. Two drops of rain, born side by side, now destined for different stories. I sit for a moment and let the silence hold me. How many of our choices — in farming, in living — are made at similar unseen divides?
The Great Divide isn’t just under my boots. It runs through our institutions, our economies, our daily habits, and our sense of the sacred. It’s in the way we name things: “resource,” “yield,” “management.” It’s in the way we eat without tasting, consume without gratitude, grow without listening.
But perhaps, like the rivers that begin here, there is also a way back — a slow, winding path toward confluence. Because every divide, when traced deeply enough, leads us to the same source.