A Wide & Open Land

Book excerpt: In the Winter of 2019 Peter Ridgeway set out to walk 179 kilometres across the Cumberland Plain, the region of rural land west of Sydney. Carrying his food and water and camping under the stars, he crossed one of the least-known landscapes in Australia, all within view of its largest city. This book recounts a unique journey across a landscape few Australians will ever see. In this open country the familiar forests of Sydney's sandstone are replaced by a fertile world of open woodlands, native grasslands and wetlands, home to some of the Nation's most unique and endangered wildlife. The traditional land of the Darug, Gundungurra, and Dharawal peoples, and the birthplace of the first Australian colony, it is a landscape which also holds the key to our entwined and conflicted origins. What was once a limitless tract of woodland is now being engulfed by the city to it's east in the largest construction project ever undertaken in the Southern Hemisphere - the elimination of an ecosystem and a community. This book provides an immersion in the history, wildlife, and culture of one of Australia's most rapidly vanishing landscapes, and reveals how the destruction of 'the West' is erasing not only itself, but something central to the identity of all Australians.