Romanticism depends upon the assumption (in the west) of the separation of nature and culture. Before we can contemplate any spiritual union or sacred reunification, separation is required. Thus, Romanticism, developed through a series of associations--intuition over rationality, feelings over beliefs, with a sense of mysticism and oneness with Nature--as though it was possible to overcome the alienation and reification that had emerged with capitalism, industrialization, and urbanization. Nature was often pictured by the Romantics as the garden, the landscape, the village, or the earth that conjured up an idealized pastoral space----a paradisical Eden-which constituted the natural habitat for the soul.

Mandy Martin and Jack Gillen, Puritjarra Flora, Found local and sourced pigment, ochre and acrylic on Arches paper,

Puritjarra cannot be seen as the garden, the landscape, the village, or the earth envisioned as an idealized pastoral space. What is being painted is a panorama of the approach to the rock shelter and escarpment that captures the rich and diverse beauty of desert flora.

Is there an Australian romatnicism then? One that steps beyond Wordsworth and the English romantics? One that considers nature as something other to the garden, the village, or the earth as an idealized pastoral space? The short answer is wilderness--wild untamed nature. Australians moved from a view of nature as possessing value only to the degree to which it can be put to use (utilitarianism) to a view of wilderness having intrinsic value entirely on its own.

The idea of wilderness has been a fundamental tenet of the environmental movement in Australia. For many Australians wilderness stands as the last remaining place where civilization has not fully contaminated the earth. It is an island in the polluted sea of urban-industrial modernity, the one place we can turn for escape from our modern way of life. Wilderness presents itself as the best antidote to our human selves, a refuge we must somehow recover if we hope to save nature.

The desert---Puritjarra----is not wilderness per se as it is, and has been, inhabited by aboriginal people. Puritjarra is not a pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent nature can for at least a little while longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of industrial civilization. Instead, it's a product of aboriginal civilization, and could hardly be contaminated by the very stuff of which it is made.

We need to be aware that wilderness is a cultural construct. If you back 200 years says William Cronon:

a wilderness then was to be "deserted," "savage," "desolate," "barren" ---in short, a "waste," the word's nearest synonym. Its connotations were anything but positive, and the emotion one was most likely to feel in its presence was "bewilderment" or terror. ... In its raw state, it had little or nothing to offer civilized men and women. But by the end of the nineteenth century, all this had changed. The wastelands that had once seemed worthless had for some people come to seem almost beyond price. That Thoreau in 1862 could declare wildness to be the preservation of the world suggests the sea change that was going on. Wilderness had once been the antithesis of all that was orderly and good---it had been the darkness, one might say, on the far side of the garden wall---and yet now it was frequently likened to Eden itself.