June in Her Spring Quotes

“How quickly they pass, the pioneering days! There is 'virgin' (unenriched, undamaged) country where never a white man has set his feet. Then come a scattering of nomads: the explorers, the gold-rushers, the bushrangers, the prospectors. Then the landgrabbers, followed soon by civilized machinery that makes their grab their own; and within two generations, a vast area of fertile wilderness has lost its secret and is parcelled out like the main street of a city.
As this happens, the aboriginals, possessed of ticking clocks and a taste for liquor, withdraw, fascinated and horrified, into the deeper bush. And on their heels there follow restless whites: those who can never settle down, those who believe it's not yet time to wake up from a dream. Surely in a gigantic continent there's always space to find! So they ride on into the interior, away from the creeping railways and the courthouses, till at last they are washed up beyond the mountains on to the shores of the central desert, hemmed in by the tracts of salty sand before them, and the law behind their backs.”
― Colin MacInnes, June in Her Spring