A mountain valley with a big footprint

If Emirates is a competent business, then it deserves to succeed. We Australians are the incompetent and the guilty party in this deal. As custodians of the land, the Aborigines grieved over the environmental changes brought about by the settlers. Not enough of us today see ourselves as custodians of the land - but rather the land that we simply walked into is seen as a windfall to be spent.

Then there is the question which only the passing of time and not today’s political spin will actually answer; to what degree will this isolated resort be so self-sufficient that most of the money spent getting there, spent there and spent going home completely bypasses the economy of this country?

The grand opening is on October 1. Some of our politicians will be there goggle-eyed at all the swish and posh and falling over each other to be nice to the big money men from Dubai. The ancient orange cliffs will look down silently as they have been since long before the first human walked the Earth.

Maybe I am just too old, but as I gazed down on the resort from the top of Donkey Mountain (picture above), I felt a bit like one of the elders of the Eora people as he heard the cracking of axes in the woods around Sydney Cove. I remember my own family’s elders in the 1940s and 1950s lamenting the loss of the old Australia. Saddened as they were then, none had any idea that the slope of the development graph was about to get very much steeper - as it must do when a culture is alienated from the land and has the technology to degrade it.