Only Australia knows what it means to live at the edge of the world. From a disparate collection of British vagabonds, convicts and thieves grew one of the greatest nations on Earth. Cast to the farthest reaches of the world, our ancestors had to make something of this strange, sunburnt land. And so they did. The European mind struggles to comprehend how vast and isolated Australia truly is. In Europe, civilisation is everywhere, old cities, roads and rivers. In Australia, you can drive for hours and see little more than red dirt and a rusted station shed. America has its great rivers, forests and fertile plains. We had a continent whose dead centre seemed determined to kill anyone stupid enough to enter it. And yet we went anyway. Over the mountains, into the interior, across deserts and towards horizons no European had seen. Men forged roads and rail through the bush. They drove cattle across distances greater than countries. They dragged civilisation across a continent where often nothing waited for them. That spirit is Australia. We began as the dregs of British society. The poor bastard who stole something he shouldn't have and found himself on a ship bound for the other side of the planet. And somehow, from that, arose the Australian. Resourceful because he had to be. Independent because often there was nobody coming to save him. Suspicious of pretension because titles meant little when everyone was covered in the same dirt. Able to laugh at misery because sometimes there was little else to do. There is something absurd about our story. Europeans travelled farther from their home than almost anyone before them, landed on one of the driest continents on Earth, looked into an endless interior and decided: this will be home. That is perhaps the most Australian thing of all. We are Europeans who grew up beneath a different sky. Britain is our mother. Europe is the civilisation from which we came. Americans are our cousins. They are our kin, but they are not us. Only Australia knows what it is to live on a lonely continent, beneath an endless southern sky, surrounded by oceans, far from our kinsmen, at the edge of the world. Only Australia knows.