A few weeks ago, just as the leader of the supposedly free world was doing his best gameshow host will-he-won’t-he? routine on whether he’d bomb Iran, I was on a plane home from Europe while my partner and our child were mid-air on two other flights.

This felt surreal and dangerously uncertain. International aeroplane travel messes with your head at the best of times, warping the clock and largely cocooning you from earthly happenings. But taking off into that communications black hole with my family in other parts of the air amid atmospherics that seemed decidedly pre-possible global conflagration was especially discombobulating.

The what ifs were endless and imponderable. It’s time for us all to be home with the dogs at our feet and the kettle on, I kept telling myself. Just get us all home where it’s safe.

Looking out of the aircraft window I’d never been so pleased to see the blue-green Australian continental edge and to then pass 10,000 metres over its hazy ochre interior snaked through with waterways and dotted with dry lake beds.

These last few years especially, despite the vacuity and cheap partisanship of so much that passes for local civic discourse and debate, Australia’s geographic........

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