SHORE LEAVE

Raw, wild, and mind-bendingly remote, yet peppered with world-class wineries and restaurants-Australia's South West Edge is a study in contrasts.

- Kevin West

"The tyranny of distance" is a phrase Australians use half-seriously to express the peculiarity of their global position. Popularized by a book by historian Geoffrey Blainey, it describes a point of view held by British colonialists of the 1800s, who believed the center of the universe to be Buckingham Palace.

From that perspective, residents of the Crown's outposts Down Under were brutally distant, somehow even more than half a world away. It's still a terribly long flight from Australia to London, or most any other place.

But what of the majesty of distance? That thought occurred to me as my flight touched down in Perth and a cheerful voice acknowledged the Whadjuk Noongar people as traditional owners of the land under our still-rolling wheels. (The ceremonial Acknowledgement of Country recognizes the ancestral claims of displaced Aboriginal people for whom, it hardly needs to be said, Buckingham Palace was not the center of the universe.) My head rushed, not so much from jet lag as jet wonder. A majestic distance: any farther and we'd be on our way home again.

A similar rush hit me a few days later, during a walk near Yallingup, in the Margaret River region south of Perth. I was accompanying a springy-legged naturalist named Hamish Gibson on a short stretch of the Cape-to-Cape Track, a 76-mile trail that runs between Cape Naturaliste in the north and the southerly Cape Leeuwin, where the Indian and Southern Oceans meet. Gibson's corkscrew hair bounced as he walked, and every few steps he stopped to recite another extraordinary fact about the area's unique biodiversity, unique ocean currents, unique geology.