The old dead trees are the most fascinating – the countless trees lying in the gullies and up the hills that fell perhaps a century ago, pulling up their roots from the earth as they toppled. The great upheavals left rocks in their huge tentacles and, as they slowly rot, the trunks are home to populations of creatures, from goannas to wild pigs. As grey as tombstones in a cemetery they lie there, having outlasted generations of farmers, as they’ll outlast me. In their own way they are as beautiful, more beautiful, than living trees.

When you stand looking down on the Freycinet Peninsula, it’s a bit like life really – its beauty, ruggedness and ageless power have the ability to overpower, inspire or make you feel as though you’ve really just come home. Like a life well lived it has a sense of real and tragic history and a genuine hope for an exciting future for yourself
and those who will follow.

Sometimes the paths we take are long and hard, but remember those are often the ones that lead to the most beautiful views. Have the courage to make that journey.

If you count your blessings not your troubles your life is more beautiful.

She had been dragged in the most humiliating of all dusts, the dust reserved for older women who let themselves be approached, on amorous lines, by boys… It had all been pure vanity, all just a wish, in these waning days of hers, still to feel power, still to have the assurance of her beauty and its effects.

Strange that the vanity which accompanies beauty – excusable, perhaps, when there is such great beauty, or at any rate understandable – should persist after the beauty is gone.

The beauty of the air, from the air… You haven’t seen Australia unless you see it from the air. The coastline, the colours of the inland. The claypans, the forests. It’s just all so beautiful. You’d never see that from the road. People climb mountains to see these things. You see that every time you take off.

Is this for progress Beauty Swept away?

When most objects are truly functional, this technological age, which is just beginning, will be truly civilised. When all objects in this country are truly functional, Australia will be as beautiful in its own way as classical Greece.

Nowhere in the modern world have the conditions set a more attractive problem for the architect than in the wooded rock ledges of the headlands of Sydney Harbour – a nice problem, for the factors are definitely clear cut and simple socially, economically and aesthetically: – A million people free to exercise their own judgement, economically able to provide themselves with fully equipped and appointed substantial homes with a beautiful, easily worked stone underlying their sites and all other building materials indigenous, and all skill and equipment handy, and the most beautiful outlook, background and garden setting possible to imagine; complete to start with.