The forest was where Baba Yaga lived in her house on chicken legs, sometimes driving herself about in a mortar and pestle, snatching children to enslave and eat.

There was also a gingerbread house that promised endless eating pleasure but housed a witch with a taste for fattened children.

Forests were their own entities that had to be respected and largely left alone. Only special people could venture in for any length of time and remain unscathed.

Even living on the edge of the woods had its dangers. It drove Hansel and Gretel's parents mad to the point where they agreed to murder the children by dumping

them where the forest was the darkest.

The things that lived in the Australian bush were different but just as frightening, things like bunyips and narguns, and the spirits of Aboriginal folklore. You'd

hear them in the strange birdcalls and sometimes you could see them in the corner of your eye.

You felt that you did not really want to be alone with them for long because they were wild nature and mystical and you were merely human.

Even now that I am much older I am wary of the bush. Its beauty is to be enjoyed in instalments rather than a permanent dwelling place.

I know that the bush made a friend's Irish great aunt walk into the dam at dusk, taking the baby with her, because she couldn't cope with the way it made her feel threatened and alone. It has sent many an immigrant mad or back to the boat and home.

For many years white Australia's relationship with the surrounding nature was somewhat ambiguous, and largely based on fear and respect ... ``her beauty and her terror''... etc. Even the Aborigines who understood it best didn't bother building permanent homes in it.