AUSTRALIA: Paradise of Natural Beauty
By Lere Shakunle       

Welcome to Australia, the paradise of natural attractions that magnetize the beholder to a standstill in wonderment. Welcome to Nature’s lullaby that cuddles the human imagination, indulges human curiosity to ask questions and make wonders in her own image.

The infinite peace of the rolling waves, the sleeping pose of pagoda of the vegetation and its kind of variety concentrated in a place that you never can find anywhere, exquisite birds and animals that liberate the imagination from cocoon and throws it into the embrace of the infinite, its natural habitat, in which everything is possible, all of these and more await the visitor as masters of ceremony to celebrate Nature’s diversity at its most strange and sublime. Yes, Nature is generous in the superlative with variety in land, sea, sky, people, forest, yes, in everything natural in Australia.

Everything about Australia’s natural attractions of lakes and seas, coral reefs and sands, rare birds and strange animals, whales and their acrobatic stunts and cool shows, beaches and their glittering waters and of course more as we shall get to know soon, reduces to puniness the human inventions in science, products of reductionism that emasculates  Nature and ends up with the durable, the breakable, the ephemeral. Here Nature shows  the long way which the human creativity still needs to go as far as reaching close even if not attaining her creative and artistic feat is concerned. Here  is good news in the halo of straight talk, hard facts that touch with poignancy the grimness of the human condition.

For let’s face it, what can you compare with the sand dunes that bring forth luxuriant forest? Pray, what among the products of the reductionism of science and its technology can you compare with the peace you feel as the sands welcome your feet and respect your footsteps by leaving them there as you move ahead in, where is that now? Wait! Australia gives the answer as we move ahead.

It is the nature of facts that they are hard and the condition of Truth that it is bitter. But where we allow one or the other to speak we would say that compared with the clip-clap of the lips of the city that never go on holiday, the quietude of the Muse of Australian beaches is a nest to the soul in search of nirvana.  There is nothing  to compare with natural beauty in its raw purity, its innocence, indeed in its flow of feelings so inviting - the allure in a birthday gown – that it entraps to a standstill, enchants into wonder. Nature expresses her feelings through the undulating landscape, the ebb and flow of the tides forever engaged in the hide of withdrawing and seek of folding and spreading, rising and falling and splashing gleefully, yes joyfully as the music of the waves rent the air, reaching beyond the beech and making for the city gallantly.

That’s Australia where Nature invests her resources of radiance, the radiance of the prince and the queen as they stroll hand in hand, the special guests of the beech, wondering why all this could be given to them, to us, to you, these infinite landscape of natural attractions, this Australia, a continent, a country and an island. It’s all peculiar, as no other place in the world shares these qualities. A basket of Nature’s trademarks in grandeur and spledour, this Australia.