Australia

The ground gives little, and gives it on no schedule.

Australia is the oldest, flattest and most weathered large landmass on earth. It sits in the middle of its tectonic plate: no collision zone, no young mountains, no glaciation, no volcanic renewal. Nothing has resurfaced it, so the soil is not soil in the sense a European means the word, but the residue left after a hundred million years of rain washing the nutrients away.

And the sky above it is the least reliable on earth. The famous fact is that Australia is dry. The useful fact is that it is erratic: the average annual rainfall figure for an inland station is a number that essentially never occurs. A lake the size of a small country fills three times a century, from rain that fell a thousand kilometres away.

Nothing here rewards the assumption that next year will resemble this one, which is why the culture that has lasted longest, for sixty thousand years and counting, is the one that never made it.